While it’s been a while since I’ve been published, I still consider myself a music journalist. (Perhaps being out of practice yet still full of dubiously formed opinions officially makes me a “music critic” these days, but why split hairs?) A good friend of mine recently sent me a remarkable piece by British poet, novelist and jazz critic Philip Larkin that she felt was relevant to a blog post I had made quite a while ago regarding the current state of jazz. Larkin’s piece was taken from an introduction he had written to a collection of his jazz reviews written for the Daily Telegraph from 1961 through 1971 that was published as All What Jazz.

Simply said, it’s a fantastic read.

It should be noted that Larkin was a staunch jazz traditionalist that often railed against the modernism of bebop, free jazz, fusion and pretty much anything that included the tonal language of Charlie Parker and beyond. Set that aside for a moment, however, and instead focus on his thoughts regarding the interplay between artist, material and audience and the shift from art for the masses to art for the academics.

Today, part 1. Tomorrow, part 2. (I’m also adding some additional footnoting via Wikipedia and other relevant links.) Later this week, I’ll offer some of my personal thoughts and bloated notions. For now, enjoy. 

Introduction to All What Jazz
Philip Larkin

And yet again, there was something about the books [of jazz criticism] I was now reading that seemed oddly familar. This development, this progress, this new language that was more difficult, more complex, that required you to work hard at appreciating it, that you couldn’t expect to understand first go, that needed technical and professional knowledge to evaluate it at all levels, this revolutionary explosion that spoke for our time while at the same time being traditional in the fullest, the deepest. . . .Of course! This was the language of criticism of modern painting, modern poetry, modern music. Of course! How glibly I had talked of modern jazz, without realizing the force of the adjective: this was modern jazz., and Parker was a modern jazz player just as Picasso was a modern painter and Pound a modern poet. I hadn’t realized that jazz had gone from Lascaux to Jackson Pollock in fifty years, but when I realized it relief came flooding in upon me after nearly two years’ despondency. I went back to my books: “After Parker, you had to be something of a musician to follow the best jazz of the day.” Of course! After Picasso! After Pound! There could hardly have been a conciser summary of what I don’t believe about art.

The reader may here have the sense of having strayed into a private argument. All I am saying is that the term “modern”, when applied to art, has a more than chronological meaning: it denotes a quality of irresponsibility peculiar to this century, known sometimes as modernism, and once I had classified modern jazz under this heading I knew where I was. I am sure there are books in which the genesis of modernism is set out in full. My own theory is that it is related to an imbalance between the two tensions from which art springs: these are the tension between the artist and his material and between the artist and his audience, and that in the last seventy-five years or so the second of these has slackened or even perished. In consequence the artist has become over-concerned with his material (hence an age of technical experiment), and, in isolation, has busied himself with the two principal themes of modernism, mystification and outrage. Piqued at being neglected, he has painted portraits with both eyes on the same side of the nose, or smothered a model with paint and rolled her over a blank canvas. He has designed a dwelling-house to be built underground. He has written poems resembling the kind of pictures typists make with their machine during the coffee break, or a novel in gibberish, or a play in which the characters sit in dustbins. He has made a six-hour film of someone asleep. He has carved human figures with large holes in them. And parallel to this activity (“every idiom has its idiot,” as an American novelist has written) there has grown up a kind of critical journalism designed to put it over. The terms and the arguments vary with the circumstances, but basically the message is : Don’t trust your eyes, or ears, or understanding. They’ll tell you this is ridiculous, or ugly, or meaningless. Don’t believe them. You’ve got to work at this after all, you don’t expect to understand anything as important as art straight off, do you? I mean, this is pretty complex stuff: if you want to know how complex, I’m giving a course of ninety-six lectures at the local college, starting next week, and you’d be more than welcome. The whole thing’s on the rates, you won’t have to pay. After all, think what asses people have made of themselves in the past by not understanding art–you don’t want to be like that, do you? Keep the suckers spending.

Read part 2 here…