Readers of John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra will remember a curious scene near the end where the hero, Julian English, drinks an enormous highball from a flower-vase and plays his favourite jazz records. After a while he goes out to the garage and kills himself. The interesting thing is that the records he plays are not by Armstrong, Ellington or even the Chicago Rhythm Kings, but Whiteman’s “Stairway to Paradise” and Goldkette’s “Sunny DIsposish.” Enough to make anyone seek oblivion, you may say, and I thought at one time that O’Hara (who certainly knew his jazz—witness Butterfield 8) was being satiric.
The lush pictorial album accompanying “The Original Sound of the Twenties” (CBS, three discs) has a yearning essay by Roger Whitaker that makes me not so sure. The twenties, and particularly the music of the twenties—“loud, clear, jolly, sentimental, brash, bubbly, lifegiving and altogether unforgettable”—are plainly full of emotional punch for their contemporaries. Perhaps Julian English’s swan song was meant seriously. The three discs, which are available separately, are divided into Whiteman/other bands, pianists/male vocalists, and female vocalists. From the jazz point of view the first is the best—Whiteman is pretty awful, but the reverse has Ellington’s “Diga Diga Do,” Armstrong’s splendid “St. Louis”, and the Dorsey Brothers “My Kinda Love” not to mention Cass Hagen’s “Varsity Drag” which sounds straight out of “The Boy Friend”—but the appeal of the other tracks will depend on the listener’s age and taste. The girl singers—SOphe Tucker and Kate Smith in particular—are forthright rather than seductive, and the men—Cliff Edwards, Buddy Rogers, Rudy Vallee—are of the almost forgotten pre-crooning world and sound incredibly cheerful and decent in consequence. And there are so many surprises: who would expect Gershwin to rattle out such and insensitive version of “Someone To Watch Over Me” , or for the whole thing to be rounded off by Bessie SMith proclaiming “I’ve Got What It Takes (But It Breaks My Heart To Give It Away)”? One star: add another for every year of age after, well, 59.
But popular music is odd. To compare this set with the Beatles’ “Help” (Parlophone) demonstrates how its appeal has shifted from the Edwardian ballad and comic-song tradition overlaid with syncopation to the genuine blues overlaid with the hybrid and plangent romanticism that is the Lennon-McCartney hallmark. Will this Original Sound Of The Sixties be the standard of the eighties? I hope so.
—Philip Larkin, “The Idols of the Twenties,” The Daily Telegraph, 15 September 1965, collected in All What Jazz: A Record Diary, 1970
Larkin loved (cool J. Lennon?) the “hybrid and plangent romanticism” of Lennon/McCartney but despised that of Coltrane, even while admitting that we probably would not go a long way out of our way to describe Coltrane’s romanticism that way – much of his criticism up to and including his Beatlemania had the smell of both “fuddy” and “duddy”. Larkin’s never-published anti-Coltrane screed was excerpted in Ben Ratliff’s Coltrane bio, which itself never goes a long way towards mounting much of a defense of Coltrane against other critics (Larkin, Crouch, etc.), implying a tacit support of their critiques.
Certainly no small amount of 80’s pop music is awash in harmonies that can be traced back to the lads, along with a certain romanticism. That said, apart from post-punks like Mission of Burma, Saccharine Trust, &c., I wonder how much of the truly “popular” pop was based in “genuine blues”.
I feel like it’s culturally blasphemous to admit it, but I’m not a huge fan of poetry or jazz. That said, I make exceptions, and Philip Larkin is one of them. He’s one of my favorite twentieth century writers, and I adore his poems. I knew he wrote music reviews for The Telegraph, but haven’t read much of his criticism. This is an interesting passage! I’ll have to keep an eye out for that book.
This is only loosely related, but The Paris Review has recently made their famous author interviews available online for free, and I’ve been gorging myself on them. There’s a fascinating interview with Larkin there, among many other great writers. You all should check it out if you haven’t already!