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A love of jazz is not what you might expect in a poet. But Philip Larkin (1922 - 1985) was no ordinary poet.
Larkin became famous in the nineteen sixties through writing poems you would think twice about giving to your favourite aunt as bedtime reading. The poems include four letter words that don't rhyme with dove.
Larkin discovered jazz when he was at school in Coventry. This was between the wars when jazz was burdened with a tainted reputation, especially in middle class England.
In the days when Larkin got to know the music jazz was 'that unique private excitement that youth seems to demand.' Jazz was to teenagers in these days what body piercing and the ingestion of doubtful substances are to teenagers today: tokens of youthful rebellion.
At Oxford University Larkin embarked on a more meaningful relationship with jazz. He got to know students who shared his passion. They swapped records and sat, no doubt with the occasional bottle of wine, and listened to the latest releases.
In 1941, also at Oxford, Larkin made friends with the novelist Kingsley Amis - also a great jazz lover.
Amis tells the story that Larkin visited record shops in Oxford with the intention of concealing 10" records in the folds of an overlarge sports jackets. A claim Larkin roundly denied.
In 1961 Larkin was asked to write on jazz for the Daily Telegraph. He did not feel particularly competent in undertaking but he took it anyway.
Larkin was not a fan of post 1945 jazz and this was the period of John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Ornette Coleman and Miles Davis. The reviews, collected in the book All What Jazz, show evidence of Larkin's benevolent nature. He manfully reviews jazz of all description. Some of it, we learn from the introduction to All What Jazz, he clearly loathed.
Of Miles Davis, at this time at one of the peaks of his career, Larkin said: 'he had several manners: the dead muzzled slow stuff, the sour yelping fast stuff, and the sonorous theatrical arranged stuff, and I disliked them all'.
He was equally less than enamoured about John Coltrane: 'metallic and passionless nullity gave way to exercises in gigantic absurdity'. He did, however, like Psalm from A Love Supreme and Alabama from the album Coltrane Live at Birdland.
Larkin's published letters reveal his likes and dislikes. In the last letter he wrote before his death he defined his jazz tastes as almost anything after Jelly Roll Morton and before Charlie Parker. He liked Bix, Armstrong, Ellington, Pee Wee Russell, Eddy Condon and so on.
Larkin also enjoyed the blues. At the time he wrote his record reviews the blues in Britain were on a wave of popularity. This was largely because groups like the Rolling Stones and The Animals featured a lot of blues numbers in their concerts.
And among American visitors to these shores were great bluesmen like Muddy Waters, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee and Sonny Boy Williamson.
Larkin may not, as he frequently acknowledged, have been the best choice as jazz critic for a daily newspaper but the quality of his writing and his dry sense of humour make him stand out from the crowd. Larkin, no ordinary poet, was also no ordinary jazz writer.
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