The Cotton Club Book

Dear God, where to start with this thing. Well, how about where the book does: the introduction. In this section Larkin admits that more than half of the jazz record-review columns contained herein were written before he was willing to confess to the public that he hated Charlie Parker, bebop, and its descendants, and thus pretty much everything new after the second world war. Presumably if he had admitted that when he started the column in 1961 the record companies would not have sent him free records.

So by Larkin's own admission, more than half of this book is him being not entirely honest about his opinions. He reviews several Parker reissues during this section and is always respectful, so knowing what we know we can only wonder how full of shit he is in the other reviews in this first part. At least he does not pretend to like John Coltrane, and spews venom at him at just about every opportunity, including an obituary of sorts upon Coltrane's death (in place of the standard publication date, the end of this piece is marked "unpublished." Thank God for editors). It's a bit of a crisis for me here because, though I think far more highly of Coltrane than Larkin did, he does manage to nail every single one of my reservations with the man's music, just with 1000% more bile than I ever could think of generating.

Sadly the first, at least partly dishonest, section is the best. Once Larkin and his gravy train of free records are established, he lets loose on all and sundry and it's just depressing, regardless of whether you share his opinions or not. I am not especially concerned with his opinions for the most part, they are what they are, and what one loves is what one loves. But every single piece is laden with some bizarre statement, some peculiar logical fallacy, some contradiction of what he says elsewhere that, combined with much of his enthusiasm being reserved for compilations of old 78s, compilations which were probably available less than a year in the 60s, that this volume's musical commentary is virtually useless.

(But as for opinions ... I like Muggsy Spanier very much, revere his 1939/40 records with his own band and Sidney Bechet, but the frequency with which Larkin holds him up as an examplar beggars belief. It makes Whitney Balliett's Catlett fixation look under control. And what is one to make of his statement that no one could possibly prefer 'A Day in the Life' to 'I Want to Hold Your Hand'?)

Troubling above all of this, though, is that Larkin is just a flat-out racist. More than once he comments that jazz is at its best as a meeting of black and white musicians (when even the great trumpeter Roy Eldridge admitted defeat when Leonard Feather challenged him in a blindfold test to prove his assertion that one could tell the race of the player by music alone). He frequently tries his hardest to avoid giving the black race full credit if it can be avoided. Black jazz musicians' support for the civil rights movement is bemoaned repeatedly, with Larkin at one point throwing in "Little Rock" as a preoccupation deserving of dismissal in the manner that one might say the Kardashians are today. He cites "kill whitey" sentiments more than once but refuses to be specific about where he has heard such things. In discussion of the avant garde, Danish-born John Tchicai gets a pass because he was born in Europe and thus does not feel that civil rights nonsense like the others who play alongside him on Coltrane's Ascension do. It's frequent and depressing in that cavalier colonialist mindset that one, unfortunately, is not surprised to find in an arch-conservative writer in country who thrilled to a TV programme called "The Black and White Minstrel Show" for many years after the last of these pieces was written.

I considered giving this two stars because Larkin writes well enough that I almost made it to the end without skimming in spite of all of the above, but fuck Philip Larkin. If you can read this book without wanting to rip up that cover image, you are a much better person than I.