Larkin and Modernism: Jazz

Abstract

In the riotous introduction to All What Jazz, Larkin argued that in the mid-century period, with the generations of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis and John Coltrane, jazz lost (or wilfully squandered) its high communicability, becoming as obscure, experimental and culturally elitist as the poetry of Ezra Pound or the painting of Pablo Picasso. Having made this alliterative triangulation between Parker, Pound and Picasso, he then breaks over the heads of all three an oceanic tirade against Modernism:

I dislike such things not because they are new, but because they are irresponsible exploitations of technique in contradiction of human life as we know it. This is my essential criticism of modernism, whether perpetrated by Parker, Pound or Picasso: it helps us neither to enjoy nor endure. It will divert us as long as we are prepared to be mystified or outraged, but maintains its hold only by being more mystifying and more outrageous: it has no lasting power. Hence the compulsion of every modernist to wade deeper and deeper into violence and obscenity … (AWJ, 17)

This chapter benefited from conversations with John Mowat and John White — jazz buffs, Larkin friends and fellow Americanists.