At Cheltenham Jazz festival: ‘the natural noise of good'

 

'I rather like being on the edge of things’, says Philip Larkin at the start of a BBC Monitor programme, Down Cemetery Road, made in 1964. You certainly couldn’t imagine his ever saying, “I rather like being in the swing of things”. On the other hand, of swing, in terms of jazz , he was a passionate advocate. He loved ‘The wonderful music that swept the world during the first half of this century [he was writing in 1970], so wonderful that it sang songs about itself (‘Everybody’s Doing It’, ‘It Don’t Mean a Thing If it Ain’t Got That Swing’)’.

I thought of Larkin when on Saturday, the only sunny day of last weekend, I walked down the road to see what was going on at my local Jazz Festival. Montpellier Gardens, usually quiet and quintessentially Cheltenham, was transformed. A huge blue-and-white big top dominated the scene, but the crowds were all outside the tent, encamped for now in front of the Free Stage: families with very small children claiming what space they could with picnic rugs and baskets; the old – and there were plenty of us there as well – commandeering the few seats scattered around. Everyone else stood, talking, listening to the music, enjoying themselves just by being there.

I retreated to the Bandstand, which was quieter and cooler. (It was from there that I took the photo above: a panoramic image which, somewhat unnervingly, uncoils the wrought-iron circular balustrading of what claims to be one of the earliest bandstands in Britain.) A couple who had also sought the shade asked me what music I had come to hear. Ah, I explained, I hadn’t actually come for the music –  realising as I said it how absurd that sounded. ‘I just like to see people enjoying themselves.’ It was true: there’s something slightly intoxicating about a scene – especially an outdoor scene – where everyone is simply being happy. The couple smiled. ‘Enjoy’, they said.

‘En joie’. Jazz, his kind of jazz, gave Larkin joy. Twenty years ago, Tom Courtenay did a one-man show about Larkin called Pretending to be myself. The stage was cluttered with packing cases and odd pieces of furniture: Courtenay (who had devised the show himself) set the play on the day in 1974 when Larkin had regretfully moved out of the flat he’d lived in almost since he had become Librarian at the University of Hull. Centre stage was an aged radiogram with, around it, some of Larkin’s record collection.  Courtenay, who looked nothing like Philip Larkin but moved and stood and blinked exactly as Larkin used to do, chose a record and put it on. Sidney Bechet. As the music played, Larkin started to sway, very slightly and never moving his feet. When  the music stopped, he stopped too, and a great smile broke across his face. He just stood and stood there, beaming and absorbed in his own happiness:

On me your voice falls as they say love should,

Like an enormous yes. My Crescent City

Is where your speech alone is understood,

 

And greeted as the natural noise of good …. (For Sidney Bechet)

 

I have always admired Tom Courtenay as an actor, and never more than in that moment.

Before I became a teacher, I doubt if I had read much of Larkin’s verse except for ‘Church Going’.  But in my first year High Windows was published and in my second I taught The Whitsun Weddings as a set text. Larkin’s poetry has lived with me ever since. Towards the other end of my career, I was invited by the Larkin Society to give a lecture in Hull at a conference for teachers teaching Larkin. I chose to talk about what jazz had meant to him and how this was reflected in his own writing of, and about, poetry. I started by trying to dispel the image of Larkin as an irredeemably miserable man:

Few things have given me more pleasure in life than listening to jazz. I don’t claim to be original in this: for the generations that came to adolescence between the wars jazz was that unique private excitement that youth seems to demand. (‘Introduction to All What Jazz’)

That first sentence (‘Few things ….’) is echoed over and over in his writing and talking about jazz. I explained to my audience at Hull, that when he had been a guest on Desert Island Discs, Larkin had chosen two records by singers from the Thirties, Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday. He’d chosen Bessie’s song ‘Down in the Dumps’ because (as he explained to Roy Plomley ) in spite of its title ‘She sounds so full of life and, as she says, vitality’; he chose ‘These Foolish Things’ because, although ‘I always thought that the words were a little pseudo-poetic, Billie here sings them with such a passionate conviction that I think they really become poetry.’ When asked at the end of the programme which of his eight records he would choose if he were only able to take one, he replied, ‘It would have to be one of the jazz records. I can’t live without jazz.’ 

It is interesting, and perhaps revealing, that Larkin wrote so rarely about ‘that unique private excitement’, jazz, in his poetry. This might suggest that he wanted, consciously or otherwise, to keep these two key areas of his life separate. But on the rare occasions when the two come together, the effect can be almost overwhelming. So I went on to compare and contrast Larkin’s bleak but evocative poem ‘Reference Back’ (‘The flock of notes those antique negroes blew / Out of Chicago air’) with his private ode to joy, ‘For Sidney Bechet’. Both are fine poems, each repaying the reader’s careful attention, and proving Larkin’s point that ‘at bottom poetry, like all art, is inextricably bound up with giving pleasure’. And when he said ‘like all art’, he was talking about jazz – jazz as he expresses it in poetry: ‘the natural noise of good’.

© Adrian Barlow

All quotations above about jazz come from Philip Larkin’s two collections of essays, interviews and reviews, Required Writing (1983) and Further Requirements (2001), both published by Faber.

Illustration: the Cheltenham Jazz Festival 2023, as seen from the Bandstand in Montpellier Gardens.

I have written about Larkin before:

Re-reading Julian Barnes: on poetry and ‘the poet’