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I'm reading the collected poems of Philip Larkin, voted the most loved writer in the UK, post WWII. He also has a book of collected reviews of jazz records from 1963 to 1971, and was not noted as a modernist. Clearly he loved a particular kind of jazz, and there's nothing wrong with that.
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06-10-2021 05:16 PM
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Thanks for sharing poetry here, Rob. It's a refreshing change from the norm. Bechet is one of my favorites; the utter audacity of his approach and vibrato is really compelling. I've never heard a guitar player mimic that vibrato. You'd likely need a Bigsby arm and brass balls to do so. case in point:
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Reminds me of a slide guitar approach, or steel guitar. It can be done tastefully. Clearly he got through to Larkin, “like an enormous yes”!
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The estimable Graham Reid, of this parish, here writes about Larkin and Jazz.
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"Playing for an audience of cobras..."
Been there!
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I figure if they can give Bob Dylan a Nobel Prize for Literature, they oughta give Larkin a Nobel Prize for Music. I mean, if there was one.
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May I quote the great Ralph Ellison from his essay, "The Charlie Christian Story"?
There is this cruel contradiction implicit in the artform itself, for true jazz is an art of individual assertion within and against the group. Each true jazz moment (as distinct from the uninspired commercial performance) springs from a contest in which each artist challenges all the rest; each solo flight, or improvisation, represents (like the successive canvases of a painter) a definition of his identify as individual, as member of the collectivity and as a link in the chain of tradition. Thus, because jazz finds its very life in an endless improvisation upon traditional materials, the jazzman must lose his identity even if he finds it; how often do we see even the most famous of jazz artists being devoured alive by their imitators, and, shamelessly, in the public spotlight?
Not a response to the poetry of Larkin, which I very much enjoyed. Any chance I have to quote Ralph Ellison is a chance I will gladly take, even if I have to retype it myself
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Originally Posted by Flat
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Originally Posted by Rob MacKillop
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No, never met any of her clan, though my late mother-in-law was a pupil at Gillespies High School, where Miss Jean Brodie lived out her prime.
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Originally Posted by Rob MacKillop
It turned out the guy was so nuts that he had to get out of the country, because he'd gotten fired from every school at which he taught at. He'd last two weeks before he wound up getting in a fight with someone!
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Haha, I did not know that. I have to confess I have not read anything by her, though my wife has.
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