All What Jazz: A Record Diary 1961 - 1971 gathers Philip Larkin's elegant, witty and penetrating reviews and responses to an enormous range of jazz and other records.
Philip Larkin was born in Coventry in 1922 and was educated at King Henry VIII School, Coventry, and St John's College, Oxford. As well as his volumes of poems, which include The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows, he wrote two novels, Jill and A Girl in Winter, and two books of collected journalism: All What Jazz: A Record Library, and Required Writing: Miscellaneous Prose. He worked as a librarian at the University of Hull from 1955 until his death in 1985. He was the best-loved poet of his generation, and the recipient of innumerable honours, including the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, and the WHSmith Award.
Larkin originally wrote these record reviews for England's Daily Telegraph , and he gathered most of them in an earlier edition subtitled A Record Diary 1961-68 (1970). While his acerbic derision of modernism as exemplified by Pound, Picasso, and Charlie Parker might be enough to keep all but the most culturally conservative from reading beyond his introduction, readers who can see beyond his opinions will find the poet, novelist, and essayist Larkin. He structures a piece with gentility and flavor, using collections of reviews brief enough to be called notes to exemplify comments about ``the State of Jazz'' and to propound a nostalgic ideal. All What Jazz has as much to say about Larkin as it does about jazz recordings; it is as appropriate for literature collections as for music collections. William Brockman, Drew Univ. Lib., Madison, N.J.
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