All that jazz

Philip Larkin loved trad jazz. John Harris grew up thinking nothing before bebop was worth listening to. So he tried to discover the appeal of Ellington and Basie"I can live a week without poetry," Philip Larkin said in 1965, "but not a day without jazz."Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Bix Beiderbecke: these were people all but idolised by Larkin. To some members of his generation, he later reflected, what they played "had the same emotional effect as perhaps 100 years ago the great poets had". ...

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