Various Artists: Larkin's Jazz | Jazz review

(Properbox)This four-disc box-set amounts to exactly what it says on the tin. English poet Philip Larkin, who was the Daily Telegraph's jazz critic in the 60s, loved jazz passionately from his teens in the mid-1930s to his death, entranced by the joyous and convivially swinging pre-1945 sounds that, as he put it, "once made life sweet". He loathed bebop modernism and everything that followed, which led to such withering review references as the "corpse-walking" of Miles Davis. Larkin scholar Tre...

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