In the best poem he never wrote (in truth,
his introduction to the collection of reviews All What Jazz published in 1970),
Philip Larkin describes his readers, the average jazz fan:
Sometimes I imagine them, sullen fleshy
inarticulate men, stockbrokers, sellers of goods, living in thirty-year old
detached houses among the golf courses of Outer London, husbands of ageing and
bitter wives they first seduced to Artie Shaw’s Begin the Beguine or The
Squadronaires’ The Nearness of You; fathers of cold-eyed lascivious daughters
on the pill, to whom Ramsay Macdonald is coeval with Rameses II, and
cannabis-smoking jeans-and-bearded Stuart-haired sons whose oriental contempt
for ‘bread’ is equaled only by their insatiable demand for it; men in whom a
pile of scratched, coverless 78s in an attic can awaken memories of vomiting
blindly from small Tudor windows to Mugsy Spanier’s Sister Kate, or winding up
a gramophone in a punt to play Armstrong’s Body and Soul; men whose first
coronary is coming like Christmas; who drift, loaded helplessly with
commitments and obligations and necessary observances, into the darkening
avenues of age and incapacity, deserted by everything that once made life
sweet.
Accidents of geography aside (since he must
live in the USA rather than the UK), I wonder how wide of the mark this is as a
description of David W Niven?
David who, you may ask? I had never heard
of him either until the other day, googling indiscriminately as I am wont to
do, I discovered the Internet Archive and the David W Niven Jazz Collection.
Mr Niven’s collection comprises thousands
of hours of commercially released jazz recordings. Concerned to preserve the
music for future generations and his own children in particular, he has
assembled the recordings by artist and in chronological order, added his own
commentary and then donated these cassette tapes to the Archive where they have
been digitized and are available to download.
A PDF giving more details about the collection can be found here.
Mr Niven’s collection of Duke Ellington
recordings alone comprises over a hundred and ninety hours of listening.
I should like to post one tape from the
collection every week on Villes Ville, complete with the relevant snap of Mr
Niven’s own handwritten index cards. We’ll proceed through the collection in reverse chronological order and eventually the posts will be indexed here, too. There will
be a new tape available every Monday evening.
As a taster, here is a digitized copy of a commercially
produced cassette of the album The Elegant Mister Ellington, a bootleg itself
in the first instance, which finds Ellington and his orchestra in concert at
The Sportpalast in Berlin, 4 October, 1959.
Stay tuned...
This particular song is featured on Miss Terry’s 1982
album A Dream Comes True with Tommy Flanagan, Ed Thigpen, Jesper
Lundgard.
