Jazz Preview: Celebrating the other great love in Larkin's life

Apart from being a national treasure as a poet Larkin, who died in 1985, was a lifelong lover of jazz.

He wrote a review column in a national newspaper and his book All What

Jazz is a collection of his pieces from which I still derive huge

enjoyment.

The introduction in which he describes his gradual disenchantment with the idiom remains a masterpiece.

For all his dismay at what happened from Charlie Parker onwards, he always a retained a basic affection for jazz.

"Few things in life have given me more pleasure than listening to jazz," he wrote.

Saxophonist John Barnes and trumpeter Alan Elsdon played Sidney Bechet's Blue Horizon and Bix Beiderbecke's Davenport Blues at his memorial service at Westminster Abbey.

After the service ended, Elsdon climbed into the organ loft and played A Closer Walk with Thee.

Larkin was Librarian at Hull University for 30 years which makes it particularly appropriate for the Hull festival to salute his jazz links. An evening of Larkin-inspired jazz from Mad Dog and the SophistiCats and a discussion will launch Philip Larkin's Jazz: A Celebration, a set of CDs produced by Proper Records with notes by Trevor Tolley and John White.

Dr White will talk about the compilation and the event, on July 16, will be hosted by jazz critic and Larkin authority Richard Palmer.