All What Jazz - Analysis

A voice that doubts its own audience, then invents it anyway

The piece begins with a sly existential joke: My readers are so faintly present that the speaker wonders if they really exist. That doubt isn’t just about circulation numbers; it sets up a deeper claim about the relationship between jazz, criticism, and the people who might need either. The only proof of readership is practical and faintly absurd—where they can buy records—plus the occasional backlash from a Miles Davis fan or a celebrity’s press agent. From the start, then, the speaker places himself between commerce, fandom, and publicity, and he sounds irritated by all three. Yet he keeps talking, which suggests another motive underneath the complaining: the need to picture a human recipient for what he’s saying, even if that picture comes out harsh.

That harshness is not incidental. The speaker doesn’t merely describe; he caricatures. But the caricature has a purpose: it exposes what he thinks jazz has been reduced to—an object that people consult like a consumer good—while also hinting that he still believes the music can reach them more deeply than their questions and complaints suggest.

Outer London: jazz remembered inside a suburban cage

When he says Sometimes I imagine them, the poem turns from complaint into invention, and the invented readers arrive as a very specific social type: sullen, fleshy, inarticulate men living in 30—year—old houses by golf courses in Outer London. The details matter because they define a cage: not poverty, not glamour, but comfortable repetition—houses with a set lifespan, leisure engineered into the landscape, a place designed to keep experience predictable. Jazz enters this world not as a living art but as a private relic, something stored and scratched, like the coverless 78s in the attic.

And yet, for all the contempt in the description, the speaker is also oddly attentive. He can name the records that scored these lives: Artie Shaw’s Begin the Beguine, the Squadronaires’ The Nearness of You. Those titles bring romance into the scene, but the romance is already souring: the men are husbands of ageing wives they once seduced to those songs. The music becomes a timestamp on desire—proof that something once moved, even if what remains is bitterness and routine.

A family portrait drawn with cruelty—and fear

The imagined readers don’t appear alone; they come with children who sharpen the poem’s generational anxiety. The daughters are cold—eyed and lascivious, on the pill; the sons are cannabis—smoking, jeans—and—bearded, with oriental contempt for bread that somehow coexists with an insatiable demand for it. The comedy is barbed, and some of the barbs are plainly reactionary. But the emotional logic is clearer than the politics: the speaker paints a home where nobody can translate themselves to anyone else. The men are inarticulate; the children are saturated with new language and new poses; everyone is mutually unintelligible.

Even the historical comparison—Ramsay Macdonald treated as coeval with Rameses II—doesn’t just mock ignorance. It suggests time itself has become ungraspable inside this household: history flattens into a single haze, and the past loses its contour. In that haze, jazz is one of the only things that can still produce a sharp, involuntary point of feeling.

Records as a trapdoor: memory that is bodily, not noble

The poem’s most vivid passages are the memories the attic records can awaken. These are not tasteful nostalgia scenes; they’re physical, messy, and strangely tender. One man remembers vomiting blindly from small Tudor windows to Sister Kate. Another remembers winding up a gramophone in a punt to play Body and Soul. Jazz here isn’t a museum object; it’s a mechanism that reopens the body’s old intensity—sickness, drunkenness, romance, public display, foolishness.

That matters because it clarifies the speaker’s stake. He can sneer at these men’s lives, but he can’t deny that the music once made them feel uncontrollably alive. The contradiction is the poem’s engine: the readers are mocked as suburban, complacent, even dim, and yet the speaker grants them access to experiences that are immediate and realer than the safe present they now inhabit.

The turn toward mortality: the coronary like Christmas

The piece darkens decisively when it says first coronary is coming like Christmas. The simile is brutal because it treats death’s warning sign as a scheduled holiday—predictable, inevitable, almost socially programmed. After that line, the earlier satire stops being merely snobbish and starts sounding like fear. The men drift loaded helplessly with commitments and necessary observances into darkening avenues of age and incapacity, and they are deserted by what once made life sweet. This is the poem’s clearest emotional claim: that modern adulthood, at least as the speaker sees it, is an accumulation of duties that gradually replaces pleasure, until pleasure becomes something that happens only in memory.

The tone changes here. The earlier description enjoys its own nastiness; the later lines feel almost mournful, as if the speaker recognizes that the suburban cage is also a human fate. Even if he disdains the men, he can imagine the moment when sweetness drains away and the world becomes a corridor leading to incapacity.

The speaker’s uneasy role: contempt as a cover for caretaking

The final sentence reframes everything: These I have tried to remind of jazz’s excitement, and to say where it may still be found. That closing turns the speaker from satirist into a kind of messenger. He isn’t simply attacking his audience; he is trying to reach them before the corridor closes. The earlier insults—fleshy, sullen, inarticulate—start to look like defenses, ways to keep emotional distance from the vulnerability he’s describing. If he admits he cares about their approaching age and incapacity, he has to admit the same horizon waits for him, too.

So the poem holds a hard tension: jazz is offered as rescue, but the rescuers’ voice is contaminated by disdain. The speaker wants the music to be a living source of intensity, not an attic pile of scratched relics, and he wants the men to be more than consumers asking where to buy records. Yet he can’t speak to them without also punishing them for what they are. The result is an argument made out of mixed feelings: a wish to revive pleasure, delivered through a portrait that almost ensures the recipients will feel accused.

A sharper question the poem leaves hanging

If jazz can still be found, who is actually capable of finding it? The men in Outer London have the records but not the language; the children have language but seem to treat the past as Rameses II. The speaker claims he can point the way, but his own imagination keeps returning to an attic—private, dusty, upstairs—like the only remaining place where excitement is allowed to survive.