I'm screwy about nutty jazz lyrics

I HAVE recently been engaged in selecting material for an anthology of writing on jazz for HarperCollins (end of ad).

To put it another way: I have been wading through acres of prose, wondering why most jazz writers have such a muddy style and dragging my feet out of the quicksand of their paragraphs in search of the occasional flowering oasis.

Or, to put it another way: I have been wondering why jazz writers can't write half as well as jazz musicians can talk . . .

Anyway, in my travels I again came across the jazz writings of Philip Larkin, who is probably the most unfashionable jazz critic there has ever been. As he always reviewed records, not performances, he gave the impression that he had never heard a live jazz group in his life - which is an unfashionable impression to give in a music as live and personal as jazz.

But that is not why I say he was unfashionable. By that, I mean that not only did he write like a dream but also his views were unacceptable to orthodoxy. Unorthodoxy didn't think much of him either. He didn't care much for trad, and he didn't care at all for the avant- garde, and he didn't seem to care what anyone thought of his opinions. Nor did he observe the unwritten rule of jazz: that you don't attack what you don't like, you just ignore it.

He was like a diplomat who always says what he thinks, and as a result nobody took him seriously. You have to join a gang in jazz to be taken seriously. He was his own man.

Well, I took him seriously, if for no other reason than that he once complained that he had been searching for years for the lyrics to I'm Nutty about Screwy Music. This startled me because I, too, have been looking for years for the lyrics of that very song.

The only recording I know of it is from way back in the Thirties, by the Jimmy Lunceford Orchestra. This was a group which, despite being the suavest of all the black swing bands, had a welcome streak of nonsense in its soul: one of its songs, called Well, All Right Then, has no lyrics at all, apart from that phrase repeated over and over again. (Thus beating for shortness my previous favourite short song, Man from the South, written, I think, by Rube Bloom and played by Joe Venuti and Eddie Lang. The words are as follows. 'Well, I met a man from the South/Yeah, I met this man from the South/He had a big cigar in his mouth/So I knew that he was from the South.')

The only time I ever heard I'm Nutty about Screwy Music was on Radio 3's Jazz Record Requests, and it was plain from his comments that Peter Clayton thought very little of the lyrics. I thought they were wonderful. Thereafter, I scanned every Lunceford reissue I saw in the shops to see if the song was there. It never was.

Till the other day I lifted up a tape with trembling fingers, and rushed it home to transcribe the lyrics. It's too late for Philip Larkin now, of course, but at least I can ask the question: how could the curmudgeon who is supposed to have written all those grouchy letters have fallen in love with something as gaily lyrical, and joyfully politically incorrect, as this?

I'm Nutty about Screwy Music

At the state asylum,

On the second floor,

I talked with a patient,

Room two-thirty-four.

I said: 'You don't look crazy,

Can't see why you're here . . .'

He sort of looked at me

and smiled

And whispered in my ear:

'I'm nuts about screwy music,

I'm screwy about nutty rhythm,

I'm dilly over all silly melodies,

Crazy as a loon can be.

I'm daffy 'bout goofy tempos,

I'm goofy 'bout daffy changes,

I'm dippy over all dizzy harmony

Written in a minor key.

I love to hear sounds that are

queer,

I'm eccentric they say.

There's a boot in a flute,

Or a mellow moon in cello.

I'm nuts about screwy music,

I'm screwy about nutty rhythm,

I'm dilly over all silly melodies,

Crazy as a loon can be . . .'

The whole thing is broken up, as you might expect, by little, suitably off-centre bits of music, and the bar lengths are very odd indeed. If it had been a novelty trifle tossed off by W H Auden or Louis MacNeice, it might have been quite famous by now, or at least in all the anthologies. But the composer credits on the tape say only 'Rose'. Well, all I can say is: Thanks, Rose. You are not forgotten.