Various Artists: Larkin's Jazz

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 Trevor Tolley and friend and jazz writer John White have organised the music to reflect the poet's jazz evolution – from Louis Armstrong, Artie Shaw and Count Basie in his teens, to the white Chicago swingers and clarinetist Pee Wee Russell at Oxford in the 40s, and on to the big-band music, and even a little Dave Brubeck, that accompanied his gin-powered jazz evenings at home with cronies in later years. For jazz virgins, there could be worse potted-histories than this one from a unique fan who wrote beautifully about the narrow band of jazz he did like, and who took for granted the music's central role in art, rather than the weird footnote status usually assigned to it. But it's really a complement to existing Larkin memorabilia rather than a representative jazz compilation.