A vote of confidence

Last night I was honoured to be in the company of Yazz Ahmed, Donovan Haffner, Knats, Heidi Vogel, Iain Ballamy, Olivia Cuttill, Jean Toussaint and others as recipients of the 2026 Parliamentary Jazz Awards. The event took place at World Heartbeat, a venue close to the new US Embassy in Nine Elms. It was the 21st year of the awards, given by the All Party Parliamentary Jazz Group, and I was delighted to be given the Jazz Media Award. As one does, I gave a short acceptance speech in which I said that 64 years ago, aged 15, I came runner-up in the Daily Telegraph‘s Junior Jazz Critic competition, and I’ve been trying to do better ever since. The Telegraph‘s senior jazz critic at the time was Philip Larkin, a great poet but a very iffy jazz critic: enthusiastic about the early stuff in a duffel-coat-and-college-scarf sort of way, he detested almost anything modern (sample phrase: “the passionless creep of a Miles Davis solo”). He was one of those critics who decided pretty early on that…