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AT RONNIE Scott's funeral last year, Benny Green, who has died of cancer aged 70, recounted a joke. At another funeral several years earlier, Green - then suffering from a back injury - had been forced to travel to the proceedings lying prone in the back of an estate car. After the deceased was interred, Scott wandered over to the horizontal Green. "Hardly worth your while going home, is it?" the saxophonist suggested, pleasantly.
Green would very likely have anticipated - and probably hoped for - his own similar cast of phlegmatic mourner. Like many of the musicians who built a British outpost for American jazz in the early post-war years, he was a serious enthusiast who camouflaged complex emotion with deflationary humour. But unlike Scott, Green grew less guarded and suspicious as the years passed, and when his playing career wound down toward the end of the 1950s he put his passions - and dislikes - on show as an eloquent commentator on American popular music and jazz.
Thus did he provide an antidote to soundbite analysis. The classics of what is often called the "Great American Songbook" of the 1930s and 1940s - terse, journalistic compressions of modern urban romance from the pens of Arlen, Berlin, the Gershwins et al - are now on almost every young jazz vocalist's debut disc, and in danger of being valued simply for sticking around. But Green knew better.
Few commentators on 20th century popular music have been fortunate enough to combine emotional connections with the era that spawned those songs, the ability to...