Whitney Balliett
Writing about jazz generally takes one of two paths, analysis or appreciation. Whitney Balliett was not a musicologist, but one of the field’s most gifted appreciators. His descriptions of what he heard, saw and felt in music are among the best twentieth century English prose in any field. Consider this passage about Thelonious Monk.
His improvisations were attempts to disguise his love of melody. He clothed whatever he played with spindly runs, flatted notes, flatted chords, repeated single notes, yawning silences, and zigzag rhythms. Sometimes he pounded the keyboard with his right elbow. His style protected him not only from his love of melody but from his love of the older pianists he grew out of — Duke Ellington and the stride pianists. All peered out from inside his solos, but he let them escape only as parody.
Musicians and academic analysts often found more poetry than accuracy in some of Balliett’s lyrical descriptions of performances and called him to account for evaluations like his contention that Max Roach didn’t swing. But it was easy to forgive him anything when he created sentences like these from an account of Pee Wee Russell’s clarinet playing.
By this time, his first chorus is over, and one has the impression of having just passed through a crowd of jostling, whispering people.
In his final chorus, he moves snakily up toward the middle register with a series of tissue-paper notes and placid rests, adopting a legato attack that allows the listener to move back from the edge of his seat.
Balliett’s skill at describing music was matched by his ability to capture the those who make it, as in this passage about Earl Hines at the piano.
Hines–tall and quick-moving, with a square, noble face–is a hypnotic performer. His almost steady smile is an unconscious, transparent mask. When he is most affected, the smile freezes–indeed, his whole face clenches. Then the smile falters, revealing a desolate, piercing expression, which melts into another smile. He tosses his head back and opens his mouth, hunches over, sways from side to side, and rumbling to himself, clenches his face again, tears of sweat pouring down his face. His face and his manner are his music–the sort of perfect, non-showman showmanship that stops the heart.
Balliett was not enamored of the avant garde of the sixties, writing that “It depends not on mere emotion but on an armored passion.” Nonetheless, he went to hear its leading figures and gave it a balanced assessment.
At its worst, then, the new thing is long-winded, dull, and almost physically abrasive. At its best–in the hands of Ornette Coleman or (Cecil) Taylor–it howls through the mind and heart, filling them with an honest ferocity that is new in jazz and perhaps in any music.
Balliett was the jazz critic of The New Yorker for forty years under its brilliant editor William Shawn. The magazine’s new owners forced Shawn out in 1987. As the editorial leadership went through changes, Balliett was downgraded, finally reduced to doing short profiles. Not long after he was relegated to a quickie sketch of Barbra Streisand, he disappeared from The New Yorker altogether, one of the magazine’s greatest assets flung away. In his last decade, he wrote occasional articles for other magazines and a few memorable pieces for The New York Review of Books.
Most of Balliett’s work for The New Yorker was anthologized in books. Two of the most recent are American Musicians II: Seventy-one Portraits in Jazz and Collected Works: A Journal of Jazz 1954-2001.
After having read him all of my adult life, I finally met Balliett in 1997, prepared to tell him what his work had meant to me. He derailed me with kind words about something I had written. I managed to get back on track with praise that embarassed him. We had occasional encounters when I was in New York. After our last conversation, I had no doubt that The New Yorker’s rejection had done serious damage to his spirit.
Yesterday, I learned with sadness that Whitney Balliett was ill. Today, he died. He was eighty years old. I shall miss him.