The Impressionist

My first expectation of a critic – of any writer – is that he write well. A critic who writes indifferent prose nullifies his judgments. Why should I take seriously the word of a man who, with each word he writes, announces his lack of a gift for crafting words?

Whitney Balliett, the longtime jazz writer for The New Yorker, the magazine that treated him with so little gratitude at the end, died on Thursday at the age of 80. Few writers, at the word, phrase, sentence, paragraph, article and book levels, have given me so much pleasure and so much encouragement to strive to write well and thus give pleasure to others. Before interviewing the jazz musicians I knew Balliett had written about long before – Elvin Jones, Sonny Rollins, Dave McKenna, others – I always reread Balliett’s originals. This ritual was simultaneously humbling and energizing. It helped me shed any notion that I could out-Balliett the master, but it also spurred me to see something different in the subject, something Balliett had missed or ignored. Sometimes, of course, I ended up writing a Balliett pastiche. In his introduction to Collected Works: A Journal of Jazz 1954-2000, Balliett wrote:

“I was and am an impressionist, and as such have been told that I come closer to delineating the music than any notator, that, anyway, jazz, with its odd non-notes and strange tones and timbres, is almost impossible to translate into notes on paper.”

“Impressionist” is misleading. As paintings, Impressionist works emphasize color over line. Their subject is often evanescent – the effects of changing light on a field or barn, as opposed to the field or barn itself. To that degree, Balliett, by finding metaphors corresponding to the improvised sounds of highly skilled musicians – sounds that will never be heard in precisely that form again -- was an impressionist. But he didn’t leave out the field or barn. Too often, “impressionist” is a term of derogation, meaning a lazy, second-best rendering.

“Pointillism” may be preferable as a way to describe Balliett’s method. By assembling a multitude of small daubs of primary color (words), he rendered a whole and created the impression of numerous secondary tones. He “shaded,” an effect not easily accomplished in paint or words. If “impressionist” implies vagueness, “pointillist” implies painstaking precision. Here’s Balliett in a 1961 piece about the alto player Johnny Hodges:

“Hodges’ bent toward sweetness did not emerge until the mid-thirties, when he began recording, with Ellington, a series of slow ballad solos. On such occasions, which he still indulges in, Hodges employs a tone that seems to be draped over the notes like a lap robe. Hodges does little improvising in these ballads. Instead, he issues languorous statements of the melody and long glissandi topped by an almost unctuous vibrato. Hodges’ Edgar Guest strain is generally well concealed, though, and it is nowhere in sight when he plays the blues, which have long provided his basic materials.”

Anyone familiar with Hodges can only nod his head. Balliett perfectly conveys the tightrope Hodges walked between the heart-piercing and the “unctuous,” and the Edgar Guest reference is pure gravy -- priceless, exact and funny. In a seemingly less poetic, more technical vein, here’s Balliett’s description of Big Joe Turner singing a blues at the 1971 Newport Jazz Festival:

“Turner will go at a slow blues this way: He spreads out the first phrase behind the beat, and he uses just two notes (Turner is not a melismatic singer) – one for the first and last words of the phrase, and one for its middle section. Then he pauses a full measure, goes on to his second phrase, pauses again, briefly, and completes the line. He repeats the line, with slight melodic variations, subtracting one of the pauses and rearranging the lyrics in an almost sleight-of-hand way.”

Notice how the sentence beginning “Then he pauses” precisely echoes the way Turner is singing, down to the use of “briefly,” cordoned off by commas, to describe the pause. This is sophisticated writing about a sophisticated art form – Kansas City blues – that probably had never been so lovingly appreciated in The New Yorker (or many other places) before.

I’m ashamed to say that on the day of Balliett’s death, but before I had learned of it, I started reading Exile on Main Street: A Season in Hell with the Rolling Stones, by Robert Greenfield. Rather, I tried to read it but that proved impossible because Greenfield can’t write. Clunky, tone-deaf, clichéd, pretentious – he commits every writerly sin and turns what ought to be a fascinating chronicle of the making of a great album into a forced march across the desert. Music deserves better. Let’s return, gratefully, to the oasis of Whitney Balliett:

“Milt Jackson is an improviser of the rank of Coleman Hawkins and Charlie Parker and Teddy Wilson, and his years with the Modern Jazz Quartet suggested what might have happened if Joyce had joined the Bloomsbury group….He is a prolix, free-floating performer, and learning how to fit into the M.J.Q. must have taught him a good deal about self-editing, a skill few jazz musicians learn.”