'A Shelf Labeled with Dewey Decimal Number 781.65'

When I was a teenager with a subscription to The New Yorker, the magazine’s premiere critic, the one whose byline I looked for first, was not Pauline Kael, the movie reviewer who wrote like a teenager, but Whitney Balliett, the jazz writer who treated musicians and his readers like grownups. Years later, when I was writing about jazz for a newspaper, Balliett’s profiles and reviews were my field guides in matters musical and stylistic. I virtually plagiarized his manner. Once, while wring about a performance by Nick Brignola, I off-handedly referred to his baritone saxophone as “plumbing.” A reader sent me a note to say I sounded like Balliett, and I took it as a compliment. It’s satisfying to see that Ted Gioia, in “The True Poet of Jazz,” shares my long-standing esteem for Balliett:

 

“He retained the enthusiasm of a fan, but it was married to the expressive virtuosity of a master writer who could extract from his typewriter something akin to what others drew from their saxophones and trumpets. It was almost as if he were a jazz musician himself, but one who wrote essays for The New Yorker instead of soloing over ‘I Got Rhythm’ chords.”

 

“Expressive virtuosity” – that’s what true writers spend a lifetime trying to achieve. Like his elder at The New Yorker, A.J. Liebling, Balliett is a primer in prose, even for writers with little or no interest in jazz. What he writes is not “pretty.” It is always carefully weighed and measured. Kael, whose prose is forgettable, has been sanctified with a volume of her own by the Library of America. Why not Balliett? A writer can learn from him that everything – home décor, modes of speech, food and drink preferences, the weather, the hardness of a reed, table manners, ambient sounds --  carry potential significance, revelations of character. All contribute to the writer’s subject at hand. When I interviewed musicians Balliett had written about – Elvin Jones, Marian McPartland, Dave McKenna, among others – I always asked what they thought of Balliett’s work in general and the profiles he had written of them in particular. All smiled and remembered him with respect and admiration.

 

About a 1974 performance by pianist Bill Evans, Balliett writes: “Henry James would have relished such intricate footwork.” His report on the 1970 Newport Jazz Festival begins like this: “Newport, as Henry James discovered, can make a philosopher of anyone.” Here’s Balliett in a 1961 piece about the great 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.”

 

When reviewing an anthology of jazz short stories, Balliett noted the sentimentality that plagues most fiction and film devoted to the music. Eudora Welty’s “Powerhouse,” he wrote, “may be the best fiction ever written about jazz.” Forgivingly, Balliett says fiction writers and poets work at a disadvantage because, “The music is ephemeral. A novelist can describe the `Appassionata’ and tell you exactly how his pianist hero plays it, but a jazz novelist must describe a music that is gone the instant it is played.” The problem is not the ephemerality of the music – that’s merely its challenge -- but the ephemerality of the writers who write about it.

 

Most of the essential Balliett can be found in American Singers: Twenty-seven Portraits in Song (1988), American Musicians II: Seventy-one Portraits in Jazz (1996), Collected Works: A Journal of Jazz 1954–2001 (2001) and New York Voices: Fourteen Portraits (2006). As Gioia writes, “Above all, Balliett’s writing has held up—more than 500 essays on jazz, and enough books to fill up a shelf labeled with Dewey Decimal number 781.65.”