'To Entertain and Recharge the Spirit'

A friend found a copy of Whitney Balliett’s first book, The Sound of Surprise, fortuitously misshelved in the “Vintage Mysteries” section in a Washington, D.C., bookstore, and mailed it to me. Published in the U.S. in 1959, this is the first English edition, brought out by William Kimber of London in 1960. I had never even seen a copy before, apart from an overpriced, beaten-up paperback. There’s no dust jacket but the book is in good shape, no scuffs, tears, scrawls or foxing. 

Balliett’s specialty was writing profiles of jazz musicians, chronicling their life and work, mingling biography and criticism. His first, devoted to the miraculous clarinet player Pee Wee Russell, would appear in The New Yorker in 1962 – “Even His Feet Look Sad.” The Sound of Surprise includes a sort of warmup, a five-pager titled “P.W. Russell, Poet,” in which the Balliett touch is already discernable:

 

“Unfortunately, Russell has almost always been regarded as a loveable freak. One reason is his physical makeup. Thin and tallish, he has a parenthesis-like stoop, spidery fingers and a long, wry, gentle face governed by a generous, wandering nose. When he plays, this already striking facial arrangement, which is overlaid with an endless grille of wrinkles and furrows, becomes knotted into unbelievable grimaces of pain, as if the music were pulling unbearably tight an inner drawstring.”

 

I’ve always thought of Russell’s physiognomy as a mix of W.H. Auden and a bloodhound, with a sparse mustache thrown in. Balliett’s gift for characterizing the music impressionistically, like a metaphor machine, is unmatched by most poets, as in this description of Russell at work:

 

“[H]e will issue, after some preliminary blinking and squinting (as if he had just entered a bright room from a dark street), a series of crablike, irregularly staccato phrases, each shaken by a bone-worrying vibrato and each clamped tightly against its predecessor, lest any distractions leak in to cool off what he had in mind.”

  

About the title of Balliett’s book: “the sound of surprise” is Balliett’s brilliant coinage, but the phrase has become a cliched synonym for jazz, used by lazy writers and critics, usually without attribution. I suppose it’s a compliment to Balliett. When I wrote about jazz for newspapers, he was always my model, but I tried to avoid slavish imitation. In his introduction, Balliett refers to “the fundamental intent of jazz—to entertain and recharge the spirit with new beauties.” He respects the music too much to descend into fanboy, hipster gush. Here is Balliett in his chapter on Errol Garner, who dared to be entertaining:

 

“(Bohemian’s law, that true art originates only in the garret, still operates to an astonishing degree in jazz, when an occasional jazz musician breaks into the big time, he immediately becomes suspect and, often as not, is dropped from the rolls of honour.)”