[Dixielandjazz] Whitney Balliett Obit

[Steve Barbone]

He was my kind of critic. IMO a beautiful writer with soul. Yet often
criticized for his flowery descriptions. In any event, a fine man as well as
a good amateur drummer who loved OKOM.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone


Whitney Balliett, New Yorker Jazz Critic, Dies at 80

NY TIMES - By BEN RATLIFF - February 3, 2007

Whitney Balliett, a jazz critic who in more than 40 years at The New Yorker
magazine encouraged readers to hear jazz through his vividly metaphorical
writing, died yesterday at his home in Manhattan. He was 80.

The cause was cancer, said his son Will Balliett.

In describing jazz during its years of greatest development and ferment, Mr.
Balliett used comparatively little technical vocabulary; he was after a
sensual rendering. Of the trumpeter Roy Eldridge, he wrote: ³His tone at
slow tempos still supplicates and enfolds and at fast speeds hums and
threatens.² The trumpeter Doc Cheatham¹s solos, on the other hand, were ³a
succession of lines, steps, curves, parabolas, angles and elevations.²

Mr. Balliett did something similar in describing appearances. Of Teddy
Wilson: ³His figure, once thin as a stamp, has thickened, and his hawklike
profile has become a series of arcs and spheres.² And of the drummer Big Sid
Catlett, who inspired some of his finest writing, he said: ³Everything was
in proportion: the massive shoulders, the long arms and giant, tapering
fingers, the cannonball fists, the barn-door chest and the tidy waist, his
big feet, and the columnar neck.²

Born in Manhattan and raised in Glen Head and Glen Cove on Long Island, Mr.
Balliett attended Phillips Exeter Academy, where he learned to played drums
in a band he summed up as ³baggy Dixieland²; he played summer gigs at a
Center Island yacht club.

He was drafted into the Army in 1946, interrupting his freshman year at
Cornell. He returned to finish his degree in 1951, then went straight to a
job at The New Yorker, where he was hired by Katherine White, a fiction
editor. 

Mr. Balliett (pronounced BAL-ee-et) worked at various production and
editorial jobs, eventually writing unsigned ³Talk of the Town² pieces, until
it came to the attention of the magazine¹s editor, William Shawn, that he
was writing about jazz for The Saturday Review magazine. Shawn gave him his
own column in 1957.

Unlike some of his colleagues, Mr. Balliett did not submerge himself in the
musicians¹ world; he had a family life to balance against nights at the
Hickory House, the Village Vanguard and the Cookery. In addition to his son
Will, of Manhattan, he is survived by his wife, Nancy Balliett; his
daughters Julie Rose of Accord, N.Y., and Blue Balliett of Chicago; two
other sons, Whitney Jr., of Natick, Mass., and James, of Erie, Colo.; a
brother, Fargo Balliett Jr. of Ithaca, N.Y.; a sister, Deyan Sheldon; and
seven grandchildren.

Mr. Balliett¹s name was on more than 550 articles in The New Yorker from
1957 to 2001, with many more unsigned. (He wrote about books for the
magazine as a sideline, and also covered Off Broadway theater for it in 1960
and 1961.) 

Influenced by Joseph Mitchell, his basic prose style was formed by his late
20s; changes came mostly as a matter of journalistic format. In the late
1950s he started bringing interviews into his work, and in 1962 he started
writing long profiles of musicians, letting their voices tell much of the
story. 

Mr. Balliett did not use a tape recorder. Instead, he took notes furiously
over several days of conversations and played them back as long, extravagant
solos; this new emphasis on long-form quotation forced him to concentrate
musical descriptions into highly poetic, cumulative glimpses of a musician¹s
sound.

It was a style that had some detractors, including the English critic Max
Harrison, who felt that it was not serious or specific enough for its
subject.

³Music is transparent and bodiless and evanescent,² Mr. Balliett wrote in
defense of his approach. He pointed out, on more than one occasion, that
jazz improvisation itself could not be perfectly notated, anyway.

Mr. Balliett¹s work survives through his 17 published collections of essays.
In the introduction to his first book, ³The Sound of Surprise,² published in
1959, he wrote:

³It¹s a compliment to jazz that nine-tenths of the voluminous writing about
it is bad, for the best forms often attract the most unbalanced admiration.
At the same time, it is remarkable that so fragile a music has withstood
such truckloads of enthusiasm.²

He added, in part, ³Jazz, after all, is a highly personal, lightweight form
‹ like poetry, it is an art of surprise ‹ that, shaken down, amounts to the
blues, some unique vocal and instrumental sounds, and the limited, elusive
genius of improvisation.²