Feb 03
Feb 03
When I first began to write about jazz it was, in a manner of speaking, my attempt at a naïve emulation of Whitney Balliett, the great New Yorker jazz writer, who died last week at 80 years of age. And in fact, for most of 20 years, I have carried on a “Letters to a Young Poet” imaginary conversation with the man. I suspect I am not alone, and that others (Adam Gopnik, Anthony Lane—although he seems more like a Pauline Kael man, maybe Lawrence Weschsler) were also children of the New Yorker impulse—fed on a greedy diet and longing for the likes of AJ Liebling, Joseph Mitchell, Philip Wylie, etc.
Fifteen years passed—before I was accorded much feature-space—where I wrote nothing but blurbs, short listings, soothed by the knowledge that Balliett (as well as mavericks like the recently departed George WS Trow) excelled in the finite landscape of 100-words-or-less. The challenge of capturing the gestural, impressionistic, even cinematic qualities of jazz and its practitioners with a mastery of language and allusion, zen-koan patience, musicality, rhythm, and poetic efficiency became an art-form unto itself. In an optimistic, Blakean augury, I learned from Balliett to “see a world in a grain of sand, And. . . Hold Infinity,” not only in the palm of my hand, but, with utmost care and economy, in the precious space of a few short fractions of column inch. Adam Gopnik eulogizing Balliett wrote, “You could make a style of your own just by stealing some of his pet adjectives: owlish, transparent, weightless. . ..” I have and still do. In the spirit of jazz innovation, I think of it (to borrow from Charlie Parker) as “Thriving on a Riff.”
Jack McDuff once told me that the most important thing to do (for a musician) is “always establish the scene of the crime.” Whitney Balliett achieved that by veering away from I’m-so-hip or theory-rich analysis and noir-ish jazz cliché—rather opting for a cosmology that was rich in poetry, metaphor, and an elevated (but never precious) literary tone. Balliett was a vivid thinker and a daring prose stylist in the same pantheon with such mid-century cultural critics as Liebling, Philip Wylie, Otis Ferguson, Dwight Macdonald, Joseph Mitchell and Pauline Kael. And he was ours.
Some of his more apt, painterly portraits came about in pieces on some of the masterful, yet underappreciated figures of pre-bop jazz: Pee Wee Russell (“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 strinking facial arrangement, which is overlaid with an endless grille of wrinkles and furrows, becomes knotted in unbelievable grimaces of pain, as if the music were pulling unbearable tight an inner drawstring”), Sidney Catlett (“sat at his drums with Prussian erectness,his trunk motionless and his arms [weighted by hands that made drumsticks look like matches] moving so fast that they seemed to be lazily spinning in slow motion”), Jimmy Rushing (who “always sounded as if he were wearing spats and morning coat and just had a good laugh”) and Roy Eldridge (“His style is wild and dancing and nervous, he seems to bite at, instead of merely blow, his notes”), among many others.
For anyone coming of age during the ‘80s, Balliett was a breath of tweedy, anachronistic fresh air—devoid of irony, sneer, with one foot in the classic New York of the Algonquin and Café Society, two-steps away from all the literature with a capital “L” that The New Yorker was known for, and smack dab in the middle of the jazz corner of the world. As a teenager discovering jazz, I read (with often perplexed wonder) pieces on Blossom Dearie, Red Allen, Tony Bennett, Alec Wilder, Mabel Mercer, Paul Desmond, Nellie Lutcher, Cecil Taylor, Red Norvo, and Dave Frishberg, etc.; and was as seduced by the musicality of his version of, “how a beautiful music grew, flourished, and (possibly) began the long trek back to its native silences,” as I was by the music itself.
I can’t say it any better than Adam Gopnik, who wrote that Balliett, “believed in the swinging, witty sounds [jazz musicians] made, and kept a faith, both mystical and defiant, that their work mattered as much as that of any novelist or painter, that the air they set vibrating in a room somewhere at night would go on resonating long after the room was gone. He made sure that it did. Delicate poets of deep emotion, he preserved their sound, and ended as one of them.”
For his love and commitment to the Sound of Surprise, I’m deeply grateful. As I keep on wondering with the wondering and writing bits pocketed from (and inspired by) Balliett’s gentle, avuncular, literary-rich legacy, I’d be playing a losing game of liar’s dice if I didn’t stop occasionally and ask myself, What Would Whitney Balliett Do?
