Ave Whitney Balliett

You know, I have been reading the articles of Balliett and, as a musician, I am impressed with how he could get into the spirit of the music through words. If I have to read about music (which I hate to do), I would rather re-read his articles than what passes for writing nowadays.

I recently read Adam Gopnik's appreciation of the late writer Whitney Balliett in the New Yorker. Although Balliett's role at the New Yorker extended beyond the coverage of jazz, his unique style blossomed under editor William Shawn, who clearly had an affinity for jazz. Why we didn't hear more from a writer of Balliett's skill and stature after Shawn's departure is a question I don't have all the answers for. What's clearer is that coverage of jazz in the New Yorker has slowed to nothing since then. One of the only jazz features to run in the New Yorker over the past two years was a Stanley Crouch piece on Sonny Rollins. I remember seeing New Yorker editor David Remnick, publicizing that weeks's issue on MSNBC's Don Imus show commenting that jazz was dying but that Rollins possessed a vitality that was worth paying attention to.

The health of jazz has always been tied to its advocates both inside and outside the music. Jazz blogs, websites and print publications certainly play an important role in communicating inside this often insular world (check out the interview with pianist George Colligan in the February issue of Cadence, as revealing a look at current working conditions for New York-based musicians as I've read) and offer the potential to draw in new audiences. But as we close in on being a decade out from the mass-marketed Duke Ellington centennial and much-debated Ken Burns Jazz series, who are the advocates in the bigger bastions of media culture insuring that jazz gets attention and seeing that it gets stamped with credibility? Its encouraging to read the thoughtful coverage the New York Times has maintained beyond just listings and seeing Robert Levi's Billy Strayhorn documentary on PBS. One of the music's most important lifelines has been public radio, and though jazz seems to have a diminished presence on NPR and many stations have abandoned jazz for talk and information-based programming, strong advocate-driven stations such as Newark's WBGO continue committed to the music.

If a magazine like the New Yorker provides thorough coverage of classical music, theatre, books, television, film and the visual arts, why not jazz? If one reason the New York Times covers jazz is its strong place and deep history in the city's cultural life, why not the New Yorker? It would be interesting to hear a response from Remnick on why
The New Yorker has abandoned jazz as part of its wide-ranging arts coverage. The music does have a deep tradition at the magazine and at this point in time, jazz needs all the help it can get.

Dave Barber

(Mr. Barber programs concerts for Cityfolk in Dayton, Ohio)

Strikes me as curious that in all the talk about Balliett, no one said anything about the current absence of jazz writing (with the exception of the calendar) in the New Yorker. Nat Hentoff's republished WSJ piece dumped on Remnick for eulogizing someone who had been treated badly, but how about bad treatment of the music?

I know the phrase was a quote from someone else, but Balliet used it as the title of his essay on Pee Wee Russell and I love it: "Even his feet look sad".

I arrived in New York by boat in summer of 1964, and the person I most wanted to meet, apart from Duke Ellington, was Whitney Balliett. So I phoned him up, and he invited me to lunch, and that was the beginning of a long friendship. I had reviewed his first collection of pieces while I was at Oxford, and I ended up playing sometimes with his rough and ready band in New York. I was a journalist at the time, but I took some pictures for his book, Alec Wilder And His Friends. Whitney was a lovely man, gentle, punctilious, with a marvelous musical laugh. His pieces will be read with pleasure as long as anyone likes jazz.

Thank you..this time for remembering Whitney Balliett. His writing was so musical and he could see,hear, and describe unique elements in many musicians that other writers and critics often missed. I was especially touched by his writing on Alec Wilder. Very few people understood Wilder as Whitney Balliett did and very few were as tolerant of and compassionate toward Wilder in his worst times...

And How!!! Thank you for this. Balliett was a vivid thinker and a daring prose stylist in the same pantheon with Liebling, Philip Wylie, Hazlitt, Otis Ferguson, Dwight Macdonald, Joseph Mitchell and Pauline Kael. . .a huge inspiration to me as a young writer (and still). We no longer have jazz writers of his ilk, literary grace, and savoir faire-- only legions of record reviewers and dyspeptic critics and discographers. No one else could find so many ways to describe the muscle and poetry of Big Sid Catlett or refer to early jazz drumming as being surrounded with "Victorian clutter". . .and then again we can all thank him for that most glorious of phrases: The Sound of Surprise.

He'll be missed.

amen. wonderful writing, wonderful that it found an outlet. jazz has more or less disappeared from the new yorker, classical music, although brilliantly handled these days, a sometime thing, absurd post modern takes on hip hop taking precedence........