Perfect Pitch
Jazz critic Whitney Balliet somehow captured the actual sound and shape of the music, and the humanity of his subjects, in his prose.
LIKE MANY A confirmed rock fan, I have a brief, adulterous fling with jazz in my past. As a 25-year-old I lurked in used record stores, I read Charles Mingus's "Beneath the Underdog," I made untutored sallies into the work of Eric Dolphy and Bud Powell. I could barely tell a saxophone from an oboe, but I kept going, and a fumbling, superficial familiarity with jazz was achieved; I am grateful for it now, because it is precisely this narrow layer of non-ignorance, this dilettante's veneer, that is irradiated when I read the prose of Whitney Balliett.
Balliett, who died on Feb. 1 at the age of 80, was given his own jazz column at The New Yorker in 1957 -- the year that John Coltrane kicked heroin, and Mingus recorded "Haitian Fight Song" -- by then-editor William Shawn, and covered jazz for the magazine for the next 40 years. The plentiful tributes that followed his death have all been studded with lines, phrases, and images from his New Yorker pieces; Balliett's was the sort of jewel-like writing before which even the most adroit eulogist lapses into helpless quotation.
On the prodigiousness of the nearly-blind pianist Art Tatum: "even while supplying accompaniment, he never seemed able to keep himself from swelling up, like an enormous djinni, alongside the soloist." The busy bandleader Eddie Condon, for Balliett, had "an unremittingly pumiced appearance." Thelonious Monk was "a tall, dark, bearish, inward-shining man" -- a line that prompts one to reflect also on Balliett's good fortune in finding his literary home at The New Yorker. (Many a magazine editor would have unthinkingly split that last compound adjective into "inwardly shining," thus sacrificing its poetic suggestion that Monk's interior illuminations were essentially private, directed toward no one but himself.)
Growing up, my standards for music writing were set by Lester Bangs, Greil Marcus, and the English music press of the 1980s. Bangs's posthumous collection "Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung" suggested that rock criticism was a matter of chaotic, Dionysian engagement: Inflate yourself with drugs or alcohol, put on the record, and let the deadline do the rest. (NB: This system only works if you are, like Lester Bangs, a virtuoso.) Marcus seemed more Apollonian -- that is, he wore glasses -- but books like "Mystery Train" and "Lipstick Traces," while more considered than Bangs's journalistic effusions, were equally head-on: dark, mythic readings of rock 'n' roll as the music of permanent disruption. In the pages of England's New Musical Express, meanwhile, and in Melody Maker, both of which came out weekly, the writing was adversarial, prophetic: jeremiads against the current state of music, hosannas for the latest underground thing.
To the parts of my brain irreversibly conditioned by all of this, Balliett comes as a relief and an antidote. There is no whizz-bang in his style, no buttonholing of the reader, no partisanship. He distrusted romanticism, and had an aversion to zealotry. He thought that Miles Davis, brooding hipster idol, blew a lot of "clams." "Jazz," he wrote in 1963, "has always been bedevilled by certain audiences -- the social-protesters, the Beats, and the hard thinkers who use the music as a weapon or a smoke screen."
Against this ax-grinding he set his own educated but idiosyncratic appreciation of the music, the actual sound and shape of it. Listening to Billie Holiday in her prime he heard "innumerable timbres: a dark-brown sound, sometimes fretted by growls or hoarseness, in the lower register; a pliable oboe tone in the high register; and a pushing, little-girl alto in between." Here, as so often in his writing, Balliett's rapt attention or devotion to the experience itself is indivisible from the artistry he uses to describe it: The incidental euphonies ("pliable oboe tone") and the leaping immediacy (that pinpoint little word "fretted") occur, as it were, simultaneously with his perception of Holiday's voice. No wonder Philip Larkin considered him "a master of language."
In his profiles of jazz people Balliett was also an exquisite portraitist. Many of the artists he dealt with were, to put it mildly, characters, and they enter his prose with Shakespearean totality, expanding through long, rollicking monologues and then contracting to the essential detail: Duke Ellington's drummer Sonny Greer "reaching out to tap a cymbal as if he were knighting it"; Ellington himself, in 1970, knocking over a Coke and saying "Oh, my! I'm the only nuisance I know who knows he's a nuisance!"
"Unfortunately," Balliett wrote in a 1962 piece on the Modern Jazz Quartet, "philosophers and theologians, while urging the pursuit of perfection, do not tell us where to turn once that state is reached." The piece was headlined "Problem," and we can be thankful that he never solved it himself. Line after line, page after page, he remained, quietly but irrefutably, a paragon: forty years at the top his game.
James Parker's column appears biweekly in Ideas. E-mail cultural.studies@globe.com.
