The jazz critic

Anyone who cares about jazz honors the name of Whitney Balliett. Anyone who cares about fine prose should honor him even more. No one -- no one -- has written better about the music than Balliett did for half a century in The New Yorker. He was the poet laureate of jazz, a nonpareil stylist whose writing was clipped yet lyrical, wondrously precise yet uniquely evocative.

Balliett died last week in New York. He was 80. "Music is transparent and bodiless and evanescent ," he once wrote of his critical approach, "so I was forced to use metaphor and simile and other such circumambulatory devices, all of which caused the musicology boys to deride me as an 'impressionist.' "

Impressionist Balliett certainly was a master on the page as Monet was on canvas.

The trombonist Jack Teagarden's "vocals were lullabies -- lay-me-down patches of sound." The cornetist "Rex Stewart's half valvings were sounds heard through a swinging door." The bandleader Claude Thornhill "wanted his sections to play without vibrato; the blocks of sound they produced were smooth, rectangular, and weightless. . . . They spoke of deep velvet, of Matisse reds, of melancholy without tears."

The jazz Balliett loved best was the small-group swing brought to perfection at the end of World War II on 52nd Street by such players as Big Sid Catlett , Vic Dickenson , Ben Webster , Bobby Hackett , and Pee Wee Russell . Though he wrote with enthusiasm of such innovators as Charles Mingus , Ornette Coleman , and Cecil Taylor , Balliett never warmed to the giants of postwar jazz: Charlie Parker , John Coltrane , Miles Davis . So be it. The limitations of his taste were a small price to pay for the luster of his prose.

One of the great events in jazz history was a 1957 broadcast on CBS called "The Sound of Jazz." Balliett helped organize it. Its highlight was Lester Young accompanying Billie Holiday on "Fine and Mellow. " What Balliett once wrote of Young's artistry on tenor saxophone describes his, too. "He kept the original melodies in his head, but what came out was his dreams about them. His solos were fantasies -- liquid, soft, lyrical -- on the tunes he was playing, and probably on his own life as well."

MARK FEENEY

Ryan O'Neal says his weekend arrest came after he fired a gun in self-defense to prevent his son from whacking him with a fireplace poker. The actor told the Los Angeles Times that he arrived at his Malibu home Saturday night after celebrating with a group of friends, including his former girlfriend Farrah Fawcett. They had been celebrating Fawcett's 60th birthday and that she is cancer-free after four months of treatment. O'Neal's son Griffin, 42, who has a history of alcohol and drug problems, was visiting. O'Neal said Griffin grabbed the poker, started swinging it, and grazed him four or five times. He "aimed at my head, I ducked, he hit his own girlfriend in the head," O'Neal, 65, told the newspaper. "I got a little nervous at that point and fled to my room . . . and I got my gun," he said. O'Neal said his son began to come up the stairs with the poker. "So I just fired it into the banister, and that scared him and he fled," he said. Sheriff's deputies arrested O'Neal for investigation of assault with a deadly weapon and negligent discharge of a firearm. He was released on $50,000 bond.

Jessica Simpson says she was stung when ex-husband Nick Lachey jumped back into dating after their high-profile breakup. "Oh, it hurt me," the 26-year-old singer-actress says in the March issue of Elle magazine, on newsstands Feb. 13. "Two or three weeks later? Yeah, I'd say it kind of hurt me." She filed for divorce in December 2005, after three years of marriage. She made that decision, she says, after watching the romance film "The Notebook" on a plane ride home to Texas. "I just figured out the statement," she says of the movie, starring Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams as star-crossed lovers. "It was about that moment of desperation. I needed to breathe."

Britain's Prince Andrew made a surprise trip to a suburban Dublin supermarket yesterday and pleasantly startled the shoppers -- particularly one woman who collided with the prince at the bottom of an escalator. Andrew, second son of Queen Elizabeth II, was on a tour of Dublin as Britain's special representative for international trade and investment. The prince visited a new branch of Tesco, the dominant British supermarket chain, which has become big in Ireland, too. "He is absolutely gorgeous, very well turned out," said Margaret Bartley, who saw the royal in the Tesco in Malahide, a posh suburb of Dublin.

FROM WIRE REPORTS

Yeah, but is it good?

'Some days it's challenging. It's exhilarating. It's worrisome. It's joyous. It's all of these things.' Don Henley, on the new Eagles album, due out in a few months.