Jazz: Remembering Whitney Balliett (1926-2007)

Remembering Whitney Balliett (1926-2007)
Category: Music

An item in the news (buried way outside of the print
edition, somewhere on the margins of the online page,
requiring multiple clicks into four or five subpages,
i.e., completely irrelevant to 99.9999999998% of the
population) gave me meaningful pause for thought this
weekend. And, upon mediating on these thoughts, I've
worked out the following, hopefully, consequential
words on an important journalist and writer (well, at
least to those scant 0.00000000002% or so of us) who
is no more:

Whitney Balliett, the long time jazz and music writer
for the New Yorker magazine, died last week from
cancer in the city he was born, lived and gave his
lifelong fidelity to, and which, of course, provided a
proper name to his aforementioned journal. Over four
of his eight decades in which breath found his person,
this sin qua non of life in general also, in passing,
encountered Mr. Balliett regularly scribing away as a
music critic, albeit, I think, a humble and,
comparatively speaking, unpretentious one, in the
same manner and spirit as Nat Hentoff, who continues
to soldier on in a number of publications, principally
at the Village Voice. In that respect, he was one
member of a generally contemptible lot (i.e., those
who manage to evade rain delays by taking shelter
under the large "art/culture critic" tent) who was
actually worthy of respect. As he once wrote, ""Music
is transparent and bodiless and evanescent". What
could be simpler than that?? And, of course, springing
forth from such a simple and essential foundation are
the more profound concepts of beauty and sensuality,
two twin pillars of much of great art. Yet, as
always, bets remained hedged, as words are very
difficult, ineffectual, and rather clumsily fitted and
possibly misaligned when utilized to convey fully and
in a meaningful way the manifold and substantive
feelings associated with such rarified formal
qualities.

His collected New Yorker articles, attempting to untie
this quirky and seemingly irreconcilable Gordian knot
and given new life in a hardbound incarnation, have
been lying on my bedroom window sill for a couple of
months now; and I've been slowly been taking in his
various vignettes of a time when Giants Roamed the
Earth. I've particularly enjoyed his annual reports
back from Newport, the once great, legendary music
festival that, at one time, even provided Duke
Ellington's popularity a second wind that fateful,
breezy day in the summer of '56, fueled by nothing
else than Paul Gonsalves' magically taken and
improvised 28 choruses, aptly assisted by Sam
Woodyard's uncompromising and relentless swing onstage
behind the drum kit and fellow drummer Joe Jones
laying down the pulse and remaining faithfully "in the
pocket" in spirit off stage via the limited and meager
resources of a rolled up "Christian Science Monitor";
and amidst the delirious thousands in the audience,
a solitary audient: the bleach blond faux paux
Marilyn Monroe looking but to this day identity
unknown except to her family and friends (and possibly
departed--we are, as always, on the clock, and this
summer will encompass the 50th anniversary of this
event) dancing uncontrollably for all to see and take
note, giving shape and form to her (still years away
to be given the formal name by an otherwise useless,
contrived hack from Pittsburgh) "15 Minutes".

Being an honest writer, it was not difficult to sense
a bit of cynicism in Mr. Balliett's prose from Newport
at the end of the festival's creative life cycle, when
those rather difficult, intangible qualities such as
"art", "beauty" and "sensuality" proved to be far too
elusive to remain sustainable and, over time, feeling
the sand underneath their feet, gave way and found
themselves eclipsed. In their places followed the all
too familiar everyday $ignposts, the three-way
intersection of Commerce, Product, and Acid Rock.
Alas, Newport was never the same, and entered its
corporate, "jazz in name only phase", where "cool
jazz" was nominally played under the auspices of the
"Kool Jazz Festival", with all applicable signage no
doubt sublimely physically approximating a green
colored pack of cigarettes.

In this respect, I'm a fish out of water: of course,
the best road is always forward and lying off in the
distance, ready to reveal its contours and twists and
turns upon closer inspection to those who seek its
winding pathways. And yet, I think to myself on many
an occasion: what would it have been like to have been
alive and able to walk the walk on 52nd street all
those decades ago, scampering down Uptown and
sashaying up Downtown, when the great ones were
sporting confident, cocky looks, fedoras were neatly
aligned, sharp, classy suits were on the order of the
day; and all the while, artists were playing an
earthy, grounded music that began to take shape and
form(and continues to do so in small, out-of-the-way,
relatively unknown corners today, well away from the
main stage and light years and many stellar
constellations removed from the bright lights and red
carpets of MTV awards, bling and general concepts of ,
ahem, "show business") respectfully, slowly but
surely, individually yet collectively, instinctually
but nonetheless consciously and with purpose , and;
ultimately, in the course of its development, it
aspires to evade the gravitational impulses of
everyday life, and, in the wake of conventionality,
take flight and soar. Its ambition: why, the very
heavens themselves, no doubt.

In downplaying the role of people like him in that
peculiar Groucho Marx sort of way ("I would never want
to be a member of a club that would have me as a
member" the Marxist one took note), Mr. Balliet
simultaneously served to extend the grandeur of the
music he helped to humbly publicize and ultimately
serve: "It's 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.
Jazz, 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." Of course, upon reading
this eloquent line of thinking, I should perhaps, if I
were more prudent, revise my crappy, ill-advised
"Icarus-inspsired" hyperbole in the prior paragraph.
Ah, what the hell: imperfections are, like everything
else, part of the learning process.