Whitney Balliett, 80, a jazz reporter who spent more than four decades writing thousands of graceful and definitive stories for the New Yorker magazine and helped create one of the finest jazz programs on television, died Feb. 1 at his home in Manhattan, N.Y. He had liver cancer.
Jazz critic and poet Philip Larkin described Mr. Balliett as “a writer who brings jazz journalism to the verge of poetry." Dan Morgenstern, director of the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University, called him “the greatest prose stylist to ever apply his writing skills to jazz."
Mr. Balliett began writing a regular jazz column for the New Yorker in 1957. To convey the essence of music and musicians, he avoided technical terms. He considered himself an “impressionist" when he wrote about musicians because music itself is fleeting, so “transparent and bodiless." Jazz in particular, he wrote, had “odd non-notes and strange tones and timbres."
In his observations, he created portraits of entertainers in action. As an amateur drummer, he had a particular appreciation for skilled drummers.
Writing of one of his idols, the drummer Sidney “Big Sid" Catlett, he said, “One was transfixed by the easy motion of his arms, the pulse-like rigidity of his body, and the soaring of his huge hands, which reduced the drumsticks to pencils."
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Jazz critic and poet Philip Larkin described Mr. Balliett as “a writer who brings jazz journalism to the verge of poetry." Dan Morgenstern, director of the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University, called him “the greatest prose stylist to ever apply his writing skills to jazz."
Mr. Balliett began writing a regular jazz column for the New Yorker in 1957. To convey the essence of music and musicians, he avoided technical terms. He considered himself an “impressionist" when he wrote about musicians because music itself is fleeting, so “transparent and bodiless." Jazz in particular, he wrote, had “odd non-notes and strange tones and timbres."
In his observations, he created portraits of entertainers in action. As an amateur drummer, he had a particular appreciation for skilled drummers.
Writing of one of his idols, the drummer Sidney “Big Sid" Catlett, he said, “One was transfixed by the easy motion of his arms, the pulse-like rigidity of his body, and the soaring of his huge hands, which reduced the drumsticks to pencils."
Continue...
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