 Collected
Works : A Journal of Jazz 1954-1999 by Whitney Balliett
As
jazz critic for The New Yorker magazine since 1957, and the author
of fifteen books, Whitney Balliett has spent a lifetime listening
to and writing about jazz. "All first-rate criticism,"
he once wrote in a review of someone else's work, "first defines
what we are confronting." He could as easily have been describing
his own work. For nearly half a century, Balliett has been telling
us, in pitch-perfect prose, what we confront when we listen to America's
greatest, and perhaps only truly original, musical form.
Collected
Works: A Journal of Jazz 1954-2000 is a monumental achievement,
capturing the full range and register of the jazz scene, from
the first Newport Jazz Festival in 1954 to recent performances
by a rising generation of musicians. Here are definitive portraits
of such major figures as: Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Django
Reinhardt, Martha Raye, Buddy Rich, Charles Mingus, Louis Armstrong,
Billie Holliday, Art Tatum, Bessie Smith, and Earl Hines-a list
that barely scratches the surface. Generations of readers have
learned to listen to the music with Balliett's graceful guidance.
For five decades he has captured the moments when jazz history
was being made.
Balliett's
knowledge is encyclopedic treasure and yet he has always written
as if he were listening for the first time. Since its beginnings
in New Orleans at the turn of the century, jazz has been restlessly
and relentlessly evolving, improvising, experimenting, shapeshifting,
a constant work in progress of sounds and tonal shades, from swing
and dixieland, through boogie-woogie, bebop, and hard bop, to
the new thing, free jazz, abstract jazz, and atonal jazz. Yet
in all its forms, the music is sustained by what Balliett calls
a "secret emotional center," an "aural elixir"
that "reveals itself when an improvised phrase or an entire
solo or even a complete number catches you by surprise."
Whitney Balliett performs the miracle of capturing the essence
of jazz-the "sound of surprise."
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