Emdashes. The New Yorker between the lines

Best of Emdashes: Hit Parade
Weekly: Pick of the Issue
Bimonthly: Ask the Librarians

Submit a question for the next column.

February012007

Whitney Balliett, 1926-2007

Filed under: In Memoriam   Tagged: , , , , , ,

It is my understanding that longtime New Yorker jazz critic Whitney Balliett has died. If anyone knows more, please confirm. What a week for deaths. Which every week is, but they seem to be snowballing.

Here's Balliett's short review in the magazine of A Great Day in Harlem, and a November 18, 1961, Talk of the Town about Sonny Rollins; as with all old Talks, it has no byline, but the reliable Greg.org credits it to Balliett, so I'm going with it. (It is indeed by him.) It begins:
When life becomes nothing but a bowl of clichés, how many young and successful people of non-independent means have the resilience and backbone to withdraw completely from the world and reorganize, refuel, retool, and refurbish themselves? Well, we know of one such heroic monk—Sonny Rollins, a thirty-one-year-old tenor saxophonist. In the summer of 1959, Rollins, finding himself between burgeoning success and burgeoning displeasure with his playing, dropped abruptly and voluntarily into oblivion, where he remained until this very week, when he momentously reappeared at the Jazz Gallery, on St. Marks Place, with a quartet. At the time of his self-banishment, Rollins was, among other things, the most influential practitioner on his instrument to come along since Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins; the unofficial head of the hard-bop school (a refinement of bebop); and one of the first of the now plentiful abstract or semi-abstract jazz improvisers. As a result, his Return—rumored for months—took on a kind of millennial air, which we got caught up in several days before the event by having a chat with the Master himself.
Friday update: Balliett's death has been confirmed. Also now online at newyorker.com: the critic's December 26, 1970, Profile of Bobby Short. Here's the Newsday obituary: "'Whitney's knowledge of the jazz world was encyclopedic, his passion for the music unbounded, and his prose as fluid and as joyful as the subject he wrote about,' said David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker.... 'Whitney's heart might have been with the music of the golden era of jazz, but he was also perfectly capable of writing with sympathy about the later innovators, such as Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman,' said Remnick. 'He was especially brilliant writing about singers and drummers—in fact, Whitney himself was a damn good amateur drummer himself.'" Other obituaries: in The New York Sun, in The Washington Post, in The New York Times, and on All About Jazz.
2 comments

Comments

Hi to all
Uncle Bun as we called him when we were little. I always thought, what a fun person he was . He would arrange the Best in Jazz at the time to come play in our Long Island house. Being so young at the time I would always stare at the bands as they played. Great Music!
I remember When Aunt Nancy and Uncle Bun got married in our living room. I got into the Booze. My Dad Fargo Balliett got so mad and took me away to eat Peanut Butter and Jelly.

Uncle Bun

Were going to miss you. Aunt Nancy was a lucky lady. Best to my cousins, Jamie,Julie, Blue, Whitney jr and Aunt Nancy

William Balliett

William BalliettFebruary 17, 2007

I removed my cousin Will Balliett's name by mistake.
Will Take Care Bud

Your cousin William from Asia signing off.

William BalliettFebruary 17, 2007

Post a comment

(If you haven't left a comment here before, it may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Thanks for waiting.)

2008 Webby Awards Official Honoree
Happy Fourth Anniversary to Us!
2009 New Yorker Desk Diaries
Inkleaf Studio illustration