It won't mean much to most people that Whitney Balliett died last week aged 80, but in the byways and backwaters of jazz internet traffic, the news has set cyberspace humming.
Balliett was a jazz reporter - for some, the best one jazz music has ever known. He could pull off the rare trick of making his readers imagine the sounds of artists they'd never heard of and never heard play. You could read a Balliett description of a jazz musician's idiosyncrasies, then eventually hear the music, smile and go: "Yep, that's what I thought it might be like."
Here is Balliett's account of the playing of the eccentric, hard-drinking old swing-era musician Pee Wee Russell, one of the few clarinetists of his generation with the independence of mind and openness to happenstance to avoid sounding like the '30s clarinet superstar Benny Goodman.
"No jazz musician has ever played with the same daring and nakedness and intuition," Balliett wrote of Russell in the 1962 New Yorker essay Even His Feet Look Sad. "He sounded cranky and querulous, but that was camouflage, for he was the most plaintive and lyrical of players. He was particularly affecting in a medium or slow-tempo blues. He'd start ... with a delicate rush of notes that were intensely multiplied into a single, unbroken phrase that might last the entire chorus. Then he'd begin with a pattern of winged double-time staccato notes that, moving steadily downward, were abruptly pierced by falsetto jumps. When he had nearly sunk out of hearing, he reversed this pattern, keeping his myriad notes back to back, and then swung into an easy uphill-downdale movement, topping each rise with an oddly-placed vibrato. By this time, his first chorus was over, and one had the impression of having passed through a crowd of jostling, whispering people."
Balliett wrote like that as a matter of course. He described patterns of sound conjured up on-the-fly by jazz musicians as other writers might describe quirks of speech, characteristic facial tics, the sounds of laughs or indignation, gestures, a graceful or awkward gait, the cut of a coat. Balliett utterly humanised the reporting of a profoundly humane art, which celebrates both individual difference and the capacity for sharing at the same time. He didn't see himself as the kind of critic who ticks boxes on some rulebook of artistic standards. In fact, he probably didn't see himself as a critic at all, and neither did those detractors who dismissed him as a wordy showoff who ducked the tough job of analysis and evaluation. But he loved it passionately and it charmed and moved him endlessly - that was obvious in every paragraph.
For me, who tried jazz writing entirely as a result of reading Balliett's famous collection The Sound of Surprise, it seemed like a pretty good excuse for doing what he did. The jazz blogs and internet chat this week confirm that a lot of music-lovers feel just the same.
