WHITNEY BALLIETT.(The Talk of the Town)(In memoriam)

Balliett on Duke Ellington; the Newport Jazz Festival; Ellis Larkins.

SHOUTS & MURMURS, by Paul Rudnick

Whitney Balliett, who died last week at the age of eighty, was above all a poet, who pursued poetry by other means. He wrote for this magazine for almost fifty years, mostly about jazz, and what he wrote was so good that Philip Larkin, not an easy man to please about either jazz or poetry, called him a "master of language," while, years later, the young Nicholson Baker still referred to him, in a wondering aside, as a "tireless prodigy." Whitney was about as pure a stylist as anyone who has written American English, yet his sentences were almost always about someone else's art; that's what gave his writing its modesty and its tensile strength. Reading through the books he made from pieces published here---"American Singers," "American Musicians"--one is grateful for their range of reference and their near-encyclopedic knowledge of the music, but what delights and amazes is the quality of his line, what William Shawn, the former editor of this magazine, once called his "genius for saying in words how a particular musician or musicians sound." Whitney could place on the page the sound of someone playing--not the reasons the sound might matter to a historian, or even the way it felt to an enthusiast, but the way it really sounded, the way it was. This, for instance, on the tenor man Ben Webster, from a late collection:

He would start a medium-slow blues solo very softly with a weaving five-note phrase, pause, play a high, barely audible blue note, and duck back to his opening phrase, still as soft as first sunlight. He would harden his tone slightly at the start of his next chorus, issue an annunciatory phrase, repeat it, insert a defiant tremolo. . . . His tone would grow hard, he would growl and crowd his notes, he would shake his phrases as if he had them clamped in his teeth. . . . As the years went by . . . he would close certain phrase endings by allowing his vibrato to melt into pure undulating breath--dramatically offering, before the breath expired, the ghost of his sound.

There is Webster, compleat. And Balliett could do it over and over. (In an entirely different piece about Webster, he mentioned that his solos "give one the impression of being suddenly picked up by a breaker and carried smoothly to shore.") Someone once said, disparagingly, of another writer that he heard with his typewriter; Balliett wrote with his ears.

Or he seemed to; only on second reading does one see how artfully constructed the writing is--the startling, yet just right adjectives, the vivid and almost always slightly comic verbs, the feeling for what's essential, the exactitude, and the one fine metaphor to end it all. Lovers of Balliett's writing would collect his epithets like autographs: the "vinegary, dissonant, gothic" tone of Monk; the "rippling, quiet-water" quality of Ellis Larkins; the "great, welcoming tone" and "almost discursive vibrato" of Coleman Hawkins. (You could make a style ...