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JerseyArticlesJazzClassic Stine | Remembering WhitneyBy Jack Stine NJJS President EmeritusThe best lines of remembrance forWhitney Balliett, the irreplaceable writerfor The New Yorker whose pieces on jazzgraced that magazine for the past fourdecades, were written by Nat Hentoff forThe Wall Street Journal the day after Balliett’sdeath on February 1. In that piece, Hentoffgot right to the point: “Jazz has never beendefined with more instant clarity than inWhitney Balliett’s four-word overture: ‘Thesound of surprise.’ In his writings on themusic for The New Yorker for more than 40years, he was able — more than any otherjazz chronicler I’ve read anywhere — to putthe music into words so that you came closeto feeling its sounds, rhythms, and insistentlyindivisible voices.”Had it not been for the thoughtfulness ofNJJS member Jim Gilmartin in sendingHentoff’s piece to me from his winter retreatin Florida, I might well have missed it, sothis month’s offering to Jersey Jazz can besplit into three more or less equal parts ofexpressions of thanks: one to Gil, one to Nat,and one that can hardly be put into words,to Whitney.Over the years of its existence, the editorsof The New Yorker managed to assemble astable of writers who by any measure oftalent and technique devised by man has tobe judged unique. Weekly, they publishedarticles by such splendid wordsmiths asWoolcott Gibbs, E. B. White, Joseph Mitchell,Edmund Wilson, A. J. Liebling, and DorothyParker (to name only a few) and into thatgroup Whitney Balliett easily fit. When hedied on February 1 at 80, he had spent halfof his life contributing more than 400articles to the magazine, many of which havebeen made permanent in separate volumes. Ihave never read a single piece by him thatdid not convey the spark of genius that lit upin words what the jazzman had in mind atthe moment of creation. It was simply theway he himself wrote and thought. He toldus things we already knew about jazz butcouldn’t quite express on our own, just as agood jazzman could tell lesser musiciansthings they knew about a certain song butcouldn’t manage to play. I’m thinking ofsomething like the example ColemanHawkins set in his recording of “Body andSoul.” Or Bunny Berigan in “I Can’t GetStarted.” These are the kinds of musicalhappenings that Whitney Balliett could putinto words.He covered everything offered as jazz in theBig Apple during those years at The NewYorker and since this was so it was inevitablethat he often had to write of music he reallywasn’t terribly enthusiastic about. Early onit was plain he favored traditional jazz, thekind of stuff that most members of NJJScare for. Once, in a letter to me, he admittedthat two of his favorite jazzmen wereSidneys: Bechet and Catlett. He went on towrite that he could play “…a blues in C (onthe piano) and a fair Sid Catlett drums.” Thiswas something like the revelation of what apostman or a bus driver might do on his dayoff. They might take a walk or a drive;Balliett sat down at the keys of his piano,but at the typewriter he was all business.Preferences never intruded into the pieceshe prepared for The New Yorker’s readers;objectivity was always the informing thing.Many of us noticed that Balliett had notappeared in the pages of The New Yorkerrecently and a lot of us wondered why. Itwasn’t that he had switched trains, moved toanother magazine or paper or just stoppedwriting, which was inconceivable. We finallygot our answer in Nat Hentoff’s obit in TheWall Street Journal. It wasn’t that Whitneyhad changed, it was The New Yorker itselfhad. The magazine had undergone a series ofperplexing changes in management and inthat tumult, Whitney simply slipped throughthe cracks. The New Yorker ceased being thedependable voice of jazz it had been so longwhen he was on the staff. Hentoff quotedTerry Teachout’s comment on all this: “He(Whitney Balliett) was treated cruelly andshabbily by William Shawn’s successors, whohad no understanding of the significance ofhis work.” Apparently what we have here is acorollary of the old saw about not fixingsomething that isn’t broken, but I can’t quitecome up with it right now.And so, Whitney Balliett’s final piece hasbeen written. He was a good one and therewon’t be another with quite his gift todignify and put into words the goings on inthe world of jazz. There’s a saying I’ve heardold jazzmen repeat: He was a good man, buthe’s been here and gone.Even Whitney Balliett could not havesaid it better.FromtheCrow’sNestBy Bill CrowPhil Schaap, the well known jazz educatorand commentator who holds forthregularly on radio station WKCR-FM,celebrated a birthday at the CajunRestaurant one night when Herb Gardnerwas there leading Stan Rubin’s band. Phil isknown for his lengthy, detailed discussionsof the recorded jazz music that he plays onhis radio show. When Herb had the bandplay “Happy Birthday” for Phil, heannounced, to Phil’s delight, “Those of youwho are familiar with Mr. Schaap’s workwill realize that I really should have talkedabout ‘Happy Birthday’ for half an hourbefore I actually played it.”JJBill Crow is a freelance musician and writer. Hisarticles and reviews have appeared in DownBeat, The Jazz Review, and Gene Lee’s Jazzletter.His books include Jazz Anecdotes and JazzAnecdotes: Second Time Around. The precedingstory is excerpted, with permission, from Bill’scolumn, The Band Room in Allegro, the monthlynewsletter of A.F. of M. Local 802.JJApril 2007 JerseyJazz 9