Interesting Emendations: Whitney Balliett's "A Walk to the Park"

“I went down to the Chelsea Hotel one afternoon a while ago to visit Elvin Jones, the unique and brilliant drummer, whose ferocity and originality and subtlety on his instrument have in the past six or so years changed the entire nature of jazz drumming and, to a degree, the nature of jazz itself.” So begins Whitney Balliett’s superb piece about Jones, which appeared in the May 18, 1968 issue of The New Yorker. A visit – not a journey, not an expedition – just a little visit with a jazz drummer in his hotel room. And I’m more than happy to tag along; this is my kind of outing. I meet the drummer, get a taste of how he lives, hear him talk a bit about his life and music, and, in the process, watch Balliett, a master writer, convert the afternoon’s experience into literature. For that's exactly what “A Walk to the Park” is – one of the greatest profiles ever to appear in The New Yorker, in my humble opinion. And what makes it great is its brilliant, nonchalant, easy-going, no-big-deal, catchy start: “I went down to the Chelsea Hotel one afternoon a while ago to visit Elvin Jones …” Balliett would later delete the “a while ago,” thereby making the thing even more perfect: see the version of “A Walk to the Park” in his classic 1971 collection Ecstasy at the Onion. The Master should’ve quit while he was ahead, though. He improvised one too many variations when, unbelievably, in his 1986 American Musicians: 56 Portraits in Jazz, he changed the beginning of “A Walk to the Park” to “Elvin Jones’ ferocity and originality and subtlety on his instrument changed the nature of jazz drumming. For a time in the late sixties, he lived in a first-floor room at the Chelsea Hotel.” This may be presumptuous, but I think I know what Balliett was up to when he made this startling and misguided change in his classic essay. He was directing the spotlight away from himself and on to Jones and his “bachelor’s nest” of an apartment. This is admirable, but wrong-headed. It’s the unabashed subjectivity of “I went down to the Chelsea Hotel one afternoon to visit Elvin Jones …” that makes the piece the rapturous reading experience that it is. Read the version in Ecstasy at the Onion; it’s perfect.