Rereadings: Whitney Balliett's "Night Creature"

This is the second in a series in which I’ll revisit some of my favorite books by New Yorker writers and try to express why I like them so much. Today’s selection is Whitney Balliett’s wonderful Night Creature (1981). 

Night Creature is a journal of jazz, covering a five-year period, 1975 – 1980. The first entry is dated September 26, 1975; the last is dated July 6, 1980. Many of the entries originally appeared as columns or parts of columns in The New Yorker. I relish the flexibility of the journal format. You can fill it with just about anything – notes, comments, reviews, profiles, interviews. And that’s exactly what Balliett did in Night Creature. Here’s a sampling: 

On March 1, 1977, Balliett is at Café Carlyle to hear pianist George Shearing:

Tonight, he played John Lewis’s “Django” so that its stubborn, complex melodic structure took on – for the first time in memory – a melancholy, lullaby quality. He made “Django” an evening meditation on the great guitarist. He did the same thing for Garner’s “Misty.” It became a cheerful ballad, and three-dimensional Garner – not a parody but a distillation. One was surprised to look up midway and discover not Garner but Shearing, with his big, swinging face, his dark glasses collecting the light, his chin plunging down-right, down-right, down-right.

On March 25, 1977, he’s at Bradley’s to hear pianist Dave McKenna: 

McKenna’s left hand generates such momentum that he needs no bass or drums. He strikes his notes a fraction behind the beat in his right hand, and he emphasizes unexpected notes within each phrase. These ingeniously chosen accents set up an irresistible rhythm – a rock-pause, rock-pause, rock-pause rhythm that continually threatens to capsize the ship but never does. He breaks up these single-note phrases with strong chords and with high-strung Tatum arpeggios. McKenna swings ecstatically hard.

On September 12, 1977, he reviews four recordings: “The Complete Lionel Hampton”; “The Red Norvo Trio with Tal Farlow and Charles Mingus”; “The Complete Fletcher Henderson, 1927-1936”; “Don Byas: Savoy Jam Party.” He says of the “Norvo” album, “The trio had a hot delicacy and it seemed to spin its music out of the air around it.” He calls Byas’s style “voluptuous.”

On June 21, 1978, he attends a jazz concert at the White House: “Rollins played a brilliant, compressed solo, full of vertical melodies, repetitions, and quotations, and Roach matched him with staccato snare-drum figures – super-double-time figures, executed at teeth-gritting speed.” 

June 24, 1978, he’s at Carnegie Hall to hear Ella Fitzgerald. He’s not crazy about her performance: “She inserts falsetto notes, needlessly big intervals, and ski jump glisses.” But he loves the work of her accompanists, Tommy Flanagan (piano), Keter Betts (bass), and Jimmy Smith (drums), who were given fifty minutes to themselves. He says of Flanagan:

He has humor, a zephyr touch, an oblique and original harmonic sense, and unwearying invention. His great facility makes what he does sound too easy – the tricky, quiet, single note melodic lines that often abruptly slow to a walk just before they end; the loose, echoing tenths in his left hand; the nimble parallel chords; the love of melody; and the multilayered improvisations he builds on a tune like “Body and Soul,” which he played tonight.

November 27, 1978, he reviews four Flanagan recordings: “Eclypso,” “Tommy Flanagan 3,” “The Tommy Flanagan Tokyo Recital,” and “Something Borrowed, Something Blue.” Of “Flanagan 3,” he says it’s worthwhile, “especially for a loose, stretching performance of ‘Easy Living,’ which Flanagan likes to play. When he settles into tempo, he gets off a rising-falling upper-register run that holds the light like a blue sky.”

January 22, 1979, he’s at Hopper’s to hear valve-trombonist Bob Brookmeyer and guitarist Jim Hall:

Hall is spare, elusive, soft, and reluctant to part with his beauties, while Brookmeyer always plays as if he were attending a convention. At Hopper’s, the two musicians seemed to be playing in adjacent rooms with the door open. Their ensembles did not blend into a double-edged voice but remained a trombone and a guitar playing simultaneously. Brookmeyer’s volume forced Hall to play louder than usual, and he almost never backed Hall’s solos (organ chords, melody, riffs would all have been proper), which took on a lorn, voyaging air. And Brookmeyer’s and Hall’s rhythmic centers were different. Brookmeyer plays in a pummelling, sometimes staccato on-the-beat style, and Hall often favors legato, downstream pahrasing. Oil and water, the two men filled the room with powerful improvisations, and we heard rich, turning versions of “Begin the Beguine,” and Andy LaVerne original called “Exactly Alike,” “Baubles, Bangles, and Beads,” “Embraceable You,” John Lewis’s “Skating in Central Park,” and a medium-tempo blues, in which Hall got off a solo full of surprised notes.

February 5, 1979, he’s at Crawdaddy to hear trumpeter Doc Cheatham:

He has a gentle tone and a discreet vibrato. His solos are a succession of lines, steps, curves, parabolas, angles, and elevations. They move with the logic and precision of composition, yet they have the spark and spontaneity of improvisation. Cheatham’s rhythmic underpinnings have a bony clarity and emphasis: all his notes seem to stand out.

February 19, 1979, he writes a tribute to clarinettist Pee Wee Russell:

Russell’s blues were an examination of the proposition that there must be a way to make sadness bearable and beautiful. He would start a solo with half a dozen low, breathy, staccato notes jammed together, repeat them and pause, rise almost an octave to a flickering, half-sounded note, and, before this ascension had registered on the ear, drop back to more staccato breathiness and into a dodging, undulating stretch of notes that had a Giacometti sound. He would for the first time bow in the direction of the beat by constructing a four- or six-bar on the beat melody, and then sneak back down to the cellar for some asides, subtones, and almost palpable breaths. The first chorus done, he would grow less and less knotted. He would move slowly up the scale, growing louder, until in the last chorus he would reach C above middle C with a banners-unfurled declarativeness.

June 19, 1979, he reviews four Charles Mingus recordings. Here’s his description of the Mingus band playing “Folk Forms, No. 1” on the album “Mingus Presents Mingus”:

It begins with Mingus playing a simple blueslike figure. He is joined by Richmond, in ad-lib time. Dolphy enters (on alto saxophone), and is almost immediately followed by Curson, who is muted. The horns converse, the rhythm slips into four-four time and is interrupted by breaks and out-of-tempo passages. Dolphy and Richmond drop out, and Mingus backs Curson. Richmond and Dolphy return, and all four men swim around and around and come to a stop. Mingus solos without backing, and Richmond reappears, pulling the horns after him. There is another stop, and Dolphy solos against broken rhythms, and the four take up their ruminations again. After a third stop, Richmond solos and he and Mingus go into a kicking, jumping, unbelievably swinging duet. Mingus falls silent, allowing Richmond to finish his solo, and there is a stop. Mingus solos briefly, and all converse intently until the rhythm slows, Dolphy moans, and they go out.

October 29, 1979, he reviews two books: Dizzy Gillespie’s memoir, To Be or Not To Bop; and a collection of William P. Gottlieb’s jazz photos called The Golden Age of Jazz. Balliett says of Gottlieb,

Taking pictures of jazz musicians has never been easy. They work largely in semi-darkness, and their grace is measured in seconds. But Gottlieb was not taking pictures; he was photographing a music. Again and again, he catches the precise moment when the musician’s face is suffused with effort and emotion and beauty: the music is there.

The same can be said for Balliett’s Night Creature: again and again, he catches a musician swinging ecstatically hard, conjuring gleaming new improvisations: the music is there.

The book brims with inspired jazz lines. For example:

On Don Byas: “He put bones in Chu Berry’s attack.”

On Fats Navarro: “A Navarro solo was like an immaculate fairway flanked by ankle-deep rough.” 

On Stan Getz: "Getz is the last of the romantic saxophonists, and when he plays ballads one just wishes that he wouldn’t keep peering out longingly between the notes."

On Hank Jones: “His touch is pearled, and his improvisations are spun out of willowy single-note melodic lines.” 

On Tommy Flanagan’s “interval-filled descending figures that suggest someone going downstairs three steps at a time.”

On Bob Brookmeyer: “He affects a smoky tone, Dicky Wells smears and shouts, a placid vibrato, and brief falsetto leaps.”

On Doc Cheatham: “When he executed a diminuendo-crescendo growl with his plunger mute in “Summertime,” the sound exploded.” 

On singer Dardanelle: “She likes to crimp some of her phrase endings and move up or down a tone midway through a long note."

On Keith Jarrett: “The playing is bravura and self-indulgent, like a dandy constantly changing clothes. It shouts and daydreams. It is an improvised music that feeds on itself.” 

On Johnny Hodges: “He bottled Bechet’s urgency and served it in cool, choice doses. He skirted Bechet’s funky tendencies – his growls and squeaks and odd, bubbling sounds. But he kept Bechet’s pouring country tone, his impeccable sense of time, and his rhapsodic approach to slow materials.”

On Betty Carter: “She likes to tip up a note suddenly and let it fall an octave and a half, then slide halfway up to where she began and break off.” 

On Barry Harris: “Everyone of his notes had the same value, whether it stood by it self, went by in an arpeggio, was the keystone of a phrase, or ended a song. Harris was like the perfectly laid fire that refused to catch.”

On Billie Holiday: “She carefully unfolds the lyrics and holds them up for us to see.”

On Jack Wilkins: “He is a wild melodist. He will throw a handful of notes into the high register, make them ring, fill the space after them with silence, and dive into his lowest register, touching each octave as he falls past. Then he will ascend and strike more urgent bells, and go into driving Django Reinhardt chords, which give way to more silence and curling meditative middle-register single notes.”

On Dave McKenna: “Each McKenna improvisation has a hand-printed quality.” 

On Louis Armstrong: “He swung even when he breathed.” 

On Michael Moore: “Each solo gleams and multiplies, like sunlight on water.”

On Coleman Hawkins’ 1939 recording of “Body and Soul”: “Before Hawkins, it was simply a torch song left over from 1930. But Hawkins filled it with his special urgency and eloquence. He blew the song tight, and one can no longer hear it without also hearing Hawkins’s version in the background.”

How I love that “He blew the song tight.”

Night Creature, along with several other Balliett jazz journals, is included in his massive 858-page Collected Works (2000). But I prefer Night Creature; it’s a perfect distillation of Balliett’s brilliant, evocative criticism. And I like the title, which, as Balliett noted at the beginning of the book, is borrowed from a Duke Ellington composition. Balliett wrote, “I do not know what beautiful night creature Ellington had in mind, but mine is jazz itself.”