December 29, 2025 & January 5, 2026 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Richard Brody, in “Goings On,” reviews Jim Jarmusch’s new movie Father Mother Sister Brother. I’m a fan of Jarmusch’s minimalist style. Brody calls this new film “an unusually plainspoken entry in the Jarmusch cinematic universe.” I think I’ll check it out.

2. Sheldon Pearce, in “Goings On,” praises Bill Charlap and Dee Dee Bridgewater’s new album Elemental. He says, “The music is charming and jaunty, its looseness and zest owed to an alchemical balance between these two performers.” Charlap is one of my heroes. Pearce calls him “an impressionist pianist,” but he’s much more than that. His invention and technique are phenomenal. He’s an amazing improviser. He’s a genius! On the other hand, my taste for Bridgewater’s singing is still developing. At times, I find her delivery halting and discordant. I credit Pearce for noting this album. Anything by Charlap is worth listening to.

3. Remember Babbo? I do. I’ve never eaten there, but as a result of reading Bill Buford’s two brilliant “Babbo” pieces – “The Secret of Excess” (August 19 & 26, 2002) and “The Pasta Station” (September 6, 2004) – I feel I know it intimately. That Babbo is gone. Its wild, ingenious co-owner and chef, Mario Batali, is gone, too. But, as Helen Rosner tells us in this week’s “Tables for Two,” there’s a new Babbo with a new chef – Mark Ladner. Rosner is not impressed. “Can you have Batali minus Batali?” she asks. Her answer is no. She says,

On my first visit to the original Babbo—God, it must have been twenty years ago—I remember being stunned at my first bite of the beef-cheek ravioli. (“Of all the pasta dishes—indeed, of all the dishes—on the menu, this is probably the one most associated with Babbo,” Batali writes of the recipe, in “The Babbo Cookbook” from 2002.) I froze. I think I stopped chewing. I was astounded that a mouthful of food could be so forceful and so silken at once. I wish I could say that I felt the same way about the version at the new Babbo. Some of the disappointment, I’m sure, had to do with the difficulty of measuring up to memory, but it was also right there on the plate. On one evening, the filling was oddly crumbly and dry, and on another the ravioli’s thick chicken-liver ragú—a striking departure from the light, buttery emulsion that dressed Batali’s original—was broken and greasy.

Rosner’s verdict may seem harsh. But that’s what I like about her. She doesn’t pull her punches. 

4. Bruce Handy’s “Talk” story “Shadow Boxing” tells about the re-creation of Joseph Cornell’s Utopia Parkway studio in a Gagosian gallery in Paris. Handy writes,

With the exhibit opening in just a few days, a team of eight workers was beavering away inside the gallery, moving stacks of old magazines, rearranging tchotchkes on shelves, applying a patina of grunge to new jars and boxes to make them look as if they’d been sitting in a cellar since the Eisenhower Administration. The gallery’s normally pristine white walls had been painted to resemble water-stained cinder blocks. A professional set decorator had added fake cobwebs to the corners. (Fine steel wool does the trick.) One could almost smell the mustiness.

Cornell is one of my favorite artists. I enjoyed this piece immensely.

5. A special shout-out to Lawrence Wright for his delightful “Takes” tribute to A. J. Liebling. Wright says, 

For my generation, Liebling still loomed as a model of incisive journalism with a personal voice. He was scholarly and highly literate while also at home with hat-check girls and the bookies at the racetrack. He barbecued the reactionary intellectuals of his era, but portrayed ordinary people with warmth.

I totally agree. Liebling is one of the New Yorker greats. 

Whitney Balliett: Four Great Jazz Pianists

Photo illustration by John MacDougall

I’ve been listening to a lot of Hank Jones, Ellis Larkins, Tommy Flanagan, and Bill Charlap this summer. They’re my favorite jazz pianists. What makes them so great? To help answer this question, I want to consider what Whitney Balliett wrote about them in The New Yorker. Balliett profiled each of them. The four pieces – “Einfühlung” (December 18, 1978), “Poet” (February 24, 1986), “The Dean” (July 15, 1996), and “The Natural” (April 19, 1999) – are among the best things he ever wrote.

The earliest piece is “Einfühlung,” on Ellis Larkins. Balliett wrote,

Larkins’ style gives the impression of continually being on the verge of withdrawing, of bowing and backing out. It is uncommonly gentle. His touch is softer than Art Tatum’s, and the flow of his melodic line has a rippling quiet-water quality. Nothing is assertive: his chords, in contrast to the extroverted cloud masses that most pianists use, turn in and muse; his single-note lines shoot quickly to the left or to the right and are gone; his statements of the melody at the opening and closing of each number offer silhouettes. But Larkins’ serenity is deceptive, for his solos have a strong rhythmic pull. It is clear that he once listened attentively to Earl Hines and Teddy Wilson, and possibly to Jess Stacy. Larkins’ short, precise, dashing arpeggios suggest Wilson, and so do the even, surging tenths he uses in his left hand. He attempts a vibrato effect by adding the barest tremolo to the end of certain right-hand phrases, recalling Stacy and the early Hines. His intent is immediate pleasure – for the listener and for himself – and it is also to celebrate the songs he plays. He endows and sustains them, indirectly fulfilling a nice maxim laid down not long ago by the drummer Art Blakey. “Music,” Blakey said, “should wash away the dust of everyday life.”

That’s one of the most beautiful jazz descriptions I’ve ever read. Two elements stand out for me – Balliett’s appreciation of melody (“the flow of his melodic line has a rippling quiet-water quality”; “his statements of the melody at the opening and closing of each number offer silhouettes”) and his preference for “single-note lines” over “the extroverted cloud masses that most pianists use.” These features appeal to me, too.

Next up is “Poet,” a profile of Tommy Flanagan. Balliett said of him,

Flanagan demands close listening. His single-note melodic lines move up and down, but since he is also a percussive player, who likes to accent unlikely notes, his phrases tend to move constantly toward and away from the listener. The resulting dynamics are subtle and attractive. These horizontal-vertical melodic lines give the impression of being two lines, each of which Flanagan would like attention paid to. There are also interior movements within these lines: double-time runs; clusters of flatted notes, like pretend stumbles; backward-leaning half-time passages; dancing runs; and rests, which are both pauses and chambers for the preceding phrase to echo in. Flanagan is never less than first-rate. But once in a while – when the weather is calm, the audience attentive, the piano good, the vibes right – he becomes impassioned. Then he will play throughout the evening with inspiration and great heat, turning out stunning solo after stunning solo, making the listeners feel they have been at a godly event. 

Note that reference to “single-note melodic lines.” A theme is emerging. Balliett loved single-note melodic lines, and he loved pianists who played them. Consider “The Dean,” the next portrait in this set. It’s a profile of Hank Jones. Balliett wrote,

Jones first came to New York in 1944, to join Hot Lips Page’s band, on Fifty-second Street. He was entering a land of pianistic giants and near-giants. Art Tatum was God, and nearby were Nat Cole, Teddy Wilson, and Marlowe Morris; and just coming up were Bud Powell, Al Haig, Erroll Garner, and Thelonious Monk. Jones listened, appropriating a little of Tatum, a little of Wilson and Cole, and a little of Powell and Garner. The result is a quiet, lyrical, attentive style, so subtle and technically assured as to be almost self-effacing; you have to lean forward to catch Jones properly. He will start two choruses of the blues with delicate single notes, placing them in surprising, jarring places, either behind the beat or off to one side—a path over a rocky place—and then play several dissonant chords; return to single notes, this time letting them pour in Tatum runs, some going up, some down; slip in more chords; and close the solo with a chime sound. Unlike most modern pianists, Jones constantly uses his left hand, issuing a carpet of tenths, little offbeat clusters, and occasional patches of stride. Jones’s solos think, and they rest far above the florid, gothic roil that many jazz pianists have fallen into in the past twenty years.

This piece also contains a wonderful review of Jones’s album Steal Away: Charlie Haden and Hank Jones (1995). Balliett wrote,

Most of the numbers are played straight but with the harmonic and rhythmic inflections that separate jazz from the rest of music. On “Wade in the Water” and “Go Down, Moses,” however, Jones improvises delicately, and on “We Shall Overcome” he pauses after a unison statement of the melody, Haden begins to “walk,” and Jones suddenly lifts into four ringing choruses of the blues, his single-note lines sparkling and his chords bell-like. It’s an electric moment. 

Again, in this piece, we see Balliett expressing his love of single-note lines (“delicate single notes,” “return to single notes, this time letting them pour in Tatum runs, some going up, some down,” “his single-note lines sparkling”).

I now turn to the last piece in my Balliett quartet – “The Natural.” It’s a profile of Bill Charlap, who is one of my heroes. I have all his albums. His music has provided me with countless hours of listening pleasure. This is the piece that led me to him. Balliett described his style:

His ballad numbers are unique. He may start with the verse of the song, played ad lib, then move into the melody chorus. He does not rhapsodize. Instead, he improvises immediately, rearranging the chords and the melody line, and using a relaxed, almost implied beat. He may pause for a split second at the end of this chorus and launch a nodding, swinging single-note solo chorus, made up of irregularly placed notes – some off the beat and some behind the beat – followed by connective runs and note clusters. He closes with a brief, calming recap of the melody. His ballads are meditations on songs, homages to their composers and lyricists. He constantly reins in his up-tempo numbers. He has a formidable technique, but he never shows off, even though he will let loose epic runs, massive staccato chords, racing upper-register tintinnabulations, and, once in a while, some dazzling counterpoint, his hands pitted against each other. His sound shines; each note is rounded. Best of all, in almost every number, regardless of its speed, he leaves us a phrase, a group of irregular notes, an ardent bridge that shakes us.

That “His sound shines; each note is rounded” is inspired. Balliett’s “single note” theme is much in evidence (“swinging single-note solo chorus,” “sailing-along-the-tonal-edge single-note lines,” “loose, almost atonal single-note lines,” “a handful of unevenly spaced single notes”). All four pieces are inspired - as artful and beautiful as the music they describe. 

October 4, 2021 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. A special shout-out to Steve Futterman for alerting me to the Bill Charlap Trio’s upcoming album “Street of Dreams.” I love this trio’s work. I have all its albums. Futterman writes, 

The pianist Bill Charlap, united as a working unit with the bassist Peter Washington and the drummer Kenny Washington for nearly a quarter century, has pulled off a very neat hat trick. By blending two unrelated strains of popular piano-trio traditions—the spit-and-polish drive of Oscar Peterson and the probing lyricism of Bill Evans—the Charlap triumvirate has established its own distinct voice, smoothly morphing into the premier mainstream jazz-piano trifecta. [“Goings On About Town: Music: Bill Charlap Trio”]

2. I relish this line in James Wood’s excellent “Connect the Dots”:

Every so often, a more subtle observer emerges amid these gapped extremities, a writer interested merely in honoring the world about him, a stylist capable of something as beautiful as “the quick, drastic strikes of a bow dashing across the strings of a violin,” or this taut description of an Idaho winter: “Icicles fang the eaves.”

3. Alexandra Schwartz’s absorbing “Tell Me What You Want” contains this wonderful quote from Amia Srinivasan’s essay “The Right to Sex”: 

Desire can take us by surprise, leading us somewhere we hadn’t imagined we would ever go, or toward someone we never thought we would lust after, or love.

I know exactly what she means.

The Village Vanguard: A Salute

Adam Shatz, in his absorbing “In the Vanguard of Trio Jazz with Micah Thomas” (NYR Daily, May 29, 2020), describes a place I’ve always wanted to visit:

Ever since the Covid-19 era began, I’ve been daydreaming about a basement down a flight of stairs on 7th Avenue South, in the West Village. It’s a room where I’ve spent many late-night hours over the last thirty years. There’s a small bar in back, a stage in front. The tables are packed so closely together that it was probably some kind of hazard even before the pandemic, at least for those who had to navigate between them, taking orders and serving drinks. The green-felt walls are covered with framed photographs of John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Dexter Gordon, Cecil Taylor, and others. It’s not a beautiful room, it’s even a little shabby, but it’s a room dedicated to beauty—the beauty of live jazz at the Village Vanguard.

Shatz goes on to mention some of the trios he’s seen at the Vanguard – “trios led by Tommy Flanagan and Geri Allen (both now deceased), Fred Hersch, Craig Taborn, and Jason Moran.”

One of my favourite trio albums is “The Bill Charlap Trio: Live at the Village Vanguard,” recorded in September, 2003. It contains nine tracks, including Gerry Mulligan’s “Rocker,” Vernon Duke’s “Autumn In New York,” and Harold Arlen’s “My Shining Hour.” Charlap’s rendition of “My Shining Hour” is exquisite. The whole album is exquisite! It puts me there, in that “room dedicated to beauty” – the one and only Village Vanguard.

Bill Charlap's Sparkling "Uptown, Downtown"

September was a banner month. Two of my heroes produced new works. John McPhee published Draft No. 4. And Bill Charlap released Uptown, Downtown. I’ve already posted my response to McPhee’s superb book (see here, here, and here). Today, I want to comment on Charlap’s brilliant album. The choice of material is inspired – Gerry Mulligan’s “Curtains,” Tommy Wolf and Fran Landesman’s “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most,” Stephen Sondheim’s “Uptown, Downtown,” Isham Jones and Gus Kahn’s “The One I Love Belongs to Someone Else,” Michael Leonard and Herbert Martin’s “I’m All Smiles,” Rodgers and Hart’s “There’s a Small Hotel,” Gigi Gryce’s “Satellite,” Jim Hall’s “Bon Ami,” and Duke Ellington’s “Sophisticated Lady.” Each number is stocked with surprising notes and rich melodic imaginings. Charlap’s playing is fresh, sparkling, and perfect. He’s an improviser of the greatest subtlety and invention. His sidemen – bassist Peter Washington and drummer Kenny Washington – are excellent. My favorite cut is “Curtains,” a gorgeous, swinging, shimmering thing that went straight into my personal anthology of great piano jazz.

Tony Bennett and Bill Charlap's "The Silver Lining"

If Whitney Balliett, the great New Yorker jazz critic, were alive today, I’m sure he’d be savoring Tony Bennett and Bill Charlap’s superb new album, The Silver Lining. Balliett, who died in 2007, was a fan of both Bennett and Charlap. In his classic profile of Bennett, “A Quality That Lets You In” (The New Yorker, January 7, 1974; included in Balliett’s 1979 collection American Singers), he wrote,

He [Bennett] drives a ballad as intensely and intimately as Sinatra. He can be a lilting, glancing jazz singer. He can be a low-key, searching supper-club performer. But Bennett’s voice binds all his vocal selves together. It is pitched slightly higher than Sinatra’s (it was once a tenor, but it has deepened over the years), and it has a rich, expanding quality that is immediately identifiable. It has a joyous quality, a pleased, shouting-within quality.

Bennett was forty-eight when Balliett wrote those words. Now he’s eighty-nine. Amazingly, Balliett’s description still applies. If anything, Bennett’s voice is even richer now than it was in 1974, when Balliett profiled him. And it still has that “joyous quality” that Balliett mentions. Listening to him sing Jerome Kern’s gorgeous songs on The Silver Lining, I’m struck by his expressiveness; he sounds like he really believes the lyrics he’s singing.

Bennett and Charlap’s singer-accompanist relationship seems perfect. To my knowledge this is the first time they’ve performed together. Charlap seems to intuit Bennett’s every melodic move, embracing them, celebrating them. He’s a great jazz pianist. Balliett thought so, too. Here’s some of what he said about him in his wonderful “The Natural” (The New Yorker, April 19, 1999):

His ballad numbers are unique. He may start with the verse of the song, played ad lib, then move into the melody chorus. He does not rhapsodize. Instead, he improvises immediately, rearranging the chords and the melody line, and using a relaxed, almost implied beat. He may pause for a split second at the end of this chorus and launch a nodding, swinging single-note solo chorus, made up of irregularly placed notes – some off the beat and some behind the beat – followed by connective runs, and note clusters. He closes with a brief, calming recap of the melody. His ballads are meditations on songs, homages to their composers and lyricists. He constantly reins in his up-tempo numbers. He has formidable technique, but he never shows off, even when he will let loose epic runs, massive staccato chords, racing upper-register tintinnabulations, and, once in a while, some dazzling counterpoint, his hands pitted against each other. His sound shines; each note is rounded. Best of all, in almost every number, regardless of its speed, he leaves us a phrase, a group of irregular notes, an ardent bridge that shakes us.

That “His sound shines; each note is rounded” is inspired. It exactly describes Charlap’s playing on The Silver Lining. The album is sublime.

September 14, 2015 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. The Michigan noise trio Wolf Eyes may favor “blisteringly loud and astoundingly inaccessible textures” (Benjamin Shapiro, "Into the Woods"), but I certainly don’t. Much more to my liking is the Bill Charlap Trio, which "Goings On About Town: Night Life" calls “the premier mainstream piano trio of its day,” and says, “the suave interplay between the group’s leader and his longtime partners—Kenny Washington, on drums, and Peter Washington (no relation), on bass—is always a pleasure to hear.” I agree. Charlap is a remarkable improviser. Here’s what Whitney Balliett said about him:

His ballad numbers are unique. He may start with the verse of the song, played ad lib, then move into the melody chorus. He does not rhapsodize. Instead, he improvises immediately, rearranging the chords and the melody line, and using a relaxed, almost implied beat. He may pause for a split second at the end of this chorus and launch a nodding, swinging single-note solo chorus, made up of irregularly placed notes – some off the beat and some behind the beat – flowed by connective runs, and note clusters. He closes with a brief, calming recap of the melody. His ballads are meditations on songs, homages to their composers and lyricists. He constantly reins in his up-tempo numbers. He has a formidable technique, but he never shows off, even though he will let loose epic runs, massive staccato chords, racing upper-register tintinnabulations, and, once in a while, some dazzling counterpoint, his hands pitted against each other. His sound shines; each note is rounded. Best of all, in almost every number, regardless of its speed, he leaves us a phrase, a group of irregular notes, an ardent bridge that shakes us. [“The Natural,” The New Yorker, April 19, 1999].

2. I enjoyed Richard Brody’s capsule review of Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (“Revealing the catastrophic impact of seemingly minor events on people who are struggling to subsist, De Sica endows slender side business and incidental pictorial details with high suspense and tragic grandeur. With a keen succession of tracking shots amid crowds at a market and a church, he transforms the sheer scale of the city and the vast number of residents in similarly desperate straits into a symphonic lament for the human condition”). But the title Bicycle Thieves is new to me. I’ve always known it as The Bicycle Thief. That’s what Pauline Kael called it (see her 5001 Nights at the Movies).

3. That “a paddle of shiso, whole and flat like a beautiful leaf pressing” in Silvia Killingsworth’s "Tables For Two: Ganso Yaki" is superb.

4. Atul Gawande’s "Postscript: Oliver Sacks" is a wonderful tribute. Gawande says of Sacks, “He wanted to see humanity in its many variants and to do so in his own, almost anachronistic way—face to face, over time, away from our burgeoning apparatus of computers and algorithms. And, through his writing, he showed us what he saw.”

5. Sack’s "Filter Fish" is immensely enjoyable. The detail of the fishmonger delivering the fish alive, “swimming in a pail of water,” is inspired.

6. John McPhee’s "Omission" is another piece in his excellent “The Writing life” series. This one focuses on deletion of material, what McPhee calls “the principle of leaving things out.” How does a writer decide what to omit? McPhee proposes the following criterion: “You select what goes in and you decide what stays out. At base you have only one criterion: If something interests you, it goes in – if not it stays out.” It sounds straightforward. But it’s not. McPhee illustrates the problem with a story about riding in a limo with Louis Marx, the toy manufacturer:

So this is the situation: Two-thirds of a century later, I am describing that ride to New York City in an article on the writing process that is focussed on the principle of leaving things out. I am with Mr. and Mrs. Monarch of Toys, whose friends a few years ago led various forms of the invasion of Europe. Do I leave that out? Help! Should I omit the lemony look on General Smith’s face the day he showed up late for lunch after his stomach was pumped? I am writing this, not reading it, and I don’t know what to retain and what to reject. The monarchical remark on being greater than the sum of Lionel and Gilbert—do I leave that out? I once saw Mr. Marx toss a broiled steak onto a rug so his bulldog could eat it. How relevant is that? Do I leave that out? Will it offend his survivors? In a recent year, his great-granddaughter was a sophomore in my college writing course. Her name was Barnett, not Marx. I did not know her beforehand, and had not even learned that my old roommate’s grandniece was at Princeton when her application for a place in the course came in. “You gave my grandmother her first kiss,” it began. How relevant is that? Should I cut that out? Mrs. Marx—Idella, stepmother of my roommate—was rumored among us Princeton sophomores of the time to be the sister of Lili St. Cyr. In the twenty-first century, in whose frame of reference is the strip dancer Lili St. Cyr? Better to exclude that? Best to exclude that Idella danced, too? This is about what you leave out, not what you take off. Writing is selection.

That “This is about what you leave out, not what you take off” made me smile. But the passage doesn’t really solve the question of whether that bit about Louis Marx tossing a broiled steak onto a rug so his bulldog could eat it should go in or stay out. Earlier in his piece, McPhee proposes “interest” as his main criterion for determining selection. But in the above passage he appears to use “relevance” as his guide. I prefer “interest.” Some details, such as that insouciant steak-toss to the bulldog on the rug, can be relished for their own sake. Of course, the true artist finds a way of making the interesting relevant. That’s what McPhee does in “Omission.”