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. 

September 2, 2024 Issue

When I read a book review, I want to know two things: what the book's about and how it’s written. For me, the “how” is more important than the “what.” I’ll read a stylishly written book on almost any subject. These days, New Yorker reviewers rarely address form. The only exception is James Wood. Case in point is Kathryn Schulz’s “Living Under a Rock,” in this week’s issue. It’s a review of Marcia Bjornerud’s Turning to Stone. Schulz beautifully describes it: 

In its pages, what Bjornerud has learned serves to illuminate what she already knew: each of the book’s ten chapters is structured around a variety of rock that provides the context for a particular era of her life, from childhood to the present day. The result is one of the more unusual memoirs of recent memory, combining personal history with a detailed account of the building blocks of the planet. What the two halves of this tale share is an interest in the evolution of existence—in the forces, both quotidian and cosmic, that shape us.

This is the kind of book I’d be interested in reading. What is the writing like? Schulz offers a hint:

Bjornerud is a good enough writer to render all of this perfectly interesting. She has a feel for the evocative vocabulary of geology, with its driftless areas and great unconformities, and also for the virtues of plain old bedrock English. (“There is nothing to be done in bad Arctic weather but wait for it to get less bad.”) 

That’s it, that’s all she says regarding the book’s prose. Not even one extended quotation to give the reader a taste of Bjornerud’s style. 

The best New Yorker book reviewers – John Updike, V. S. Pritchett, George Steiner, Helen Vendler, Whitney Balliett, Janet Malcolm – were all great quoters. Now only James Wood continues the practice. All the rest are so in love with their own voices, they’d rather paraphrase than quote. It’s a great loss.  

Ryan Ruby's "To Affinity and Beyond"

Great to see Bookforum back in business! There’s an absorbing piece in it by Ryan Ruby called “To Affinity and Beyond.” It touches on a lot of things I’m interested in – criticism, interpretation, argument, description. It’s a review of Brian Dillon’s new essay collection Affinities: On Art and Fascination. Ruby calls it “a kind of manifesto for an anti-critical criticism.” What’s “anti-critical” about it, says Ruby, is its lack of argument:

If nothing Dillon writes “pursues an argument” or is “built to convince,” it is, in part, an attempt to make a virtue of the limitation he confesses in Essayism: “I was and remain quite incapable of mounting in writing a reasoned and coherent argument.” He associates argumentation with the academy, whose procedures of making “judgments and distinctions” are foreign to a sensibility that prefers describing objects and noting correspondences between them. 

I relish argument. Many of my favorite critical essays are fiercely polemical, e.g., Martin Amis’s “Don Juan in Hell,” Janet Malcolm’s “A Very Sadistic Man,” James Wood’s “Hysterical Realism,” Pauline Kael’s “Circles and Squares.” Argument gives criticism a piquant bite. But I don’t think it’s essential to its effectiveness. Description, on the other hand, is key. “All first-rate criticism defines what we are encountering,” Whitney Balliett said in his Jelly Roll, Jabbo & Fats (1983). Peter Schjeldahl said something similar in his Let’s See (2008): “As for writerly strategy, if you get the objective givens of a work right enough, its meaning (or failure or lack of meaning) falls in your lap.”

Postscript: Tony Bennett 1926 - 2023

Tony Bennett (Photo by Wyatt Counts)

I see in the Times that Tony Bennett died. He is the subject of one of Whitney Balliett’s finest pieces – “A Quality That Let’s You In” (The New Yorker, January 7, 1974; included in his great 1979 collection American Singers). Balliett called Bennett an “elusive singer.” He wrote,

He can be a belter who reaches rocking fortissimos. He 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. It has, in a modest way, something of the hallelujah strain of Mahalia Jackson.

Balliett described Bennett’s face as being “easily sculptured by light.” He said,

In broad daytime, he tends to look jagged and awkwardly composed: his generous Roman nose booms and his pale-green eyes become slits. But the subdued lighting in the Amalfi [where Bennett was having supper] made him handsome and compact. His eyes became melancholy and shone darkly, the deep lines that run past his mouth were stoical, and his nose was regal. His voice, though, never changed. It is a singer’s voice – soft, slightly hoarse, and always on the verge of sliding into melody.

I’m listening to Bennett’s superb 2015 album The Silver Lining, as I write this. The way he nails the soaring high note at the end of Jerome Kern’s “Yesterdays” is thrilling. To think he was almost ninety when he did that. The guy was a marvel – one of the great jazz singers of all time. 

Toward My Own Theory of Description: Cymbal Splashes

Paul Cézanne, Pines and Rocks (c.1897)

I’m still exploring types of sensory description. In my first post, I considered description of touch (“The water is forty-six degrees. Against the temples, it is refrigerant and relieving”). In my second, I looked at description of smell (“About a month before Christmas, when the bakery began turning out its seasonal cookies, neighborhood breezes effloresced with cinnamon and nutmeg and ginger”). Today, I’ll consider description of sound. My example is from Whitney Balliett’s great “A Walk to the Park” (The New Yorker, May 18, 1968; included in his splendid 1971 collection Ecstasy at the Onion), a profile of the extraordinary jazz drummer Elvin Jones:

The first number, built around Jones’ wire brushes, was a fast version of “Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise.” Farrell soloed on flute and Greene and Ware followed. Jones handles brushes the way a great chef handles a wire whisk, with fast, circular, loose-wristed motions. He began almost inaudibly, with polishing, sliding, ticking sounds on the snare, broken by silvery cymbal strokes. Slowly he rent this gentle flow with bass-drum beats and with jagged, irregular wire-brush strokes on the snare and the big tomtom. These were multiplied and intensified until it sounded as though he were using sticks, and the solo ended. It was a short, perfectly designed warmup. The group went into “Night in Tunisia.” It started in a high, intense fashion, and by the time Farrell had finished a ten-minute solo Jones had switched to sticks and Pookie’s was ballooning with sound. Then Jones took off. He began with heavy rimshots on the snare, which split notes and split them again, then broke into swaying, grandiose strokes on his ride cymbals, accompanied by lightning triplets and off-beat single-notes on the bass drum. Switching patterns, he moved his right hand between his big and small tomtoms in a faster and faster arc while his left hand roared through geometrical snare-drum figures and his high-hat rattled and shivered. He switched patterns again and settled down on his snare with sharp, flat strokes, spaced regularly and then irregularly. He varied this scheme incessantly, gradually bringing in bass-drum beats and big tomtom booms. Cymbals exploded like flushed birds. Jones had passed beyond a mere drum solo. He was playing with ear-splitting loudness, and what he was doing had become an enormous rolling ball of abstract sound, divorced from music, from reality, from flesh and bone. It trampled traditional order and replaced it with unknown order. It delighted the mind and hammered at the guts. Jones waded through his cymbals again and went into a deliberate, alternately running and limping fussilade between his snare and tomtoms that rose an inch or two higher in volume. Suddenly he was finished. Farrell played the theme and Jones slid into a long, downhill coda that was a variation on the close of his solo, paused, and came down with a crash on his cymbals and bass drum.

Wow! That’s one of the most bravura descriptions of jazz I’ve ever read (I almost said “heard”). That “Cymbals exploded like flushed birds” is inspired! There’s another passage earlier in the piece that’s equally as good:

Farrell started quietly on the blues and Jones set up light tic-tic tic-tic-tic tic tic-i-tic tic-tic strokes on the snare, followed by softer irregular strokes and a shaking roll. The high-hat jiggled unevenly up and down and the bass drum was quiet. Farrell grew more heated, and Jones began throwing in cymbal splashes, bass-drum accents, and complex, charging left-hand figures. His volume rose steadily, though it never eclipsed Farrell, and suddenly one realized that Jones’ quadruple-jointed rhythmic engine was in high gear. Pookie’s was rocking. At the end of Farrell’s solo, Jones abruptly dropped his volume to some sliding cymbal strokes which shimmered below the opening of the piano solo. Jones scuttled and rattled behind the piano. His snare-drum accents were light and loose, and the center of his efforts fell on the ride cymbal, on which he would run softly ahead of the beat, fall exaggeratedly behind then catch up and ride the beat before shooting ahead again. During Ware’s solo, Jones whispered along on the high-hat, dropped occasional bass-drum beats, and made Ware’s tone sound fat and assured. Farrell returned, exchanged some four-bar breaks with Jones, and the number ended with a shuddering rimshot. 

Note the profusion of mimetic verbs and verbal adjectives: “polishing,” “sliding,” “ticking,” “split,” “roared,” “rattled,” “shivered,” “exploded,” “trampled,” “hammered,” “waded,” “shaking,” “jiggled,” “charging,” “rocking,” “shimmered,” “scuttled,” “shooting,” “whispered.” These passages describe both the action of Jones’ drumming and its sound. They blend two types of description: sensory and kinetic. I’ll have more to say about kinetic description in later posts, but first I want to finish my discussion of sensory description. My next post will be on description of taste.

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.” 

Old Favorites

Lately I find myself spending more time re-visiting favorite old books than I do reading new stuff. By “old,” I mean books I acquired back in the seventies and early eighties. For example: Edward Hoagland’s Walking the Dead Diamond River (1973), Whitney Balliett’s Ecstasy at the Onion (1971), Janet Malcolm’s Diana & Nikon (1980), Sanford Schwartz’s The Art Presence (1982), John McPhee’s Pieces of the Frame (1975), M. F. K. Fisher’s As They Were (1982), Helen Vendler's Part of Nature, Part of Us (1980), John Updike's Picked-Up Pieces (1976). I love these books. I love everything about them – their dust jackets, their feel as physical objects, the wonderful writing they contain. If there were a fire, these are the books I’d try to save first.

Nick Thorpe's "The Danube"

I relish writing composed in the present tense and written from the first-person perspective. It’s a rare combination. The only New Yorker pieces written this way that I can think of are Whitney Balliett’s “Ecstasy at the Onion” (October 10, 1969), John McPhee’s “The Search for Marvin Gardens” (September 9, 1972), Anthony Bailey’s “Outer Banks” (May 25, 1987), and Cynthia Zarin’s “An Enlarged Heart” (August 18 & 25, 2003). The first part of McPhee’s great “The Encircled River” (May 2 & 9, 1977) is composed in the first-person-present-tense. Books written in this style include Geoff Dyer’s The Missing of the Somme (1994), Eva Hoffman's Exit into History (1993), Gideon Lewis-Krauss's A Sense of Direction (2012), Morten Strøksnes’s Shark Drunk (2017), and the one I’m currently reading – Nick Thorpe’s The Danube (2013). 

Thorpe’s book brims with sentences like these:

Here on the fraying fringes of Europe, between the Greek and Roman ruins of Histria and the rising waters of the Black Sea, I begin my journey up the River Danube.

As I drive towards the delta from the west I see my first wind turbines, spaced out across the hills like dandelions, or the advance guard of a Roman army.

On a Sunday morning in Tulcea, I go in search of the imam at the mosque a little way up the hill towards the museum.

I leave Galați at lunchtime, closely following the Danube on the road to Brăila, my head humming with the red wine from the Greek reception.

I drive through sparse deserted villages which feel as though they have been unpopulated since the Romans withdrew, and reach the Danube in time to watch a blood-red sun sink through vineyards among the forested islands of the river.

On a wide meadow, a headland overlooking a sweeping bend in the Danube, just before the Romanian-Bulgarian border at Silistra, I catch sight of a man striding purposefully beside a line of blue and yellow beehives, evenly spaced like floats on a net across the river.

I arrive late in the evening in Ruse, and the first three hotels are full.

I see the camels of the Koloseum Circus first, then the big tent as I speed past on the main road.

I go there, I do this. What could be simpler? Yet such lines have the breath of life: personal experience recorded with the immediacy of an inspired snapshot. I devour them.  

March 11, 2019 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue: 

 1. I enjoyed Helen Rosner’s “A Season for Everything,” particularly this sentence: “Nakayama chatted with one of her seafood suppliers, who had dropped by to deliver four burly kegani, or horsehair crabs, their strawberry-colored shells covered in spiky whiskers.” 

2. James Marcus’s moving “Blood Relations,” an essay on the death of his father, contains this memorable definition of “palliative care”: 

The word comes from the Latin pallium, which is a cloak. It means that the patient will be enveloped, protected, wrapped in a mantle of painkilling techniques that are often pharmaceutical but may also consist of old-fashioned human tenderness. It’s what we should want for the people we love. But it also signals that the fight is over. It is a white flag, a coming to terms with extinction. 

 3. Another excellent piece, David Remnick’s “Holding the Note,” profiles bluesman Buddy Guy. Remnick’s mention of Alberta Hunter reminded me of Whitney Balliett’s superb “Let it Be Classy” (The New Yorker, October 31, 1977; included in Balliett’s great 1979 collection American Singers), in which he describes Hunter singing her classic “Downhearted Blues”: 

Jimmy Rowles played a four-bar introduction, and Alberta Hunter began the famous lyrics: “Got the world in a jug, stopper right here in my hand. Got the world in a jug, stopper right here in my hand. The next man I get, he’s got to come under my command.” Her voice was steady and rich, and her vibrato betrayed none of the quaveriness that often besets older singers. Her phrasing was legato, and once in a while she used a high, almost falsetto cluster of notes which recalled Ethel Waters. There is a burnished, accreted assurance and depth and color on Alberta Hunter’s singing. At first, she stood nearly motionless. She moved one knee on the beat, and occasionally she raised her right arm and smoothed the air with her hand. 

 4. In his absorbing “Modernism for All,” a review of MoMA’s “Joan Miró: Birth of the World,” Peter Schjeldahl says of Miró’s “Painting,” “It stirs a personal memory.” Schjeldahl’s piece stirred a personal memory for me, too. When I was fifteen, my family and I lived in Saint John, New Brunswick. I recall bringing home a library book on Miró’s work. My father, who’d never shown any interest in art, leafed through it and took a fancy to a painting of a strange constellation of eyeballs, stars, and horned creatures. He liked it so much, he decided to make an imitation of it. He bought a big sheet of plywood, covered it with canvas, painted it tan, plotted all the shapes on it in pencil, glued twine on the sinuous lines and painted it black, then painted all the shapes, following Miró’s colors – red, white, blue, black, even a dab of yellow. I helped him with it. When it was finished, we hung it in the living room of our Fort Howe apartment. That was a long time ago. We moved several times after that. Our homemade Miró disappeared. I’m embarrassed to say I don’t know the name of the original. Google provides the painting, but not its title:

November 26, 2018 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Antony Huchette's snowy illustration for “Goings On About Town” ’s “Celebrating the Holidays” is delightful.

Antony Huchette, "Celebrating the Holidays" (2018)

2. Also in GOAT, Steve Futterman’s note on Carol Sloane at Birdland caught my eye, reminding me of Whitney Balliett’s 1987 Sloane profile, in which he describes her singing as “conversation put to music” (“Carol Sloane and Julie Wilson,” The New Yorker, April 6, 1987).

3. Frédéric Bazille’s gorgeous “Young Woman with Peonies” (1870), illustrating Hilton Als’ “At the Galleries: ‘Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet to Matisse to Today’ ” helps offset Janet Malcolm’s startling opinion, expressed in her recent “Six Glimpses of the Past,” that open peonies are “blowsy and ugly.”

Frédéric Bazille, "Young Woman with Peonies" (1870)

4. Peter Schjeldahl’s GOAT note on Dike Blair is a beauty, and is worth quoting in full:

Blair has been painting coolly beautiful little still-lifes of ordinary things in ordinary places for so long that, by now, they seem almost to paint themselves, for their own enjoyment. A pink cocktail luxuriates in a stemmed glass, never mind the somewhat gawky foreshortening of the tabletop that it shares with a cloth napkin and a bowl of nuts. Spatters of paint on a cement floor get a kick out of suggesting a frontal abstract painting, while still knowing perfectly well what they are. A yellow line and the shadow of a car bumper on a parking lot, water in a swimming pool, a torn-open FedEx envelope near a window fan, Dunkin’ Donuts coffee cups, and a nodding tulip in a vase on a nighttime windowsill become unwilled memories—the almost, but not quite, meaningless retention of the small, sticky epiphanies that bind us to life.

5. Richard Brody reprises his brilliant capsule review of Howard Hawks’s “Bringing Up Baby” in this week’s “Goings On About Town,” and why not? It’s one of his best pieces. The last line is sublime: 

And Hawks brought to fruition his own universe of hints and symbols to conjure the force that rules the world: she tears his coat, he tears her dress, she steals his clothes, she names him “Bone,” and the mating cries of wild animals disturb the decorum of the dinner table, even as a Freudian psychiatrist in a swanky bar gives viewers an answer key.

6. Raffi Khatchadourian’s absorbing “Degrees of Freedom” tells about an extraordinary neuroscientific experiment in which a paralyzed woman’s brain is directly connected to a robotic arm. Khatchadourian is a superb describer of complex technological devices and procedures. His description of the implanting of the microelectrodes in the woman’s brain is unforgettable. Here’s a brief excerpt:

Then, suddenly, the injector was triggered. The sound of valves opening and closing filled the operating theatre, along with the rush of compressed air through the injector, the noise a lightning-quick mechanical breath, culminating in a metallic clink. In an instant, the ninety-six electrodes were in, like a soccer cleat going into soft earth.

Khatchadourian’s “Degrees of Freedom” is every bit the equal of his great “Transfiguration” (The New Yorker, February 13 & 20, 2012). I enjoyed it immensely. 

Ethan Iverson’s Superb “Duke Ellington, Bill Evans, and One Night in New York City”

Duke Ellington (Photo by Marty Lederhandler)

A cool piece of jazz criticism appeared yesterday at newyorker.com – Ethan Iverson’s “Duke Ellington, Bill Evans, and One Night in New York City” (“Culture Desk,” August 17, 2017). It’s a comparative analysis of “Ellington and Evans both playing an Ellington standard, ‘In a Sentimental Mood,’ on the same hot Thursday night in New York City—August 17, 1967.” It begins by helpfully providing links to the two performances:

Here is Ellington’s version, at the Rainbow Grill, with the tenor saxophonist Paul Gonsalves, along with John Lamb on bass and Steve Little on drums. And here is Evans’s version, at the Village Vanguard, with Eddie Gomez on bass and Philly Joe Jones on drums.

Then it focuses on Ellington’s version, describing it as a blend of two interpretations of the song – “old style” (“The first chorus is piano in D minor/F major, the ‘old style,’ fairly close to the first 1935 recording”) and “new style” (“After the ‘old-style’ chorus, Duke modulates to Bb minor/Db major for Gonsalves’s entrance, the same key used for the ‘new style’ version of ‘In a Sentimental Mood’ tracked with John Coltrane, in 1962”).

Of Ellington’s performance, Iverson writes,

Playing with Coltrane, Ellington’s “new-style” arrangement had a mournful raindrop piano part that was dramatic and distinctive. At the Rainbow Grill, Ellington doesn’t play many of the raindrops but goes all out in rhapsodic style: heavy block chords, cascades, even a long left-hand trill underneath pointillistic right-hand stabs. It would be hard to find ballad accompaniment this busy anywhere else.

That “heavy block chords, cascades, even a long left-hand trill underneath pointillistic right-hand stabs” is excellent.

Iverson then turns to Bill Evans’s version. He writes,

Bill Evans recorded “In a Sentimental Mood” a few times over the years, usually as a ballad, but at the Vanguard that night it was a medium swinger. There are three different takes from three different sets on August 17th and 18th, but the piano part is consistent. Gomez and Jones make all the rhythmic hits and substitute changes with the pianist, but they are also free to offer tasteful commentary. Over all, this is a much more modern and interactive approach to the rhythm section than Lamb and Little with Ellington at the Rainbow Grill. Unlike Ellington’s unwinding scroll, conventional small-band jazz practice dictated an identical “melody in” and “melody out.”

I like that bit about “Ellington’s unwinding scroll.” Remember Adam Gopnik’s opinion that Ellington played “no better than O.K. piano” (“Two Bands,” December 23 & 30, 2013)? (I criticized it here.) Well, Iverson provides a welcome corrective. He describes Ellington’s playing as “mysterious” and “detailed.” He says, “Each of Ellington’s chords is its own universe.” Referring to Ellington’s playing on John Coltrane’s 1962 version of “In a Sentimental Mood,” Iverson says,

Coltrane then leaves the star solo turn to Ellington, who offers one of the most perfect piano improvisations in the whole Duke canon: mysterious, searching, surreal. That surreal piano chorus is in stark contrast to Evans’s professional and clean chorus with Gomez and Philly Joe, where each note of attractive melodic improvisation in the right hand fits perfectly with the added-note harmony (and implied chord scale) beneath.

Iverson favors Ellington over Evans. He says,

Ellington could connect all the dots—the social, the modernist, the intellectual, the populist, the personally poetic—for a vision of American music truly epic in scope. As great as Evans was, he didn’t have that kind of command.

Iverson’s exquisite piece led me in several different directions. It led me to Whitney Balliett to see if the Master covered either of these gigs. Sure enough, he attended Ellington’s stand at the Rainbow Grill (see his “Small Band,” Ecstasy at the Onion, 1971, in which he describes Ellington’s playing as “first-rate,” and says of Johnny Hodge’s rendition of “On the Sunny Side of the Street,” he “left fat, dying notes all over the bandstand”). It led me to Gopnik’s appallingly wrong-headed piece, aforesaid. And, of course, it led me to the music. I’m listening to Ellington’s 1967 version of “In a Sentimental Mood,” as I write this, savoring those “heavy block chords, cascades, even a long left-hand trill underneath pointillistic right-hand stabs.” 

Tommy Flanagan's Superb "Lady Be Good ... For Ella"

One of my all-time favorite jazz albums is Tommy Flanagan’s 1994 Lady Be Good … For Ella, with Peter Washington on bass and Lewis Nash on drums. Flanagan was a superlative improviser, who respected the melody even as he spun brilliant variations on it. New Yorker jazz critic Whitney Balliett said of him, “It is rare to come away from hearing Flanagan without something new and ingenious” (Night Creature, 1981). Flanagan was Ella Fitzgerald’s accompanist from 1968 to 1978. After that, he went solo (sometimes with bass and drums, or just bass). He died in 2001.

Lady Be Good … For Ella contains eleven beautiful songs, including a dashing “How High the Moon,” an exquisite “Angel Eyes,” and two inventive, completely different versions of Gershwin’s “Oh, Lady Be Good.” The highlight, for me, is Flanagan’s sparkling performance of an arresting, seldom-heard Sammy Cahn tune called “Pete Kelly’s Blues.”

Lady Be Good … For Ella is a superb album by a great jazz poet. 

June 27, 2016 Issue

There’s a “Night Life” note in this week’s issue that caught my eye. Titled "Special Piano Extravaganza," it says,

This multi-generational meeting of piano luminaries brings together three exceptional stylists: Frank Kimbrough, George Cables, and Don Friedman. United in their authority of the post-bop idiom, each has a wholly distinctive approach to the genre—consider this evening a master class in keyboard expertise.

This event took place last night at Jazz at Kitano in New York City. I wish I could’ve been there. I’m a fan of all three pianists – Kimbrough, Cables, and Friedman. They truly are, as “Night Life” notes, “exceptional stylists.” I’m listening to Cables’ great 2015 album In Good Company as I write this. If Whitney Balliett were alive, he would’ve covered this gig. And he would’ve written it up in The New Yorker so that readers could imagine they were there, too. He loved piano jazz. He referred to it as a “pianistic river that flows through New York” (Night Creature, 1981). It appears that river is still flowing.

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.