In its near-century of excellence, The New Yorker has been home to more than its share of tops-in-their-field contributors. There’s E.B. White, with his luminous short essays; S.J. Perelman, arguably the 20th-century American humorist, at least among highbrows; or Roger Angell, who moonlighted from his day job as fiction editor to roam America’s ballparks, the most incisive and trenchant of baseball scribes. But to my mind, and many others’, the New Yorker staffer who topped his field even more hands-down was Whitney Balliett, that rare music critic of real literary stature, who covered jazz for the magazine from 1957 until 2001.
To categorize Balliett as a “jazz writer” is “as witless,” writes the pop/jazz historian James T. Maher, “as it would be to call St. Augustine a city planner.” Balliett—as famous, if not more so, for his profiles as for the reviews which, at his peak, he poured out almost weekly—was a master of physical description, able to capture a subject’s essence in a brushstroke or two. Buddy Rich didn’t merely exit a hotel elevator, “he shot out, spraying the lobby with early-morning glances,” the nervous, combative drummer to a T.
Balliett was big on entrances. Ebullient Stephane Grappelli, on a midtown Manhattan shopping spree, “charged through the Herald Square doors at Macy’s and came to a stop ten feet inside,” the author wheezing to keep up with the septuagenarian fiddler. When the clarinetist Pee Wee Russell, on whose hangdog looks and mien Balliett dined out often, “was thoughtful, he glanced quickly about, tugged his nose, and cocked his head. When
