Adam Gopnik remembers Whitney Balliett, jazz critic for The New Yorker:
"As the music he loved aged, he was often left without a subject, and those of us who revered his writing sometimes wished that he could have discovered in himself a more sympathetic ear for the sounds of newer jazz. But he was too honest to pretend to admire what he didn't, and it was the great American music of the twenties through the eighties (the seventies, a jazz Indian summer in New York, were a high-water mark for him) that remained his subject. In his work, along with the writerly gifts, there is also a vision of what art should be -- an entire aesthetic. He saluted and admired the self-conscious greats, Armstrong and Ellington above all, loved stars (he wrote keenly about Sinatra and Tony Bennett), and appreciated innovators (he wrote early and well about Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman). But his heart and his soul were the artisan-poets of jazz, the late-night pianists and unsung singers, the long line of jazzmen and women who 'piece out their lives in the shadows and shoals of show business' and keep alive the music's lyric heart. Gene Bertoncini and Tommy Flanagan, Bill Coleman and Anita Ellis, Zoot Sims and Joe Venuti and Big Sid Catlett (Balliett played drums, and that great drummer may have been his God) -- he believed in the swinging, witty sounds they made, and kept a faith, both mystical and defiant, that their work mattered as much as that of any novelist or painter, that the air they set vibrating in a room somewhere at night would go on resonating long after the room was gone. He made sure that it did. Delicate poets of deep emotion, he preserved their sound, and ended as one of them."
[Via The New Yorker]
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