Books in Brief: Night Creature: A Journal of Jazz, 1975-1980

Night Creature: A Journal of Jazz, 1975-1980, by Whitney Balliett (Oxford, 285 pp.. $15.95). Whitney Balliett, jazz critic for The New Yorker since 1957, has long been regarded by his colleagues as the best in the business—an informed amateur with a poet’s ear, whose writing captures the essence of jazz with elegance and economy. His latest collection, Night Creature, brings together pieces written between 1975 and 1980; of obvious interest to jazz listeners, it also has much to offer those who simply appreciate fine prose, whatever the subject. The articles in Night Creature, arranged chronologically, alternate between commentaries on live performances and profiles of individual players, spaced by an occasional book or record review. As usual, the profiles—always a Balliett specialty—are the book’s strong point. Some are sharply etched cameos hung on a record review (Nat Cole) or a recent death (Erroll Garner), while some (Zoot Sims, Benny Goodman) are full-dress productions built around an interview; all are enlivened by Balliett’s masterly knack for conveying personality, style, and tone of voice within the space of a few precisely observed paragraphs, something no one at The New Yorker does better. Balliett is not a trained musician, and his gentleman-critic stance does backfire from time to time. (No serious scholar, for example, would ever have called James Lincoln Collier’s inept The Making of Jazz “shrewd and graceful and funny.”) One reads Balliett for things other than meticulous scholarship, though, and such things are present in glittering abundance on every page of Night Creature. Indeed, two pages in particular are themselves worth the price of admission: page 45, which contains a flawless pen- and-ink sketch of Buddy Rich in meditation, fully worthy of Sem or Beerbohm; and page 98, where Balliett neatly describes pianist Dave McKenna as having saluted Art Tatum one evening with “a couple of fifty-foot arpeggios,” and then compares a Mary Lou Williams-Cecil Taylor concert to a literary shootout between James Gould Cozzens and Nathalie Sarraute. Writing like that is hard to find and harder to better.