Books in Brief: Jelly Roll, Jabbo & Fats

Jelly Roll, Jabbo & Fats: Nineteen Portraits in Jazz, by Whitney Balliett (Oxford, 197 pp„ $17.95).

Another superb collection from Whitney Balliett, a literary journalist with a poetic streak who has been writing about jazz for The New Yorker at odd intervals ever since 1957. Like its companion volume, the 1977 collection Improvising: Sixteen Jazz Musicians and Their Art, Mr. Balliett’s 11th book is given over entirely to his acknowledged specialty: the profile. Eleven of the 16 pieces here are standard New Yorker profiles raised to the level of high art by Mr. Balliett’s wonderfully idiosyncratic prose style and matchless eye for detail. (What other jazz writer would have recorded for posterity the contents of pianist Dick Wellstood’s library: Smollett, Huxley, Musil, Nabokov, Meredith, Hazlitt, Gibbon, Chesterton, Leavis, Peacock, and Dr. Johnson?) The other five are a comparatively new wrinkle—elegant brief lives of Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney Bechet, Fats Waller, Lester Young, and Erroll Garner. Leon Edel once called the biographical essay “a beautiful literary form requiring brevity, lucidity, selective detail, and, above all, a light ironic touch.” Mr. Balliett’s posthumous profiles fit the bill admirably.