VARIETY
93
performer") who has "colleagues" ("Bailey, however, is unremittingly
dull, a habit that is enthusiastically shared by most of his colleagues on
the instrument"), and one of his better records is likely to be "one of
his superior efforts." Worst of all, Balliett's columns are full of the care–
fully cadenced, studiedly sophisticated lyricism that has helped
to
make
the
New Yorker
short story a recognizable genre. He writes, for example,
that a famous tenor saxophonist's "heavy vibrato suggested the wingbeats
of a big bird and his tone halls hung with dark velvet and lit by huge
fires."
But anyone who does not look beyond these mannerisms is, in
Balliett's case, making a mistake. Again take the sentence just quoted as
an example. Out of context you see only that it is absurdly fancy and
cluttered, but look at it in context:
Hawkins' early style was rough and aggressive. His tone tended
to be harsh and bamboolike, and he used a great many staccato,
slap-tongued notes. But these mannerisms eventually vanished,
and by the mid-thirties he had entered his second and most
famous phase. His heavy vibrato suggested the wingbeats of a
big bird and his tone halls hung with dark velvet and lit by
huge fires. His technique had become infallible. He never
fluffed a note, his tone never shrank or overflowed-as did Chu
Berry's, say-and he gave the impression that he had enough
equipment to state in half a dozen different and finished ways
what was in his head.
The sentence is still fancy, but if you happen to know how Coleman
Hawkins sounded in the twenties and then in the thirties--and, inci–
dentally, how Chu Berry sounded imitating him-what you are struck
by is not its fanciness but the astonishing descriptive accuracy that it
shares with the more matter-of-fact sentences around it. Fancy writing
or not, during those years Hawkins really did sound just the way
Balliett says he did, and to be able to offer so perfect a verbal image
of his or anyone else's playing is to have a very rare gift. This sort of
accuracy can be found in almost every column in these collections, and
it is something to be grateful for at a time when most criticism-even
in
better magazines than
The New Yorker-is
relentlessly pretentious and
self-regarding. Balliett may have his faults, but at least he is always more
interested in describing what he hears, and in getting his readers to hear
it too, than he is in exploiting his subject matter or inflating his own
opinions to provide revelations about the cultural situation and the
plight of modem man.
But though Balliett's writing is not self-regarding, it is self-in–
dulgent. Accurate description is necessary in all criticism so that the
reader can listen to or look at or read what the critic has written about,
