Whitney Balliett on Rollins et al.

[Larry Kart]

This came up a while ago, when someone referred to Whitney Balliett's being "broad-minded" in his tastes, but I wasn't able to chapter and verse. Back in 1956 or '57, Balliett wrote the liner notes for the Pacific Jazz album "Grand Encounter -- 2 Degrees East, 3 Degrees West," with John Lewis, Bill Perkins, Jim Hall, Percy Heath, and Chico Hamilton. In the course of praising the certainly praiseworthy Perkins for his gentle lyricism, Balliett went on to say this: "There is [in Perkins' playing] none of the hair-pulling, the bad tone, or the ugliness that is now a growing mode, largely in New York, among the work of the hard-bopsters like Sonny Rollins, Hank Mobley, and JR Monterose."

Actually, I kind of like "the hair-pulling" -- in one way, it's completely out of left field; in another way, it reveals exactly where Whitney was coming from.

[BruceH]

I remember reading some of Balliett's early stuff years ago and being startled at a reference or two to Rollins's "ugly, billy-goat tone" or words to that effect. I had never thought of Rollins that way, but had to admit that I didn't listen to his "tone" per se, but rather to his "line"---what he was doing musically. If you compared his tone to prettier sax players, then yes, I supposed it was rather flat in comparison (though I prefered to think of it then, and now, as "emphatic"---certainly not ugly.) But you don't listen to Rollins for tone; particularly for a fat, burnished, singing tone. This was a criticism he made several times, it obviously got on his nerves, but it strikes me as like castigating Dizzy for not having the golden tone of a Clifford Brown. Anyway, I dismissed it, because these were particularly old Balliett essays and he may have changed his mind in the ensuing three decades or so.

[ghost of miles]

Parker and Coltrane were also attacked early on for their "shrill" and "ugly" tones. Being so far removed from their arrival on the scene (and departure from it), it took me years of listening to comprehend how such charges could ever have been made... not that I now validate them, but at least I think I finally got the context. To my modern, relatively-youthful ears, Bird and Trane's tones sound wonderful.

[JSngry]

Balliett's a favorite of mine, not for his musical insight, but just for his turns of phrase. With a large enough perspective, I can see where Balliett was coming from re:Rollins' tone, although, truthfully, I think that it was probably more the articulation(s) that bugged him than the tone itself. Sonny in those days loved to be, shall we say, "abrupt" sometimes. And Balliett was by no means the only contemporaneous critic to notice this.

But otherwise, somments like this about Rollins' (and shortly thereafter, Coltrane's) tone strike me as the equivalent of people who complain that the jalapenos at Taco Bell are "spicy". I guess if black pepper sets your mouth afire, then yeah, But otherwise...

And when was Hank Mobley's tone ever "hard"? Gimme a break...

[Larry Kart]

What Balliett's remarks here, and much of the rest of his work (though usually more covertly), reveal to me is that he thinks of jazz as a source of certain kinds of "let's warm our toes in front of a nice fire" pleasure and comfort but not as a source of necessary, inescapable information about the state of reality as filtered through the hearts, minds and music of people who couldn't evade or escape it. I know -- I exaggerate; and there's also the fact that Balliett has been in Cecil Taylor's corner almost from the first. But Jim's shrewd point about Sonny's being "abrupt" and the likelihood that (IMO now) this feeds into what Balliett meant by "hair-pulling" -- well, if Sonny or JR were abruptly pulling your hair with their accenting, tonal distortions ("distortions," for want of a better term), etc., such toyings with/variations on the then prevailing norms of musical elegance and comfort were damn close to (and in no way separable from) the essence of the stories their music was telling. (Lord knows what Balliett thought of vintage Jackie McLean! And isn't his Pee Wee Russell a New Yorker -- i.e. the magazine Balliett wrote for -- eccentric, not a man whose music's could implicity threaten your sanity? )

Now who doesn't want to be comforted some of time, maybe even whenever possible? But if my desire to be comforted leads me to take, say, Bobby Hackett or Ben Webster primarily as purveyors of good old days/ good old feelings social and emotional comfort (as I think Balliett comes dangerously close to doing -- in this he's a precursor of the way Woody Allen has often used jazz on his soundtracks), then the reality of Hackett and Webster's music is to some degree being denied and/or screwed around with. And I don't want to be comforted if and when the nature of reality is not in fact comfortable.

Don't have Balliett's collected works in front me, but I'd be curious about how often in what ways he refers to Charlie Parker or Bud Powell. In fact, I'd bet just about anything that the young Balliett had little or no sympathy for bebop. Not a crime, I know, but interesting if so.

[JSngry]

Larry, your comments about Balliet's esthetic preferences remind me very much of Stanley Dance's take on Gene Lees, that Lees had an attraction to the "nicer" (or "middle class") aspects of jazz that reflected a Caucasian-American "wish fullfillment" (my phrase, not his) that ultimately perverted, perhaps even denied, the root essence of what the music was, where it was coming from, and what it was really "saying". Which is not to say that Lees is without merit, just that there's a "lens" pretty much permanently in place that may or may not distort reality, depending on what is being viewed through it.

Tell you what about Stanley Dance - "moldy fig" that he sometimes was (or liked to pretend to be...), when he was on his home turf, the cat knew in a way that few jazz critics have known.

[marcello]

Larry, with all due respect, I think you have Balliett wrong.

Here he is on Parker:

Parker had a unique tone; no other saxophonist has achieved as human a sound. It could be edgy, and even sharp.... It could be smooth and big and sombre. It could be soft and buzzing. Unlike most saxophonists of his time, who took their cue from Coleman Hawkins, he used almost no vibrato; when he did, it was only a flutter, a murmur. The blues lived in every room of his style, and he was one of the most striking and affecting blues improvisers we have had. His slow blues had a preaching, admonitory quality. He would begin a solo with a purposely stuttering four-or-five-note announcement, pause for effect, repeat the phrase, bending its last note into silence, and then turn the phrase around backward and abruptly slip sidewise into double time, zigzag up the scale, circle around quickly at the top, and plummet down, the notes falling somewhere between silence and sound.

On Gillespie' stlye in the 40's:

Few trumpeters have ever been blessed with so much technique.

Gillespie never merely started a solo; he erupted into it. . . . [He]

would hurl himself into the break, after a split-second pause with a

couple of hundred notes that cork-screwed through several octaves,

sometimes in triple time, and were carried in one breath, past the

end of the break and well into the solo itself. . . . Gillespie’s style at

the time gave the impression—with its sharp, slightly acid tone, its

cleavered phrase endings, its efflorescence of notes, and its bran-

dishings about in the upper register—of being constantly on the

verge of flying apart. However, his playing was held together by his

extraordinary rhythmic sense.

On Monk:

His compositions and his playing were of a piece. His improvisations were molten Monk compositions, and his compositions were frozen Monk improvisations. His medium- and up-tempo tunes are stop-and-go rhythmic structures. Their melodic lines, which often hinge on flatted notes, tend to be spare and direct, but they are written with strangely placed rests and unexpected accents. They move irregularly through sudden intervals and ritards and broken rhythms. His balladlike tunes are altogether different. They are art songs, which move slowly and three-dimensionally. They are carved sound. (Monk's song titles -- "Crepuscule with Nellie," "Epistrophy," "Ruby, My Dear," "Well You Needn't," "Rhythm-a-ning," "Hackensack" -- are as striking as the songs themselves. But none beat his extraordinary name, Thelonious Sphere Monk, which surpasses such euphonies as Stringfellow Barr and Twyla Tharp.) His improvisations were attempts to disguise his love of melody. He clothed whatever he played with spindly runs, flatted notes, flatted chords, repeated single notes, yawning silences, and zigzag rhythms. Sometimes he pounded the keyboard with his right elbow. His style protected him not only from his love of melody but from his love of the older pianists he grew out of -- Duke Ellington and the stride pianists. All peered out from inside his solos, but he let them escape only as parody.

Taking things in historical perspective, Rollinf tone was harsh, and maybe ugly, in the 50's. His tone on those Vanguard records is about as smooth as rough granite.

[Chuck Nessa]

His tone on those Vanguard records is about as smooth as rough granite.

Do you take this as a negative, like WB?

[JSngry]

Sorry, but "ugly" in the 1950s would have been somebody like Big Jay McNeely who intentionally distorted the sound of the horn. Rollins' tone then was certainly big, but I maintain that the perception of "ugliness" was due mainly to the articulation and phraseology than the tone itself, which was nothing if not multifacited as the "need" of the moment dictated and quite controlled. Always.

Intonation was sometimes an issue early on, as was occasional glitches in register leaps. But tone never was. Even the earliest Rollins, where he sounds like the horn can't handle his energy (not the other way around), is marked by a tone that is in no way "uncontrolled", and cetainly not "distorted". Certainly Illinois Jacquet's tone of the time was more "agressive", as were cats like Arnett Cobb et. al. But it was a time when certain elements within jazz were courting "refinement", which in some quarters meant "taking the edge off", which in yet some other quarters was extrapolated into equating certain types of directness with ugliness.

Which is all well and good, I suppose, but there's a fatal flaw there, and it's that the tenor (any instrument, really, but I speak from what I know) will have one kind of "ugliness" when it's not being played with control, and another one altogether when a cat knows how to play. In the latter case, accusations of "ugliness" reveal quite a bit about the accuser and little, if anything, about the object of the accusation. Because, let's face it - the number of people who will spend the time and energy it takes to learn to so something well in order to create intentional, unmitigated ugliness instead of some sort of personal vision of "truth and beauty" are few and far between.

Now, sometimes the truth hurts, as they say, and most folks do equate hurt with ugly, and nothing else. But that's their problem, isn't it...

[Larry Kart]

Jim -- Didn't know that Stanley said that about Lees. Interesting and pretty accurate IMO, though Lees and Balliett are also different sorts of "cats" (as Lees might put it). Balliett certainly has a higher brow (for what that's worth -- your call), while Lees loves to snuggle up to the musicians who will let him he do so (or leave him with the impression they have let him), which is not something that I can see Balliett going in for very much, if at all. On the other hand, at least one salt-of-the-earth guy, the late Don DeMichael, Lees' successor as editor of Down Beat, swore by Lees (in the good sense), so Lees can't be all bad.

Marcello -- Don't mean to backtrack on or unfairly modify what I said before, but though I know it can't be proved (barring the advent of evidence I don't have), I'd still bet that Balliett didn't particularly care for bebop when it was happening. These views of Parker, Gillespie, and Monk are retrospective, which again doesn't in itself prove anything, but we do know that once he became a Grand Old Man of Jazz, Balliett's Rollins was no longer a purveyor of ugliness or "bad tone" but a GOMOJ. About Balliett and his likely emotional and social distance from bop, I'm reminded of this passage from Litweiler's "The Freedom Principle":

"The purest manifestation of bop -- the music of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Fats Navarro, Bud Powell -- was a music of extremes. There were the extreme's of bop's harmony, its mixtures of consonance and disssonance, its substitued harmonic structures. More extreme were bop's rhythms: the slippery accents among even tiny note values, the broken lines of eighth notes; the shock of sudden doubletime runs. The fast tempos, the speed of the lines, the electrocuted leaping in the high, middle, and low ranges of the instruments required a coordination of nerve, muscle, and intellect that pressed human agility and creativity toward their outer limits. Bop was an exhilarating adventure; in Gillespie's dizzying trumpet heights, in Powell's hallucinated piano excitement, a deadly fall to earth is ever possible. The vividness of Parker's alto saxophone lyricism made him bop's central figure, and his rhythmic tumult is the tumult of complex fleeting emotions. The brokenness of his phrasing, the swiftness of his passing emotions, from cruelty to tenderness, suggest a consciousness that was itself disrupted.... His desparation was shared by much of his generation." Etc.

For better or for worse, I'd guess that this was not Balliett's world, nor a worldview that he would have wanted to give much room to.

[marcello]

His tone on those Vanguard records is about as smooth as rough granite.

Do you take this as a negative, like WB?

No, and I don't feel that WB took it that way also. It was just his description.

Edited March 28, 2006 by marcello

[marcello]

But tone never was. Even the earliest Rollins, where he sounds like the horn can't handle his energy (not the other way around)

Now that's a perfect description!

[Larry Kart]

BTW, Jim, I said I wasn't happy with saying tonal "distortions." What I meant was that Rollins liked to lean way in to certain rhythmic/timbral gestures -- summoning up an air of the blatant that went far beyond what anyone else who wasn't kidding or the like would have done at that time (as on "Wagon Wheels" from "Way Out West"). But Sonny, as we know, wasn't kidding; he was playing.

[marcello]

Larry, the Parker and Gillespie excerpts were from the 50's, but the Monk was from his obituary piece of Monk in '82.

Like all writers, WB has his excesses, and his favorites are from the Swing Era. That said, he has gone out of his way to investigate ( and sometimers praise ) those in the New Wave including Cecil Taylor, Roswell Rudd, Air, Braxton etc., so he has been more open than most and usually fair.

I remember that he once called Chuch Mangione " the Harry James of the 70's"; a nice turn of a phrase.

I like Gene Lees also until he goes way overboard in praise with Canadian talent. If you've

spent as much time as someone like me has in Toronto, you learn to forgive that. Canadians can be patriotic to the point of fanaticism. But Lees writes from the heart.

[JSngry]

BTW, Jim, I said I wasn't happy with saying tonal "distortions." What I meant was that Rollins liked to lean way in to certain rhythmic/timbral gestures -- summoning up an air of the blatant that went far beyond what anyone else who wasn't kidding or the like would have done at that time (as on "Wagon Wheels" from "Way Out West"). But Sonny, as we know, wasn't kidding; he was playing.

Well, yeah, we're on the same page here, and that's what I meant - somebody like Big Jay McNeely's tone was truly "distorted" in terms of how it was produced on/drawn from the instrument. Sonny had a freakin' pallate of tones, none of which were in the least distorted in that way.

[brownie]

Not only was Mobley mistreated, he was also mispelled on that Pacific Jazz release. His name comes out as Hank Mobely in Balliett's liner notes!

[John L]

Baillet is certainly one of the most entertaining and articulate jazz writers. He does seem to prefer his jazz to be warm, comfortable, and "intellectual." I recall some reviews of jazz festivals where Baillet sat very uncomfortably through hard bop acts like Art Blakey with Lee Morgan and Hank Mobley in order to finally hear his beloved Modern Jazz Quartet.

Edited March 28, 2006 by John L

[MartyJazz]

Baillet is certainly one of the most entertaining and articulate jazz writers. He does seem to prefer his jazz to be warm, comfortable, and "intellectual." I recall some reviews of jazz festivals where Baillet sat very uncomfortably through hard bop acts like Art Blakey with Lee Morgan and Hank Mobley in order to finally hear his beloved Modern Jazz Quartet.

Ironic, since I would think one was more likely to hear "the sound of surprise" (WB's original apt description of jazz) from an outstanding Blakey group than the MJQ.

[Larry Kart]

But Blakey and Co. would engage in a fair amount of "hair-pulling."

[AllenLowe]

well, when Balliett is good he's good, when bad he makes me want to strangle him - some of his profiles are indeed priceless, off the top of my head I'm thinking PW Russell, Red Allen, Mel Powell, ML Williams - I do find many of his impressionistic descriptions of musical performances excruciatingly annoying, and I skip over them - and he has LOT of blind spots - Miles was a "first rate second rate trumpeter," Jaki Byard's playing was "watery," he does not like Barry Harris, thinks Max did not swing - I'd have to go back, but these are the things whicc, ultimately, have dated some of his writing - and if one reads his festival reviews back to the '70s and '80s he is overwhelmingly negative about contemporary players, with a few exceptions -

[BruceH]

Parker and Coltrane were also attacked early on for their "shrill" and "ugly" tones. Being so far removed from their arrival on the scene (and departure from it), it took me years of listening to comprehend how such charges could ever have been made... not that I now validate them, but at least I think I finally got the context. To my modern, relatively-youthful ears, Bird and Trane's tones sound wonderful.

I know what you mean. Sometimes you have to make the attempt to imagine what someone sounded like 'way back when they came on the scene. Parker must have sounded bracingly new, at the very least. Now (and for a long time) it's hard not to hear Parker as very "normal"-sounding. That's what happens when you have thousands of ardent immitators.

[Simon Weil]

I think Balliett is a proper writer with a real style - the only one, really, to write about Jazz. By that I mean he is a guy with an essentially "literary" style which stands up to repeated readings. It's art, what he does - and no-one else in Jazz (that I've read) comes even close.

The trouble is I think loads of people try - and don't succeed. Where there's a kind of integrity to Balliett's approach (A kind of obsession with aesthetic issues because that's where his heart is, in an interest in beauty (divorced from social content)) and he writes out of a certain coherent sensibility - other people don't.

You don't need to be an artist to be a (Jazz) critic. If you're not, don't try. Balliett is.

Happy days...

Simon Weil

Edited March 31, 2006 by Simon Weil