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The Boston Globe stated: “Balliett’s genius for pictorial description (which helps make him a gifted writer of profiles) extends to the music itself. No one writes about what they listen to anywhere near as well.”
Although he played drums during his college days and was a member of a band, Whitney was not a studied musician. He had no formal training in theory and harmony so during the 40+ years he wrote Jazz profiles for The New Yorker magazine he had to fall back on his other gifts when describing the music - his gift for “pictorial description.”
In many ways, this made Whitney’s Jazz writings more accessible to the majority of Jazz fans since they, too, for the most part, lacked procedural training in melody, harmony and rhythm - the building blocks of music.
As a result, "Balliett comes as close as any writer on jazz—perhaps on any musical style — to George Bernard Shaw's intention to write so that a deaf person could understand and appreciate his comments. This volume approaches indispensability." Choice reviewing Balliett’s American Musicians.
The editorial staff at JazzProfiles thought it might be fun to share some briefer pieces from the pen of our ideal - Whitney Balliet - to give you an appreciation for his “ … genius for pictorial description.” This is the first in a series of six continuously running featuring Whitney’s sui generis pictorially descriptive approach to writing about Jazz which is marked by what Gary Giddins has labeled “writerly attributes: insight, candor, observation, discernment, delineation, style, diligence and purpose.”
These are all drawn from Goodbyes and Other Messages: A Journal of Jazz 1981-1990 [1991]. This is number 4 in a series.
Published in 1985, the discographical references to the, regrettably, short-lived music of the Gerry Mulligan Sextet have since been superseded my myriad CD reissues among them The Fabulous Gerry Mulligan Sextet - Fresh Sound CD 418-419 - and you can find our blog feature about these “complete” sextet recordings including the insert notes by the esteemed British writer by going here.
However, what is important about this piece is that it is by Whitney, which makes it valuable in and of itself, and because it adds more viewpoints about Mulligan and his music to the blog archive on this subject.
“Gerry Mulligan's sextet lasted only from the middle of 1955 until the end of 1956, and it filled a lacuna in Mulligan's career between his pianoless quartets of the early fifties and the big band he put together in 1960. The sextet included Jon Eardley or Don Ferrara on trumpet, Zoot Sims on tenor saxophone, Bob Brookmeyer on piano and valve trombone, Mulligan on piano and baritone saxophone, Peck Morrison or Bill Crow on bass, and Dave Bailey on drums.
Brookmeyer and Eardley had worked in Mulligan quartets, and Sims and Mulligan had played together off and on in New York and on the Coast. Morrison and Bailey sat in at a Mulligan rehearsal, were admired, and became part of the sextet. It is not clear where the idea of the sextet came from.
Certainly Mulligan's quartet, which was formed in 1952 and was dependent on the mannerly counterpoint of Mulligan and the trumpeter Chet Baker, contributed to it. And Mulligan must have listened to the serpentine melodic lines that Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh were working out with Lennie Tristano, and to the early contrapuntal investigations of the Modern Jazz Quartet and Dave Brubeck. He may also have had in mind the old [baritone saxophonist] Adrian Rollini groups, which he relished. The result was a partly written, partly jammed music built on unison or free-flowing ensembles, solos backed by organ chords aka riffs] or Ellington melodic fragments, and a clear, uncluttered rhythmic pulse, not unlike Tristano's metronomic timekeeping.
It was a dense, swinging music, and when the four horns took off at the end of a number for several chourses of collective soloing (far less staccato and far more melodic than the soloing of the ordinary Dixieland or New Orleans ensemble) audiences found themselves shouting and jumping. But Mulligan was heady and restless at the time, and because the public response was limited, or there weren't enough jobs, or he wanted to get on with other things, he dissolved the group.
Fortunately, the sextet went into the Mercury recording studios five times, and the results give a loose idea of what it sounded like. Three L.P.s, made from thirty-four numbers set down (including alternate takes), were released in the fifties, and have long been out of print. PolyGram has reissued the best of them, "Mainstream of Jazz: Gerry Mulligan and His Sextet, "and it has also issued, on "Mainstream of Jazz: Gerry Mulligan and His Sextet," Volumes II and III, fourteen numbers never released before. The original "Mainstream of Jazz" remains a superior album. On "Ain't It the Truth,""Igloo,""Lollypop," and "Blue at the Roots," there are good jammed ensembles, and on the first number Mulligan and Sims play a long and successful duet — a fresh approach that doesn't turn up anywhere else on the records.
The two "Blues" in Volume II have some ensemble jamming, and so does "Demanton," which is based on "Sweet Georgia Brown." There are more glimpses of the group's collective work on "Broadway," in Volume III. The ardor and ease of Brookmeyer and Sims held the sextet together, and countered Eardley's stiffness and weak lip and Mulligan's tendency to keep trying to make indelible emotional statements. (Don Ferrara appears only on four numbers, all done at the group's last recording session and included in the original "Mainstream of Jazz" album.)
The longer the sextet went on, the hotter and more inventive it became. It's too bad Mulligan let it go.”