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Whitney Balliett’s “Bird”
09-01-2020
 

Whitney Balliett’s “Bird”

The music critic Whitney Balliett once remarked that jazz is a highly personal medium—“like poetry, it is an art of surprise.” Balliett contributed more than five hundred pieces to The New Yorker, from 1952 to 2001. He was the magazine’s jazz critic for five decades, during which he wrote about a wide assortment of figures, such as Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, Rosemary Clooney, and Thelonious Monk. He also published seventeen books, including “Such Sweet Thunder” and “Jelly Roll, Jabbo, and Fats.” He was so prolific that it’s difficult to pick just one of his pieces to recommend. In a portrait of the bassist and bandleader Charles Mingus, Balliett writes one of the best ledes of any piece of jazz criticism published in the nineteen-seventies. (“Charles Mingus, the incomparable forty-nine-year-old bassist, composer, bandleader, autobiographer, and iconoclast, has spent much of his life attempting to rearrange the world according to an almost Johnsonian set of principles that abhor, among other things, cant, racism, inhibition, managerial greed, sloppy music, Uncle Tomism, and conformity.”) One of my favorite pieces by Balliett is his profile of the jazz legend Charlie (Bird) Parker, from 1976. In “Bird,” Balliett chronicles both Parker’s wild personal excesses and his lyrical virtuosity. Balliett’s prose swoops and glides across the page, evoking the saxophonist’s masterly shifts in tone and timbre. “He could do anything he liked with time, and in his ballads he lagged behind the beat, floated easily along on it, or leapt ahead of it; he did things with time that no one had yet thought of and that no one has yet surpassed. His ballads were dense visions, glimpses into an unknown musical dimension,” Balliett writes. “Although they were perfectly structured, they seemed to have no beginnings and no endings; each was simply another of the visions that stirred and maddened his mind.” Balliett’s work crackles with intensity and precision as he nimbly documents the profound ways in which Parker turned the world of jazz upside down and helped usher in a new musical era. As he traces Parker’s evolution as an artist, Balliett offers a master class in critical dexterity—and in making an art out of narrative revelation.

—Erin Overbey, archive editor

 
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