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Collected Works: a Journal of Jazz 1954-2000: Collected Works 1954-2000 by Whitney Balliett (Paperback, 2001)

World of Books Ltd (10284601)

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Author:Balliett, Whitney. In his collected works, leading jazz critic Whitney Balliett captures the evolution of the musical style since the mid-1950s. Jazz is an improviser's art, many spontaneous creations are never recorded.

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Whitney Balliett is the greatest critic of jazz, the most influential and original music of the twentieth century. For half its span, he has written about jazz for The New Yorker in prose that seems always to find appropriate words for the experience of music - perhaps the most difficult task any writer can face. Jazz is an improviser's art, threatened constantly by evanescence: so many brilliant spontaneous creations are never recorded. It is, in Balliett's famous phrase, 'the sound of surprise'. His monumental 'journal' of jazz captures, with never a trace of sentimentality or indulgence, the evolution of the music since the mid 1950s in some of its finest performances, at small clubs and large festivals alike. He also writes marvellous, and often mercilessly sharp, critical profiles of artists, from Armstrong and Ellington to Lovano and Marsalis. His brief and thoughtful essays on musical form - boogie-woogie, blues, swing - and on the histories of various instruments in jazz are among the most instructive ever written. A Journal of Jazz transcends its genre. As one American critic has remarked, 'few people can write as well about anything as Balliett writes about jazz'.