WILLIAM YOUNGREN
and then compare what he hears or sees or finds on the page with what
the critic has said was there. And it is particularly heartening to find
someone writing accurately about jazz because all the writers who
have written regularly about it in the past have either lacked Balliett's
taste or his writing ability, or they have been too nervous about what
tone to take toward the music-whether to play the barroom good
fellow or the classroom pedant- to keep the eye steadily on the object. As
I've suggested, Balliett's great virtue is that he can keep his eye on the
object and describe it accurately, but his trouble is that he is too ex–
clusively interested in doing so. He is too intent on making each column
start fresh and end as a finished, self-sufficient production; there is too
little intellectual continuity from column to column, too little sense of a
mind actively working to articulate what F. R. Leavis once called "an
organization of . . . things that have found their bearings with regard
to one another." When he has something before him to be described,
all his energy goes into describing it; when he doesn't, he is likely to
fall into long and meaningless digressions, in which the fancy writing
that worked in the Coleman Hawkins paragraph because it was being
turned outward on a real object is turned inward on nothing at all.
He is fond of beginning his columns with such digressions, of which
the following is a fair sample:
If
heaven does induce the final cooling of those fleshy turbines
the emotions, then all great religious music, which is distinctly
fleshy and highly emotional, is basically secular. (Most Protes–
tant hymns, with their Babbitt-like rhythms and oaken melo–
dies,
are
religious.) Indeed, some religious music shines with
evil. Consider the ominous chants and down-there brass choirs
in Berlioz'
Requiem,
which reverberate through the vaults not
of heaven but of hell. And consider one of the newest of re–
ligious musics, the American Negro's gospel songs.
This sort of journalistic slackness is obviously related to the annoy–
ing mannerisms I mentioned at first, but it is a far more damaging flaw.
Before you have had the desire or the chance to check the accuracy of a
critic's descriptions and judgments, what makes him seem initially worth
listening to and arguing with is precisely some sense of intellectual con–
tinuity and coherence-not the specious coherence critics often gain by
forcing their personalities or their theories on everything they write
about, but the genuine coherence which a trained sensibility possesses
and by which it evaluates new experiences accurately in terms of old.
Balliett does not really give you this sense, and so I suspect that many
intelligent readers who don't already know enough about jazz
to
see
the accuracy of his perceptions-just the readers, that is, who would
