Paul Desmond - "An Insouciant Sound" - Whitney Balliett
Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all right reserved.
Every time I read the writings of Whitney Balliett, I sense that I am in the presence of a when-Jazz-meets-Literature dynamic. He was one of the most erudite writers to ever cover Jazz and its makers and his style of writing was clear, concise and coherent.
I sought this piece out not only because of the merits of Whitney’s writing style and the fact that I became a Paul Desmond-junkie the first time I heard him play Little Girl Blue [on the Brubeck Jazz Red Hot and Cool Columbia LP], but also because I am collecting relevant pieces for my next anthology - A Dave Brubeck Reader - which will feature an entire section devoted to Paul due to his close personal and professional association with Dave.
A word or two more about Whitney before we get into his piece on Paul.
“Whitney Balliett ... was above all a poet, who pursued poetry by other means. He wrote for The New Yorker magazine for almost fifty years, mostly about jazz, and what he wrote was so good that Philip Larkin, not an easy man to please about either jazz or poetry, called him a “master of language,” while, years later, the young Nicholson Baker still referred to him, in a wondering aside, as a “tireless prodigy.”
William Shaw, his editor at The New Yorker said of him: ‘Whitney was about as pure a stylist as anyone who has written American English, yet his sentences were almost always about someone else’s art; that’s what gave his writing its modesty and its tensile strength.’
Reading through the books he made from pieces … what delights and amazes is the quality of his line, what William Shawn, the former editor of this magazine, once called his ‘genius for saying in words how a particular musician or musicians sound.’ Whitney could place on the page the sound of someone playing — not the reasons the sound might matter to a historian, or even the way it felt to an enthusiast, but the way it really sounded, the way it was.”
Adam Gopnik, The New York Times Magazine
Aside from its literary elegance, another of the wonderful qualities of Whitney’s writing is that as a non-musician, it relies heavily on metaphors, allusions, and imagery.
Balliett’s style is less about analysis, theory and structure and more about similes, euphemisms, and personification.
However he chooses to express his singular point-of-view, Whitney’s way with words never detracts from the pleasure he derives from the music and its makers.
While not a studied musician [he was an amateur drummer], Whitney substituted descriptive prose filled with literary allusions, allegories and analogies all of which provided an uncanny description of a particular Jazz musician and his style of playing.
I mean, when you read this, there’s no doubt that Whitney got Paul; his strengths and his weaknesses. Just read what he does with a description of Paul’s sound, his tone.
But he doesn’t describe them in musical terms.
Insouciant - from the French se soucier to care, adding in as a prefix, creates a meaning that approximates “not to care” in English.
But insouciant when applied to Paul Desmond and the sound of his alto saxophone also brings into focus a meaning which includes a certain childlike lightheartedness, or, a cavalier it’s of no importance attitude or a persona characterized by an informal, let’s not take things too seriously.
Of course, given the context of the 1950s and 1960s when Paul Desmond was at the height of his powers, being COOL was the one word that would sum up this “insouciant” demeanor and attitude.
“The quietness of Desmond's attack was deceptive, and gave a conventional, even timid, air to what he played. But he always moved along the outer edges of the chords he was improvising on, atonality in sight. His rhythmic attack was equally deceptive. He gave the impression of sailing along endlessly in an easy four-four, but he continually altered his time. He played behind the beat, on the beat, and ahead of the beat. He halved the tempo and doubled it, or he floated, using no tempo at all. Like his friend Jim Hall, Desmond was one of the handful of jazz improvisers who demand total concentration. If the listener falters, he is lost; if he remains rapt, he is blessed.”
Whitney Balliett
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