Word: balliett
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AMERICAN SINGERS by Whitney Balliett Oxford; 178 pages...
...play up the soloist, adding a flourish here or a rhythmic twist there, never straying from the background. Whitney Balliett is his critical counterpart. Jazz aficionados tend to go heavy on the adjectives; Balliett favors a deceptively simple style that illuminates the musician instead of the writer...
This latest collection of a dozen profiles, mostly from his New Yorker criticism, is Balliett's "act of homage to a highly gifted and unaccountably neglected group of Americans." They are America's nonclassical singers: figures like Mabel Mercer, Tony Bennett and Ray Charles, who straddle the worlds of theater tunes, blues and popular standards. They work within a rich tradition that came out of ragtime and came in with the fascinating rhythms of George Gershwin and Jerome Kern. The early singers were "intuitive and homemade," Balliett observes, but their descendants are sophisticated musicians who blend the soft...
Offstage, Balliett lets the singers ram ble through the big dates and broken marriages of their pasts, reviewing their child hood idols and latter-day saints. Anita Ellis recalls a memorable appearance with Billie Holiday: "I couldn't get over how she changed-from that naked, smoking, tough woman in the dressing room to the cool, motionless, vessel-of-life singer onstage." Joe Turner tells how as a teenager he wheedled his way into singing at a local Kansas City club: "The man who owned the joint . . . asked me how old I was, and I told him twenty...
Thomas D. Balliett '75 said, "This is the seventeenth year I've been in school, and somewhere along the line worrying about grades has to stop...