Is writing about jazz like dancing about architecture? Not in the case of Whitney Balliett, who would have been 81 today. Mr. Balliett died in February of this year. He was a jazz critic at The New Yorker for over 40 years and his entry in Grove calls his writings "eloquent and highly stylized."
The Mudd has seven of his books, mostly collections of his essays. A side note: his first wife, Elizabeth Hurley King, is a direct descendant of Rufus King, one of the two first United States senators from New York.