Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Whitney Lyon Balliett was born in Manhattan, New York on April 17, 1926. He was raised in Glen Cove, Long Island and attended Phillips Exeter Academy, where he learned to play drums. There he became part of a band that played “baggy Dixieland” and during the summer played gigs at a Center Island yacht club.

Drafted into the Army in 1946, interrupting Whitney’s freshman year at Cornell University, he returned to finish his degree in 1951. While matriculating he was a member of The Delta Phi Fraternity and after graduating went to work at The New Yorker, hired by Katherine White, one of the magazine’s fiction editors.

Among his many jazz wittings were: Such Sweet Thunder: 49 Pieces on Jazz, Super-drummer: A Profile of Buddy Rich, Alec Wilder and His Friends, Improvising: Sixteen Jazz Musicians and Their Art, Night Creature: A Journal of Jazz 1975-1980, American Musicians: Fifty-Six Portraits in Jazz, American Singers: Twenty-seven Portraits in Song, and Collected Works: A Journal of Jazz 1954-2000.

Acclaimed for his literary writing style, jazz critic, book reviewer and author Whitney Balliett passed away on February 1, 2007, aged 80, from cancer.

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