I went to the Strand in search of Alec Wilder’s classic text American Popular Song. It wasn’t there. This has happened my last several trips to the store, which boasts eight miles of books. Eight miles of books, and still their collection is missing essential titles? It made me wonder if they were culling the herd in response to cataclysm within the literary ecosystem.
In its place I found I book I didn’t know I wanted. But now that I have bought it, I cherish it much more than the source of my original hunt. It’s Alec Wilder & His Friends, from 1974, and it’s a collection of New Yorker profiles by Whitney Balliett, who died three years ago.
These are portraits of—this is a term that has been applied to me more than once—old souls who “hold a common vision of life that has lately fallen low. They are highly moral people who have guarded their souls, who have, no matter how bad the going, refused to compromise. They have gone without jobs when fashion has turned against them, rather than demean themselves in shoddy ones. They have kept their spirits intact despite neglect, near-privation, and even semi-oblivion. These sterling people, in taking the high road, have bent their energies toward the endless polishing of their arts, and pre-eminence, no matter how tardy or circumscribed, has been their reward.”
A few—Tony Bennett, Blossom Dearie, Marian McPartland—were able to hang on long enough to enjoy an Indian summer of their careers. At the other end of the spectrum you have the much less known jazz pianist Marie Marcus. All of the subjects make for companionable reading.
I borrowed Balliett’s style for one section of my book From Square One. He sets up a scene and then lets his subject talk, often for pages at a time. The illusion is that there has been no mediation by an author. Of course just the opposite is true. Balliett has erased his questions and left the answers-as-monologue. The style seems old-fashioned today, and that no doubt has something to do with why I employed it.
