http://tinyurl.com/32svrl
"A critic is a bunch of biases held loosely together by a sense of taste."
Something he wrote about DA MONK:
"His improvisations were attempts to disguise his love of melody. He clothed whatever he played with spindly runs, flatted notes, flatted chords, repeated single notes, yawning silences, and zigzag rhythms. Sometimes he pounded the keyboard with his right elbow. His style protected him not only from his love of melody but from his love of the older pianists he grew out of -- Duke Ellington and the stride pianists. All peered out from inside his solos, but he let them escape only as parody."
He wasn't a much of a fan of Avant-Garde, but he was down with Ornette and Cecil.
"At its worst, then, the new thing is long-winded, dull, and almost physically abrasive. At its best--in the hands of Ornette Coleman or (Cecil) Taylor--it howls through the mind and heart, filling them with an honest ferocity that is new in jazz and perhaps in any music."
Whitney Balliett
April 17, 1926 - Feburary 1, 2007
R.I.P.
