Obituary for Whitney Lyon Balliett
The Los Angeles Times, Feb 3 2007, P. 95, with photo
"Whitney Balliett, a jazz reporter who spent more than four decades writing thousands of graceful and definitive stories for the New Yorker magazine and helped create one of the finest jazz programs on television, died Feb. 1 at his home in New York City. He was 80 and had liver cancer.
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Whitney Lyon Balliett, the son of a businessman, was born April 17, 1926, in Manhattan. While attending the private Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, he began what he called his "erratic non-career as a drummer" after hearing a jam session on a Sunday afternoon at Jimmy Ryan's club on New York's West Side.
After graduating from Cornell University in 1951, he wrote about jazz for the Saturday Review while working as a proofreader for the New Yorker, whose editor, William Shawn, gave the young writer a jazz column in 1957.
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An early marriage to Elizabeth King Balliett ended in divorce.
Survivors include his wife of 41 years, landscape painter Nancy Kraemer Balliett of Manhattan; three children from his first marriage, Julie Rose of Accord, N.Y., Blue Balliett of Chicago and Will Balliett of Manhattan; two sons from his second marriage, Whitney L. Balliett Jr. of Natick, Mass., and Jamie Balliett of Erie, Colo.; a brother; a half sister; and seven grandchildren."