Submitted by geoffrey james, Feb 7, 2007 11:33

A very fine obituary of a wonderful writer, and a kind and generous man. You are asbolutely right about the Sound of Jazz broadcast. I don't think there has been anything like it. (The Ken Burns series demonstrated that there is no performance so wonderful -- including Hawkins' Body and Soul -- that cannot be talked over. ) I had the pleasure of knowing Whitney for the longest time -- I got off the boat in Manhattan in 1964, and called him, and he took me to lunch, and that was the beginning of a long friendship. It is sad that the New Yorker did not treat him particularly well, especially when Tina Brown tried to turn the magazine into a cross between Vanity Fair and a newsmagazine. But his pieces stand up so well, and they will be read for as long as there is a love of jazz. He once said to me that James Boswell was the first New Yorker profile writer, and in Whitney, a great American music had its first Boswell.

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