Whitney Balliett; Jazz Reporter Known for Poetic Prose

The jazz show, hosted by New York Herald Tribune columnist John Crosby, brought to millions of homes such eclectic performers as Billie Holiday, Count Basie, Gerry Mulligan and Thelonious Monk. The program also twinned unlikely pairings of musicians, such as Russell and Jimmy Giuffre, clarinetists of two very different generations and styles.

Eric Larrabee wrote in Harper's magazine that "The Sound of Jazz" was the "best thing that ever happened to television." Columbia Records produced an album of the show's performers, and a video of the program was released in the mid-1980s.

Jazz critic John S. Wilson, writing in the New York Times in 1985, said that "putting Monk on national television at a time when, to the extent the general public knew of him at all, he was apt to be considered weird and possibly menacing, was a courageous and positive act."

Mr. Balliett contributed short articles for the New Yorker's Talk of the Town section as well as book, film and theater reviews. He also wrote poetry. He left the magazine staff in 1998.

Collections of his New Yorker writings were published frequently over the years. His books included "American Singers" and "American Musicians." One massive volume, subtitled "a Journal of Jazz," came out in 2000.

Reviewers noted that Mr. Balliett's taste was more traditional than avant-garde, and he tended to overlook more contemporary players, but he liked to approach all music with a degree of curiosity. He also had a reputation for writing sympathetically about his subjects, often letting them speak for paragraphs at a time to convey their rhythm and personality.

"You have to look at it from the musicians' point of view," he told the Times of London in 1993. "Often they don't get paid more than the union minimum or they've been on the road. I once traveled with Duke Ellington's orchestra, for about five days, and I couldn't believe it. Jesus! You don't know where you are, you have no sense of time or place, you can't sleep right. How these guys do it for so long, I don't know."

His 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.