As Jazz critic for The New Yorker magazine sine 1957, and author of fifteen books, Whitney Balliett has spent a lifetime listening to and writing about jazz. "All first rate criticism" he once wrote in a review of someone else's work, "first defines what we are confronting." He could as easily have been describing his own work. For nearly half a century, Balliett has been telling us, in pitch-perfect prose, what we confront when we listen to America's greatest, and perhaps only truly original, musical form.

Collected Works: A Journal of Jazz, 1954-2001, is a monumental achievement, capturing the full range and register of the jazz scene, from the first Newport Jazz Festival in 1954 to recent performances by a rising generation of musicians. Here are definitive portraits of such major figures as Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Django Reinhardt, Martha Raye, Buddy Rich, Charles Mingus, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Art Tatum, Bessie Smith and Earl Hines - a list that barely scratches the surface. Generations of readers have learned to listen to the music with Balliett's graceful guidance. For five decades he has captured the moments when jazz history was being made.

Balliett's knowledge is an encyclopaedic treasure, and yet he has always written as if he were listening to jazz for the first time. Since its beginning in New Orleans at the turn of the century, jazz has been restlessly and relentlessly evolving, improvising, experimenting an shape-shifting - a constant work in progress of sounds and tonal shades, from swing and Dixieland, through boogie-woogie, bebop, and hard bop, to the newer forms of free jazz, abstract jazz, and atonal jazz. Yet in each incarnation, the music is sustained by what Balliett calls a "secret emotional centre", and "aural elixir" that "reveals itself when an improvised phrase or an entire solo or even a complete number catches you by surprise." Whitney Balliett performs the miracle of capturing the essence of jazz - the "sound of surprise".

"After all these years, I am still awed by your incomparable understanding of jazz, by your genius for saying in words how a particular musician or musicians sound, and by your writing purely as writing - WILLIAM SHAWN, editor of The New Yorker from 1952-1986

WHITNEY BALLIETT is jazz critic for The New Yorker. He is married to the painter Nancy Balliett. They live in New York City.

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