When Whitney Balliett's American Musicians first appeared in the fall of 1986, the acclaim it received was universal. Leonard Feather, writing in The Los Angeles Times, said "no other writer now living can write with comparable grace and equal enthusiasm about everyone from Jack Teagarden and Art Tatum to Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman." And Bruce Cook in The New Leader called the book "the quintessential Whitney Balliett, the cream of the cream,...