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* Collected Works: A Journal of Jazz 1954-2000. By Whitney Balliett. St. Martin's Press (175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010; 212-674-5151), 2000. 872 pp. Index. Hardcover, $40.00. Jazz critic for The New Yorker magazine since 1957, Whitney Balliett has collected a series of his writings about jazz and grouped them by decade (the fifties to the nineties and beyond). The individual pieces capture the flavor of jazz performances from New York club solos to festivals and institutions such as Preservation Hall in New Orleans. Readers learn that Duke Ellington was intensely superstitious, that Bill Clinton considers jazz a "music of inclusion, a music of democracy," and that trumpeter Tom Harrell thinks that "improvisation and composing are the same thing, just carried out at different speeds." Taken as a whole, the book offers a brief history of American jazz in the last half of the twentieth century.