Name: But Beautiful
Rating: 4.75 (4 reviews)
ISBN: 9780865475083

Geoff Dyer

A fictional recreation of the spirit and sound of jazz traces the history of the music through the lives of eight great musicians: Lester Young, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington, Ben Webster, Chet Baker, Bud Powell, and Art Pepper

A Book about Jazz

But Beautiful

Greg Talbot

Bent out of shape in a hospital after a military training exercise, a doctor notes of the young man “constitutional psychopathic state manifested by drug addiction (marijuana barbiturates), chronic alcoholism, and nomadism…A purely disciplinary problem” The doctor’s afterthought in summary is the singular word “jazz” (p.16). What a phenomenal and inspiring love letter to the men who lived between the silences and the noise. Hustling from gig to gig; masters of their craft and alienated in their homeland. Well received in Germany as men, but second-class citizens subject to Jim Crow injustice and police brutality. Bud, Bird, Monk, Chet, their itinerant stories are explored from gig, to gal, to meltdown, to reflection. Whether it’s Bud Powell’s wandering across the New York streets, unsure if he is dead or alive. Chet Baker’s beating by a drug dealer with a glass ketchup bottle, or Monk’s unpredictable mood swings, are embellished with Dyer’s imaginative criticism This book flows so beauifully. It's a stream of conscious with of tinkering minds and stripped-down Raymond Carver structure. These lush stories reflect their own melody, words like notes, gliding the reader across the journey of these men who were hailed as genius and struggling to find their next meal. But in their life, they produced some of these beautiful explosions of noise on vinyl. And it’s out there now. Streaming in fact. Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” or Monk’s “The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady”, or Davis’s wild “Live/Evil” have found their way deep into my psyche and hopefully the inner world of many more. Dyer captures the story of the original cool. From bebop to fusion…the continuous improve, the endless gig, it’s jazz baby. In the afterward, Dyer reveals some of his magician hand. “The best readings of art are art (p.184)”. Many of these stories have their origin in legendary episodes. And they are also an inspired creation. Dyer states that “photographs” of these men were most valuable to his writing, even more then the biographies he documents in the index. And so many of these pages retain the sharp photo quality. Shared of glasses after a fight. Reading a newspaper in a foreign language. Beach seductions. Crafted is a loving tribute to one of the great musical traditions, and "But Beautiful" continues the conversation the music that inspired it.

"May be the best book ever written about jazz."—David Thomson, Los Angeles Times In eight poetically charged vignettes, Geoff Dyer skillfully evokes the music and the men who shaped modern jazz. Drawing on photos, anecdotes, and, most important, the way he hears the music, Dyer imaginatively reconstructs scenes from the embattled lives of some of the greats: Lester Young fading away in a hotel room; Charles Mingus storming down the streets of New York on a too-small bicycle; Thelonious Monk creating his own private language on the piano. However, music is the driving force of But Beautiful, and wildly metaphoric prose that mirrors the quirks, eccentricity, and brilliance of each musician's style.

But Beautiful A Book about Jazz

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