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But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz

4.29 of 5 stars 4.29 · rating details · 544 ratings · 75 reviews

"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 f...more

Paperback, 240 pages

Published November 10th 2009 by Picador (first published 1991)

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Sep 09, 2011 Noce rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: narrativa-inglese, musica

Istruzioni per un’adeguata lettura.

- Sciogliete accuratamente le parole di questo libro, in una sera tiepida in cui non avete niente da fare, e immergetevi nella lettura con un sottofondo di musica jazz, a volume medio. Prima di levare lo sguardo dal libro, e ritornare alla solita routine abbiate cura di non strofinare via le emozioni che vi sono cadute addosso. Piuttosto frizionatele e lasciate che vi detergano l’anima.

- Risciacquate bene la malinconica melodia interiore di cui ormai siete pred...more Istruzioni per un’adeguata lettura.

- Sciogliete accuratamente le parole di questo libro, in una sera tiepida in cui non avete niente da fare, e immergetevi nella lettura con un sottofondo di musica jazz, a volume medio. Prima di levare lo sguardo dal libro, e ritornare alla solita routine abbiate cura di non strofinare via le emozioni che vi sono cadute addosso. Piuttosto frizionatele e lasciate che vi detergano l’anima.

- Risciacquate bene la malinconica melodia interiore di cui ormai siete preda, in modo da togliere eventuali tracce di agenti estranei (che so, l’eco di un nocivo ritornello di qualche canzone di Gigi D’Alessio e consorte, involontariamente sentito alla radio, mentre la mattina eravate imbottigliati nel traffico. Oppure l’intro di qualche trasmissione televisiva culturalmente elevata, come “Le tagliatelle di nonna Pina” che fanno da trionfale ouverture all’entrata della Clerici).

- Asciugate in un panno, la scala cromatica delle emozioni che questo libro vi ha suscitato, e stiratela, ancora palpitante, al rovescio, badando a mantenere la sua forma naturale intatta, senza pieghe, facendo scorrere delicatamente il ferro da stiro nel senso delle vibrazioni, ed evitando di allargare il senso di silenzio che cerca di rifare capolino nella vostra serata.

- Vi consiglio inoltre di cambiare ripetutamente il jazz che state ascoltando, alternando Ellington a Baker, Mingus a Monk, Parker a Jarrett, Coltrane a Powell, affinché non si debba ricorrere a una lettura violenta e affrettata, e vanificare così l’effetto salutare di questa storia d’amore musicale, lunga quanto il brivido di una nota di sax.

Piccola postilla: al mondo ci sono due tipi di persone. Quelli che quando parlano di jazz, citano la stra-abusata frase straccia maroni di Baricco, “Quando non sai cos’è, allora è jazz, gnè gnè gnè”. E poi ci sono quelli che invece ti fanno il nome di questo libro, o te lo regalano.

E giusto per introdurvi all'atmosfera ideale, vi regalo pure questo: http://youtu.be/ecrE80rnjhw
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Sep 22, 2007 Sarah rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: er-body

First, some gushing: Geoff Dyer is my favorite non-fiction writer ever and probably the best and most interesting author that you’ve never heard of. In these desperate days of tell-all memoirs, dry scholarly works, and self-help books, Dyer has forged ahead at full speed, writing self-deprecating, smart and funny genre-bending essays and books. And you can tell how much fun he’s having.

His book Out of Sheer Rage, which is impossible to categorize, forever changed the way I look at writing. The...more First, some gushing: Geoff Dyer is my favorite non-fiction writer ever and probably the best and most interesting author that you’ve never heard of. In these desperate days of tell-all memoirs, dry scholarly works, and self-help books, Dyer has forged ahead at full speed, writing self-deprecating, smart and funny genre-bending essays and books. And you can tell how much fun he’s having.

His book Out of Sheer Rage, which is impossible to categorize, forever changed the way I look at writing. The book, which is about him wanting to write a book about D. H. Lawrence, read like a 300-page preface to a book that he never got around to and promoted replacing literary criticism with, well, more literature. Reading it felt like someone embracing me and whispering in my ear, “It’s okay to have fun, Sarah. It’s okay to try new things. Really, it’s probably what you have to do.” In fact, in writing about him publicly, I feel like I’m giving away a secret.

So – why did it take me so long to read But Beautiful? I bought it a few years ago just because Dyer wrote it, but never read it because I didn’t really have an interest in or knowledge of jazz. Fortunately, though, I picked it off the bookshelf last week and found myself in love all over again.

How should a person write about jazz? After a typical Dyer-esque inner struggle in which he tried everything and then dismissed it all, the answer was clear: he would follow the rules and ways of the music. The result is a collection of eight chapters, each focused on a different jazz legend: Lester Young, Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington, Chet Baker.

Are these chapters fiction or non-fiction? True or not? Well, Dyer says, um, yes and no. He took from a lot of famous stories and quotes (standards) and then adapted them (improvised) and basically did what he felt like. The result captures the spirit of jazz more than any academic essay or novel or biography ever could. As I learned the tenets and tendencies of the music, I saw them being utilized by Dyer in his own prose at the same time. And this is all on top of his beautiful, funny, and straightforward writing style.

Just like Duke Ellington’s “Take the Coltrane “ Or Charles Mingus’ “Open Letter to Duke” (see how much I learned about jazz?), Dyer’s book is a tribute and also a work of art in it’s own right – it steals, echoes, references, riffs, and retells. It’s word jazz. Those who know a lot about jazz will pick up on many more of the allusions and the hidden quotes while those who don’t know much can just sit back and enjoy the music of the prose and learn as they go.

Not to mention the heartbreaking portraits it paints of the artist themselves and their often-tragic lives on the road and on stage – in between drug and alcohol addictions, discrimination, violence, mental illness, and, well, the blues. As someone who always had trouble listening to jazz, I can now access it and understand it better – envisioning Mingus sitting at the piano that could only fit in the kitchen of his small apartment, composing among the daily lives of his wife and children. Seeing Lester Young’s young talent be destroyed by life in the army (the most jazz-killing environment you can imagine). Sitting in the car with Duke, perpetually on the road.

And for those readers still itching to know some facts and read some traditional criticism, Dyer attached a 30-page essay to the back of the book. Although the essay is interesting and solidifies much of what you’ve just read in the body of the book, it seems a bit like an apology for being so whimsical (or, perhaps, something his editor made him add). Either way, it doesn’t take away from the bulk of Dyer’s project.

This is just one of those books – I want to scream its name from the rooftops.
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May 02, 2012 Ian Graye rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: cul-poli-phil-art, muse-ik, reviews-4-stars, read-2012, reviews

In a Lonely Tenement

He awoke at 6am, and slid out of the bed in the 20’s studio apartment he’d leased for six months.

It was still dark outside, but he could see a sliver of golden glow in a crack in the curtains.

He went over to it, and drew the curtains slightly apart.

Across the gap in the horseshoe-shaped apartment building, but down one level, he could see the source of the glow.

A woman, in her pyjamas, was prancing around her bedroom, well, between the wardrobe and her bed.

She was trying to...more

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Oct 25, 2011 Steve rated it 5 of 5 stars

But Beautiful soars, it flits, it builds with big crescendos, and it breathes in syncopation. It doesn’t always play the notes our melody-trained minds might expect; it plays better ones instead. It’s writing about jazz. It’s writing as jazz. Beyond that, I can’t think of a better way to describe Dyer’s purpose than to lift large chunks of his preface.

When I began writing this book I was unsure of the form it should take. This was a great advantage since it meant I had to improvise and so, from

...more But Beautiful soars, it flits, it builds with big crescendos, and it breathes in syncopation. It doesn’t always play the notes our melody-trained minds might expect; it plays better ones instead. It’s writing about jazz. It’s writing as jazz. Beyond that, I can’t think of a better way to describe Dyer’s purpose than to lift large chunks of his preface.

When I began writing this book I was unsure of the form it should take. This was a great advantage since it meant I had to improvise and so, from the start, the writing was animated by the defining characteristic of its subject.

Before long I found I had moved away from anything like conventional criticism. The metaphors and similes on which I relied to evoke what I thought was happening in the music came to seem increasingly inadequate. Moreover, since even the briefest simile introduces a hint of the fictive, it wasn't long before these metaphors were expanding themselves into episodes and scenes. As I invented dialogue and action, what was emerging came more and more to resemble fiction. At the same time, though, these scenes were still intended as commentary either on a piece of music or on the particular qualities of a musician. What follows, then, is as much imaginative criticism as fiction.

Many scenes have their origin in well-known or even legendary episodes: Chet Baker getting his teeth knocked out, for example. These episodes are part of a common repertory of anecdote and information -- “standards,” in other words, and I do my own versions of them, stating the identifying facts more or less briefly and then improvising around them, departing from them completely in some cases. This may mean being less than faithful to the truth but, once again, it keeps faith with the improvisational prerogatives of the form. Some episodes do not have their origins in fact: these wholly invented scenes can be seen as original compositions). […] Throughout, my purpose was to present the musicians not as they were but as they appear to me.

Then he does precisely that. Beautifully.

There’s a fair amount of the black experience that folds into the telling of jazz. Despite being a white guy from England, Dyer’s treatment sure seemed plausible to me. There was often a feeling of otherworldliness to it, too, like the lens was a little out of focus and the lighting was dim. The music he described was all the more vivid in contrast. Both the subject matter and Dyer’s writing itself offered glimpses – no, more like long, appreciative gazes – into the creative process.

While it’s true to say that you can appreciate this book without having much interest in jazz, it’s a bonus if you do. I enjoyed playing Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, and Keith Jarrett while I read it. For all I know, the experience may have been enhanced by smoking, drinking, and shooting up, too, but I stopped short of that. As honest, and artful, and creative as this was, I’m just glad I experienced it in any state.
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Jan 01, 2012 Cailin Deery rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites

“Despite all that has been said about jazz, it is anything but a hermetic form. What makes it a vital art form is its astonishing ability to absorb the history of which it is a part.”

This book is truly gorgeous. I hardly know where to start. I appreciate jazz, but my knowledge is in dire, short supply. It’s such a generational and collaborative art form, so it seems important to keep its evolution in context, which has always made me feel like I’ll never grasp it and will always be intimidated....more “Despite all that has been said about jazz, it is anything but a hermetic form. What makes it a vital art form is its astonishing ability to absorb the history of which it is a part.”

This book is truly gorgeous. I hardly know where to start. I appreciate jazz, but my knowledge is in dire, short supply. It’s such a generational and collaborative art form, so it seems important to keep its evolution in context, which has always made me feel like I’ll never grasp it and will always be intimidated. Dyer dashed my hesitation and makes it clear that this book (and jazz) will embrace you in a familiar, memorable way without pretension. Many artists, evidently, feel the same way I have: “Although scarcely a century old, the rapid evolution of jazz means that audience and performers alike share a sense of coming very late into the tradition.” And as such it is perpetually “a present with continuous roots in history, where an artist’s every action is judged by the unwearying tribunal of the dead.”

In “But Beautiful,” Dyer has created partially true, biographical sketches of Thelonious Monk, Art Pepper, Bud Powell and Mingus, and permeates these stories using a narrative style akin to jazz. There are countless others woven into the stories – Duke Ellington, Ben Webster, Pee Wee Russell, Lester Young, Chet Baker, Art Blakely, Charlie Parker, Roland Kirk, Eric Dolphy, etc, which add their own dimensions and interludes.

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“Where Kirk’s eyes were, Mingus saw the reflection of his own chewing face. He wanted music to be like the sun to a blind man, or a meal wolfed down when you were hungry, as immediate and instinctive, as necessary as that. And something else too – something Kirk had made him feel absolutely certain about. There had to be another sound that must also have been heard on the plantations, just as you heard it wherever work was done, however appalling the conditions: the sound of men laughing together.“

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Relationships, whether fleeting or steeped in a long history are tender. In this scene, a police officer discovered Powell, who is also a schizophrenic, on the banks of a river:

“You’re Bud Powell aren’t you?” his voice changing from tenderness to reverence.

Bud looked at him, said nothing, but there was relief at the back of his eyes, like when you knock on someone’s door at night and a light comes on in a distant room, something you feel as much as you see. As he reached for Bud’s hand, partly to help him up and partly just to shake it, he could not help smiling and blurting out, “This is the greatest day of my life”

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I already want to start this again. (less)

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May 30, 2012 Tosh rated it 5 of 5 stars

Great jazz and good writing has been a wonderful combination for many years now. So by even its cover I knew this book is going to of some interest. Geoff Dyer has a real appreciation for the visual imagery of jazz - meaning that his writing is almost a series of snapshots of various legendary jazz figures. He captures each moment that is both touching and 'wow.'

The individual pieces in this book are held together by brief episodes of Duke Ellington and Harry Carney on the road that reads sort...more

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Oct 01, 2011 Stewart rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

"But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz," published in 1996, is described by the author, Geoff Dyer, as “imaginative criticism as fiction.” Although some of the dialogue is invented, many of the scenes are based on well-known episodes in the lives of the early practitioners of American jazz. The book could be described as brief historical fiction or a literary improvisation on real-life themes.
Chapter by chapter, we get glimpses of the lives and music of Lester Young, Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington...more

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Jul 11, 2011 Jordan rated it 4 of 5 stars

BUT BEAUTIFUL, although slim, is the best book about jazz I've read. Dyer's approach is genius: he fictionally inhabits eight canonical moments in the lives of various jazz artists ("standards," he calls them), then riffs ("improvises"), blurring the line between fact and fiction. It's not just a book about jazz: BUT BEAUTIFUL is about art and creating, "tradition and the individual talent," "the anxiety of influence." Dyer's prose is exceptional, particularly his synesthesia-inducing figurative...more

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Jun 14, 2011 Tyler Jones rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: jazz, short-stories

For people with a compulsion to categorize, Geoff Dyer might be the most irritating writer on the planet. Writing books that defy easy classification seems to be Dyer's stock and trade and many find But Beautiful difficult to recognize as fiction. It is. Fiction so original as to be unlike anything the reader has read before but fiction none the less.

Dyer has chosen figures from the pantheon of jazz greats (Lester Young, Monk, Bud Powell, Art Pepper, Mingus, Duke Ellington, Ben Webster, Chet Bak...more

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Dec 22, 2010 Allan MacDonell rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I'm a big fan of writers who make stuff up about real historical people; so that puts me in the predisposed target audience for But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz. I'm not such a big fan of white Englishmen populating the inner world of strung-out, mentally afflicted, musically genius American black dudes and a couple of their white counterparts. Dyer's lyrical myth-making is fun enough, and filled with voyeuristic highs and lows. The only real trouble is that each one of these rare and special in...more

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Dec 08, 2012 John Biscello rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

A small masterpiece. One of the best books I've ever read. Impressionistic portraits of jazz legends--Lester Young, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Chet Baker, Ben Webster, Bud Powell, and Art Pepper--takes you deeply inside their music, mania, angels, and demons. The writing emulates the musicality and attitude of its subjects, and does so in a way that brings you into claustrophobic contact with these men and their obsessions. A sample passage: "That was how he always played and how he always...more

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Nov 18, 2010 Howling Black rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: american-narrative, music

Jazz can see things, draw things out of people that painting or writing don't see

The thing I most appreciated is the author's approach to the narration.
It's a complex book, music and lifes are interlaced as colours in a picture, it's not a biography of some jazzmen, nor the story of jazz, it's like jazz, mood and improvisation.
The greatness of this book is its ability to speak as music, it's a kind of concentrate of feelings, rhythm and notes. So we can experience some uncertain lives, divided...more

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Aug 09, 2010 E. Thomas rated it 4 of 5 stars

Dyer's book is as enjoyable as it is hard to classify. Each of its eight sections proceeds from a defining myth or anecdote about one of the jazz greats, which is then embellished through dialog, imagery and other fictional techniques. In this much Dyer's style resembles that of the musicians he admires: improvisatory but grounded in learning. It also resembles film when cutting back and forth in time to illuminate the present. None of the portraits fully succeed in imparting life to their subje...more

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Apr 30, 2012 Dan rated it 5 of 5 stars

Recommended to Dan by: Tobias

Shelves: music

This is a remarkable book. It's one of the best pieces of writing that I have ever read, and it's not just because I love Jazz. The approach of the writing is what I'd call unconventional because it claims to be neither fiction or non-fiction, which is a safe tack for the author to take. Even though, the book is not diminished by the author telling the reader all of this out in the preface; he says, point-blank, that it's what he's doing. He is attempting to tell the stories of a handful of jazz...more

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May 26, 2011 Iris rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: music

I married a jazz man. Thanks, Geoff Dyer, for bringing me into the fold at last.

While I've been surrounded by the recordings for many years, the clinical nature of jazz appreciation dissuades me from cottoning to the form. This book brings the love: with each chapter, a vibrant evocation of a life and art told in prose. Reading about Art Pepper or Thelonious Monk, or my favorite, tender and brave Lester Young, I heard their music and felt their life forces move through the sounds. Dyer, who mak...more

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Feb 03, 2013 Damiano Battaglia rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Due linee separate per il commento a "Natura morta con custodia di sax".
Contenuto. Entusiasmante, almeno per chi come me è totalmente digiuno di jazz. Scoprire, semplicemente per mezzo di una serie di biografie romanzate, che tipo di umanità si celasse dietro i geni del jazz, è stata un'esperienza umana folgorante. La spinta a procurarsi almeno qualche "best of" di questi artisti è quasi irresistibile, frenata solamente dalla sterminata vastità del repertorio che si dovrebbe affrontare. Il disag...more

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Nov 18, 2009 Tim rated it 4 of 5 stars

Excerpt from the full review on my blog:

Book blurbs often seem the equivalent of movie blurbs. Skepticism seems justified when a publisher puts a blurb smack on the front cover just below the title -- especially when it says, "May be the best book ever written about jazz." Is this honest commentary or gratuitous puffery? With Geoff Dyer's But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz , it's the former.

The concept behind But Beautiful is not unique in and of itself. First published in 1991 and out in a new tr...more

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Jun 17, 2011 Stenwjohnson rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The introduction to Geoff Dyer’s “But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz” raises a few red flags: He excuses his impressionistic series of jazz biographies as an act of “improvisation,” a work of creative license in the spirit of the music that it describes. If you’ve read enough music writing, you’ve heard this one before.

He shouldn’t protest so much. The eight lyrical, semi-fictionalized vignettes on Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, Lester Young, Chet Baker, Charles Mingus and others are a credible mix...more The introduction to Geoff Dyer’s “But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz” raises a few red flags: He excuses his impressionistic series of jazz biographies as an act of “improvisation,” a work of creative license in the spirit of the music that it describes. If you’ve read enough music writing, you’ve heard this one before.

He shouldn’t protest so much. The eight lyrical, semi-fictionalized vignettes on Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, Lester Young, Chet Baker, Charles Mingus and others are a credible mixture of historical record and fictional re-creation, and students of jazz history will recognize pivotal biographical moments. Dyer often tellingly references the atmospheric jazz photography of William Claxton and others, which add to the ethereal impression that his true subject is the moody netherworld of jazz mythology itself rather than the harder realities of lived experience.

The book concludes with the essay “Tradition, Influence and Innovation.” The ambitious title alone suggests the uncontainable size of the topic, and this non-fiction coda feels overreaching and thematically disconnected from the earlier chapters. Dyer is trying to do several things at once in the essay, commenting on jazz’s essential nature, offering a précis on its historical development, and loosely commenting on its present artists and their relationship to the music’s past and future. Most loftily, he suggests that jazz is by nature a series of commentaries on itself and other genres (which true enough, as improvised music on existing works) but that it defies any concrete commentary, like Music of the Spheres floating down from the empyrean as faerie dust. He decries the state of jazz writing, forgetting the fine work of Marshall Stearns, Ralph Gleason and others who wrote serious, enduring work advocating its worth before its cultural ascendency.

In the end, Dyer’s critical coda is solid and entertaining but commits the crimes it condemns, biting off more academic lard than it can chew. The earlier chapters, free from Harold Bloom quotations and glittering intellectual generalities, really capture the essence of the music.
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Dec 25, 2011 Saritha rated it 5 of 5 stars

But Beautiful is written in an a voice that sounds like fiction, bringing alive some snapshots, some moments and moods of the greats of jazz like Duke Ellington, Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell and Chet Baker.

This is a book where words have sound, the cadence itself much like jazz, a little structured, mostly improvised, with some unexpected forays. This kind of writing, this exquisite little piece of honest writing, not only blurs the divide between fiction and non-fi...more

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Sep 23, 2011 Mike Garrity added it · review of another edition

This is an odd little book. It’s a collection of fictional stories about real jazz musicians from the 50’s, stitched together by interludes involving Duke Ellington on a cross country road trip. One of the really interesting things about it is that the stories are all very visual, and obviously based on famous photographs you’ve seen of the musicians. However, the photographs are not in the book, so you need to rely on your memory of them. This means that as you read the story, it quickly become...more

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Dec 22, 2011 Katie Laird rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: all-around-greats

It has been years since I read this book, but is one of the few that has stuck with me in a big way. I can't quite explain it - even though I adore the musical genre greatly, the passages in this book pop into my brain at the most unexpected times.

It's quite simply a book about the names, faces and stories of Jazz. Nothing stuffy, nothing boring. Even if you're not a Jazz junkie - it's just a fascinating time period and group of people to dive into. And I bet you start poking around on YouTube a...more

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Mar 30, 2013 Sean rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Simply, a fantastic and enormously inventive book about Jazz. A must for jazz fans. Others may not relate as it's an imaginative work and not a historical or critical work. For them I say listen to good jazz by the classic creators of the modern form (1940s, 50s and 60s)for a few years and then read this. Classic creators = Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk etc... you've got a lot of pleasure awaiting you if you really connect with this amazing stream of music. But it takes some diggin...more

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Apr 02, 2013 Kayla Kristine rated it 4 of 5 stars

This book was recommended to me by a friend, and I have since recommended it to several customers interested in jazz. I have been a longtime listener of blues music, and have more recently begun to expose myself to jazz. This was a perfect introduction, and would suit the needs of both an avid or novice listener. I enjoyed the recurring theme of photographs and photography, and I could not get the term "synesthesia" out of my mind: both in describing Dyer's prose and the experience of creating a...more

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Mar 16, 2009 Bill rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

My favorite Dyer yet. Interleaving chapters imagining the jazz greats from the inside out, with Duke Ellington able to triumph over all while so many succumb to the times. Heartbreaking, sad, tragic, painful, ultimately only a brit fan's imaginings and tribue... but beautiful, indeed. Here's the Dyer effect: I had the experience reading this book that it reminded me of this incredible ineffable experience I might have reading this incredible book.. which was the book I was reading. It made me im...more

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Feb 15, 2012 Tim rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: nonfiction

Riffs on jazz musicians; here's what I copied into a notebook back in 1996: "Autun in New York, a brown sludge of leaves underfoot, a light rain falling. Hales of mist around trees, a clock waiting to strike twelve. Almost your birthday, Monk. ¶The city quiet as a beach, the noise of traffic like a tide. Neon sleeping in puddles. Places shutting and staying open. People saying good-bye outside bars, walking home alone. Work still going on, the city repairing itself." ¶"He saw the welcome lights...more

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Jul 16, 2012 Katherine added it · review of another edition

Ray lent me this. Perfect for anyone just turning towards Jazz or wishing to honor the art as more than a back drop. Move in alongside the psyche of some of jazz's greats. Books like this embody a soundtrack. This video showcases a few mentioned. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKqxG0... Holiday's expressions are unyeilding. The author's sensitivity and respect and the poetic language, imagery he uses is hypnotic. It can also be considered a kind of mild commentary as far as the creative process...more

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Oct 26, 2011 matt rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: miniature, musicalities, literary-crit, america-f-k-yeah, underrated, favorites

Truly superb- luminous, lyrical, subdued, kind of blue.

As I read it I heard the sound of the music limn the edges of the characters Dyer presents, who happen to be not only some of the lodestars of the jazz world but also certifiably brilliant 20th Century composers, by any standard you care to mention...Lester Young ("Pres" to Lady Day, who named her, and she him), Ben Webster, Art Pepper, Charles Mingus, Chet Baker ("the James Dean of Jazz"- a term I don't like all that much except it just s...more

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Jan 01, 2012 Paul Harris rated it 4 of 5 stars

So difficult to review this book - the likes of which I've never read before. I shan't attempt to in all honesty. Suffice to say, Geoff Dyer's writing is gripping, heartfelt, and all too believable. Which is pretty much all that matters given the subject matter - imagined portraits of the equally troubled and gifted musicians he portrays - Duke Ellington, Lester Young, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, Ben Webster, Charles Mingus, Chet Baker, and Art Pepper. I finished each chapter with an indelible...more

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Jan 08, 2013 Jayaprakash Satyamurthy rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This wasn't bad, but I couldn't help but wonder what the musicians evoked here would make of it. Like a lot of writers, Dyer sees perhaps too much meaning in music. The great thing about music, especially improvised instrumental music, is that it can be a space that transcends meaning, a space in which self expression and emotion are only a subset of what is going on. Dyer's afterword on the history and evolution of jazz, however, is a good introduction for the newcomer.

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Jan 07, 2013 Graham S rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

A wholly different kind of book that tries and largely succeeds in painting a detailed portrait of a number of jazz greats. He is able to characterise their music and demonstrate their abilities through these portraits. His starting point being that jazz is an expression of a player's personality and his life experiences. He also gets close to some plausible explanations of why so many jazz greats died early through drink, drugs and mental illness.

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About Geoff Dyer

Geoff Dyer was born in Cheltenham, England, in 1958. He was educated at the local grammar school and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. For more information visit Geoff Dyer's official website: www.geoffdyer.com

He is the author of four novels: Paris Trance, The Search, The Colour of Memory, and, most recently, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi; a critical study of John Berger, Ways of Telling; two c...more

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Books by Geoff Dyer

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“He [Thelonious Monk] played each note as though astonished by the previous one, as though every touch of his fingers on the keyboard was correcting an error and this touch in turn became an error to be corrected and so the tune never quite ended up the way it was meant to.” — 5 people liked it

“At some time all cities have this feel: in London it's at five or six on a winer evening. Paris has it too, late, when the cafes are closing up. In New York it can happen anytime: early in the morning as the light climbs over the canyon streets and the avenues stretch so far into the distance that it seems the whole world is city; or now, as the chimes of midnight hang in the rain and all the city's longings acquire the clarity and certainty of sudden understanding. The day coming to an end and people unable to evade any longer the nagging sense of futility that has been growing stronger through the day, knowing that they will feel better when they wake up and it is daylight again but knowing also that each day leads to this sense of quiet isolation. Whether the plates have been stacked neatly away or the sink is cluttered with unwashed dishes makes no difference because all these details--the clothes hanging in the closet, the sheets on the bed--tell the same story--a story in which they walk to the window and look out at the rain-lit streets, wondering how many other people are looking out like this, people who look forward to Monday because the weekdays have a purpose which vanishes at the weekend when there is only the laundry and the papers. And knowing also that these thoughts do not represent any kind of revelation because by now they have themselves become part of the same routine of bearable despair, a summing up that is all the time dissolving into everyday. A time in the day when it is possible to regret everything and nothing in the same breath, when the only wish of all bachelors is that there was someone who loved them, who was thinking of them even if she was on the other side of the world. When a woman, feeling the city falling damp around her, hearing music from a radio somewhere, looks up and imagines the lives being led behind the yellow-lighted windows: a man at his sink, a family crowded together around a television, lovers drawing curtains, someone at his desk, hearing the same tune on the radio, writing these words.” — 1 person liked it

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