Book Review: But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz by Geoff Dyer

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 trade paper edition, it consists of essays about jazz greats Lester "Pres" Young, Thelonius Monk, Bud Powell, Ben Webster, Charlie Mingus, Chet Baker and Art Pepper, with an overarching piece on Duke Ellington traveling between gigs and his songwriting. In execution, though, it is "about jazz" unlike any other book.

The combination of technical and artistic aspects makes any genre of music hard to write about and leaves little doubt that the variously attributed statement that it's like "dancing about architecture" is absolutely true. And it's hard to find a genre with a more complex architecture than jazz, thereby increasing the difficulty of describing it. Dyer, however, does so with sentences that are often strikingly simple yet go right to the heart of the music. For example:

• Monk "played each note as though astonished by the previous one," often leaving the feeling that "the song seemed to have turned inside out."
• Mingus's "bass marched everyone along like a bayonet in a prisoner's back."
• "Every time [Baker] played a note he waved it goodbye. Sometimes he didn't even wave."

These phrases exquisitely describe an aspect of each musician's style. Yet the descriptions leave the initiated nodding their head while still giving the uninitiated a sense of the nature of the music. And Dyer also provides longer expositions, such as this passage describing Pepper playing his alto sax while sitting in a prison cell:

"For a few moments he falters, oblivious to what he is playing, clutching the eight and ninth rungs of the count. Then, summoning everything, he searches for the highest note, reaches it — just — and soars clear. At the height of this leap, before gravity reasserts itself, there is a moment of absolute weightlessness — bright, clear, serene — before he is falling again, gliding in a gorgeous arc, subsiding into the deep moan of the blues. And the convicts realize that's what it's been about all along — a dream of falling."

In a paragraph, Dyer has taken us inside a few seconds of improvisation and both the emotions that helped create it and those it itself created. This is far from the only example in But Beautiful, named after a jazz standard. Over the course of roughly a page, Dyer describes Baker's style in a way that is nearly as transcendent as its subject.

Article Author: Tim Gebhart

Tim Gebhart lives in Sioux Falls, SD, where he practices law in order to provide shelter for his family, his dogs, and his books. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and his blog de guerre is A Progressive on the Prairie.

Visit Tim Gebhart's author page — Tim Gebhart's Blog