But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz [Paperback]

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 ofBut Beautiful,and wildly metaphoric prose that mirrors the quirks, eccentricity, and brilliance of each musician's style.

Geoff Dyeris the author ofOut of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence, andWays of Telling,a critical study of John Berger;The Missing of the Somme, about World War I; and the novelsParis Trance, The Color of Memory,andThe Search.

Achingly gorgeous...evokes the lives of working musicians so that you taste the whiskey, smell the stubbed cigarettes, hear the gentle clicking of the valves, the coughs, and shuffling feet between studio takes. Jonathan Lethem, Entertainment Weekly

The only book about jazz that I have recommended to my friends. It is a little gem. Keith Jarrett

A masterful effort, which comes as close to the music's essence as prose can go. Ted Gioia, San Francisco Chronicle

Dyer turns jazz into poetry and his subjects into a beautiful sad music....Few will be unmoved by his passion and eloquence and the harrowing portraits of jazz's haunted geniuses. Tom Graves, The Washington Post Book World

A gorgeous and lyrical collection of nocturnal jazz reveries. The New Yorker

But Beautifulis just that, a moving and highly original tribute to Black American music. Bryan Ferry

An ingenious anlÓ.