But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz

Lester Young fading away in a hotel room; Charles Mingus storming down the streets of New York on a too-small bicycle; Thelonius Monk creating his own private language on the piano…In eight poetically charged vignettes, Geoff Dyer skilfully evokes the embattled lives of the players who shaped modern jazz. He draws on photos and anecdotes, but music is the driving force of But Beautiful and Dyer brings it to life in luminescent and wildly metaphoric prose that mirrors the quirks, eccentricity, and brilliance of each musician’s style.

Reviews of But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz

*'Remarkable…there can be few books on jazz written with such tenderness and care.' – Times Literary Supplement* *'May be the best book ever written about jazz' – David Thomson, Los Angeles Times Book Review* *'Brilliant … (Dyer's) attempts to recreate the drug-fogged, music-drenched, reality-melting, racism crazed insides of the minds of people like Powell, Mingus, Webster and Chet Baker are unnervingly effective' – Miles Kington, Independent on Sunday*