Geoff Dyer, _But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz_

WHEN I DECIDED to give Geoff Dyer a spin a few years back, I bought Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It and this. I read Yoga first, enjoyed it (LLL June 26, 2016), but felt no particular enthusiasm for it, so this loitered on my shelves for another two years or so. Turns out it's a better book--more cohesive, unsurprisingly, since Yoga is a collection of occasional pieces, but also more about his subjects and less about Dyer, more insightful and less flamboyant.

The core of the book is eight short stories. I'm not sure Dyer would call them short stories, and they are certainly not typical short stories, but they are quite a bit like the short stories of Guy Davenport--that is, they depict actual historical figures, figures Davenport studied long and deeply, and they are written with a poet's feel for language. Dyer's historical figures are all jazz musicians from mid-century: Lester Young, Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, Ben Webster, Charlie Mingus, Chet Baker, Art Pepper, and Duke Ellington (whose story, about a road trip with Harry Carney to their next show, is broken up into segments and interspersed between the seven others).

The stories are usually set in a particular moment (e.g., "He left the asylum on a clear late-autumn morning, noticing the crunch of gravel under his feet, the waiting car") but evoke the whole career ("Monk was used to always doing what he felt like and if he felt like staying in bed for ten years he'd so that, regretting nothing, wanting nothing"). Leitmotifs occur: encounters with racism, the difficulties of getting paid, the lure of alcohol and drugs. Dyer's portraits tend to drift into poète maudit clichés sometimes, but they still succeed in dropping us into what feel like convincing evocations of the musicians' days and nights.

The stories do not always dwell closely on the music, but to make up for that we have the book's concluding piece, a 30-page essay that draws on George Steiner to talk about the great paradox of jazz, at the same time both saturated in tradition and improvisatory, born of the moment.

I think this is only entire book about jazz I have read, so it would be ridiculous for me to say it is the best book on that subject, but it's hard for me to imagine there are many better ones.