Tuesday, April 11, 2017

Geoff Dyer, But Beautiful ***

This slim book contains Dyer's impressionistic meditations about jazz. Each chapter is an imagined scene from the life of a jazz master like Duke Ellington, Lester Young, or Chet Baker, described in a manner intended to capture the feeling of the man's music. It's beautifully written and contains passages of insightful music criticism. The cumulative effect is a bit too monochromatic though: every one of the musicians is closed off and dealing with an addiction or mental issue.

My favorite chapters were the first two, about Lester Young and Thelonious Monk. The Young chapter best describes the artist's life in musical terms, and the Monk chapter has the best description of his music.
Sometimes the song seemed to have turned inside out or to have been constructed entirely from mistakes. ... But a logic was operating, a logic unique to Monk: if you always played the least expected note a form would emerge, a negative imprint of what was initially anticipated.

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