Monday, May 1, 2017

But Beautiful [A Book About Jazz]



Dyer, Geoff. But Beautiful [A Book About Jazz]. Picador, 1996.

I was impressed with how Geoff Dyer writes about music. I picked up the book with a certain prejudice, since I had just read about how he likes to study a subject intensely for a few years and then create a book about the topic. He calls it ‘gatecrashing.’ This sounds familiar: I do kind of the same thing although I may not immerse myself for quite as long (usually it’s a year-long project chosen on New Year’s Day), and I produce an article or essay instead of a full-length book. I’ll be honest with the reader about my dilettantism and even crack jokes at my own expense. I blogged about my gatecrashing here in 2012: http://margaretmontet.blogspot.com/2012/12/resolving-happy-new-year.html.

What would a whole book about jazz by a non-jazzer be like? It was compelling! Without using jargon, he describes the sonic fabric, the onstage environment, and influences acting upon the musician. It’s no secret that many depend(ed) on substances in order to cope with life on the road, or unstable home and family lives damaged by that life on the road. They toured anyway, creating new interpretations of standard solos and tunes as they travelled from town to town. That recording you’ve listened to a thousand times of Art Blakey’s group playing “A Night in Tunisia” would sound different live in Philadelphia, and different again in Chicago. Dizzy Gillespie’s version would sound different still. You’d still recognize the tune, but the performances would differ. The point in jazz is not to make your performance sound the same as the original (as with a pop or rock cover band), but to make it sound new and unexpected. With the standard tunes often performed in jazz, it’s not even common knowledge who recorded it first. 

But Beautiful profiles Coleman Hawkins, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, Ben Webster, Charles Mingus, Chet Baker, and Art Pepper. Somehow, Dyer makes clear to the reader that the performance being created onstage as we read is a direct product of the experiences and tribulations that each musician has gone through. Their emotions and memories come out in the music. We are there on the stage with the musician, with cigarette smoke impeding our breathing, and the sound of ice in glasses mingling with the music. Dyer is a Brit—this is obvious from words like serviet for napkin—and he seems unaware of jargon that an average American jazz fan like me would know. At one point he has Ben Webster telling Charlie Parker that “you don’t play the tenor sax that way.” But we all know, (don’t we?), that Parker played alto saxophone. I’ve noticed over the years that saxophone players say ‘saxophone,’ not ‘sax,’ or more simply refer to the range: ‘Charlie Parker played alto.’

These quibbles don’t take away from the book. The descriptions of the musicians are superb. I was tempted to call out from work so that I wouldn’t have to put the book down.
“Throughout I relied more on photographs than on written sources…” That acknowledgement appears in the paragraph leading into Dyer’s bibliography. Sure, they say a picture is worth a thousand words, but still, what a curious, interesting way to put together a profile of a jazz musician. That comment stopped me in my tracks as a lot of the book did. Dyer is writing as a listener and as such has no need for pesky jargon. He has to make himself clear to his readers, not his jazz subjects, and he does this with aplomb.