But Beautiful

When I received two separate recommendations for Geoff Dyer's book about jazz over a short time period, I decided it must be worth the trouble.  So it's not surprising that the book is lovely to the point of painful.  Dyer's fictionalized stories of the lives of various jazz heroes are held together above all by his focus on the damage done to these incredible musicians.  But, as the title implies, their fragility gives birth to a beauty that goes way beyond the individual involved, and, perhaps as the more straightforward music criticism in the afterword suggests, actually consumes that individual in its creation.  Since Dyer's stories are more like prose poems than plots, he does an amazing job of capturing the ineffability of the mood that a particular artist or piece of music can evoke.  In this sense, each chapter records Dyer's own emotional reaction to an artist, but elaborated an act of imaginatively sketching the life that could have produced the music so packed with this emotion.  A unique book that any jazz fan is going to love.  

 

#reread