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A review by omnivorousabstraction
But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz by Geoff Dyer
5.0
As Dyer himself suggests in the introduction, this is a uniquely 'jazzy' way to tell stories about jazz, improvising, as it were, over well-known anecdotes about a few of the all-time greats (Young, Monk, Powell, Webster, Mingus, Baker, Pepper) strung together between glimpses of Duke Ellington on a road trip, searching for his next great musical invention. Strung together - by threads of deep emotional torment and passion, of brutalisation, of substance abuse, of sentimentality and of uncompromising aesthetic devotion.
All of the vignettes are memorable and moving in some way, but for me the most powerful were those dealing with Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell and Charles Mingus, perhaps partly because I feel so especially attached to their music.
The vision of Monk probes into the obsessing uniqueness of the man as well of the artist, from his quietly otherworldly qualities and manners - 'instead of coming out of his lips, the words rolled back into his throat, like a wave rolling back into the sea instead of crashing onto the beach' - through his unique playing style - 'you always felt that at the heart of the time was a beautiful melody that has come out back to front, the way around' - his relationship with his doting wife Nellie, and his final withdrawal into himself - 'silence settled on him like dust. He went deep inside himself and never came out....He has got lost inside the labyrinth of himself and puttered around there, never found a way out.' The poetry of Dyer's language lingers in my mind, and will without doubt affect how I listen to Thelonious' music again in the future.
Powell is a sort of counterpart to Monk, the other great architect of the bebop piano style, and there is a similar sense of distance in Dyer's portrait of him. 'Your music encloses you, seals you off from me.' But where Monk is deeply withdrawn and inwardly strange, Powell seethes with manic energy, and Powell's response to the brutality of life and to his internal struggles is a more extrovert kind of frenzy, expressed in Dyer's portraits of 'a vein throbbing in your temple, swear raining on the keyboard, lips stretched back over your teeth...melodies blooming and fading like flowers...snarling at the audience of between numbers' and of Powell struggling to play again in his broken old age - 'like the tightrope walker wobbling....then stumbling, your hand becoming tangled up in each other...drowning in the the tune like it was an ocean swallowing you up....As the audience applauded, they understood that there must be something terrible about a form of music that can wreak such havoc on a man....It is the crash rather than the perfect somersaults that expresses the truth.' The whole dialogue with Powell is a very poignant one.
The one constant factor in Mingus' life, in the Dyer telling, is anger, wild, volatile, unpredictable anger - anger connected, as in the Greek world, with strength of will and character and self, with pure unadulterated θυμός. 'He was like a country where the temperature changes vehemently every few seconds - except whenever it does it's boiling: boiling cold, boiling hot, boiling rain, boiling ice.' 'He had decided that nothing would get in his way, and as a consequence his life had become an obstacle course.... If he had been a ship the ocean would have been in his way.' That giant ego, that sense of spirit, is felt in the vast power of his music (e.g. The tour de force, 'Moanin'' with its fat Bari saxes) - 'he hollered and whooped above the music, urging it on so that he could feel the calm of the hurricane's eye, yelling and howling like Frankenstein ecstatic and aghast at the monster he has unleashed, delighted by the thought that it is all but beyond his control.' Dyer also offers a deeply beautiful account of the relationship that developed between Mingus and the blind multi-saxophonist Roland Rahsaan Kirk, of their shared visions of music as a loud cry, for Kirk emerging from dreams, and for Mingus 'like the sun to a blind man, or a meal wolfed down when you were hungry'.
The other vignettes are beautiful too, lovingly exploring the characters of the elder statesmen Young and Webster, and of the junkie maniacs Baker and Pepper, the hero of supposedly 'squandered potential' and the man convinced of his own fundamental importance. This is a book I will keep coming back to, I think.
All of the vignettes are memorable and moving in some way, but for me the most powerful were those dealing with Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell and Charles Mingus, perhaps partly because I feel so especially attached to their music.
The vision of Monk probes into the obsessing uniqueness of the man as well of the artist, from his quietly otherworldly qualities and manners - 'instead of coming out of his lips, the words rolled back into his throat, like a wave rolling back into the sea instead of crashing onto the beach' - through his unique playing style - 'you always felt that at the heart of the time was a beautiful melody that has come out back to front, the way around' - his relationship with his doting wife Nellie, and his final withdrawal into himself - 'silence settled on him like dust. He went deep inside himself and never came out....He has got lost inside the labyrinth of himself and puttered around there, never found a way out.' The poetry of Dyer's language lingers in my mind, and will without doubt affect how I listen to Thelonious' music again in the future.
Powell is a sort of counterpart to Monk, the other great architect of the bebop piano style, and there is a similar sense of distance in Dyer's portrait of him. 'Your music encloses you, seals you off from me.' But where Monk is deeply withdrawn and inwardly strange, Powell seethes with manic energy, and Powell's response to the brutality of life and to his internal struggles is a more extrovert kind of frenzy, expressed in Dyer's portraits of 'a vein throbbing in your temple, swear raining on the keyboard, lips stretched back over your teeth...melodies blooming and fading like flowers...snarling at the audience of between numbers' and of Powell struggling to play again in his broken old age - 'like the tightrope walker wobbling....then stumbling, your hand becoming tangled up in each other...drowning in the the tune like it was an ocean swallowing you up....As the audience applauded, they understood that there must be something terrible about a form of music that can wreak such havoc on a man....It is the crash rather than the perfect somersaults that expresses the truth.' The whole dialogue with Powell is a very poignant one.
The one constant factor in Mingus' life, in the Dyer telling, is anger, wild, volatile, unpredictable anger - anger connected, as in the Greek world, with strength of will and character and self, with pure unadulterated θυμός. 'He was like a country where the temperature changes vehemently every few seconds - except whenever it does it's boiling: boiling cold, boiling hot, boiling rain, boiling ice.' 'He had decided that nothing would get in his way, and as a consequence his life had become an obstacle course.... If he had been a ship the ocean would have been in his way.' That giant ego, that sense of spirit, is felt in the vast power of his music (e.g. The tour de force, 'Moanin'' with its fat Bari saxes) - 'he hollered and whooped above the music, urging it on so that he could feel the calm of the hurricane's eye, yelling and howling like Frankenstein ecstatic and aghast at the monster he has unleashed, delighted by the thought that it is all but beyond his control.' Dyer also offers a deeply beautiful account of the relationship that developed between Mingus and the blind multi-saxophonist Roland Rahsaan Kirk, of their shared visions of music as a loud cry, for Kirk emerging from dreams, and for Mingus 'like the sun to a blind man, or a meal wolfed down when you were hungry'.
The other vignettes are beautiful too, lovingly exploring the characters of the elder statesmen Young and Webster, and of the junkie maniacs Baker and Pepper, the hero of supposedly 'squandered potential' and the man convinced of his own fundamental importance. This is a book I will keep coming back to, I think.