But Beautiful, Geoff Dyer
But Beautiful, Geoff Dyer
List: $19.99 | Sale: $13.99
Club: $9.99

But Beautiful
A Book About Jazz

Author: Geoff Dyer

Narrator: Dion Graham

Unabridged: 5 hr 6 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 04/09/2019

Categories: Nonfiction, Music, Jazz


Synopsis

In eight poetically charged vignettes, Geoff Dyer skillfully evokes the music and the men who shaped modern jazz. Drawing on photos, anecdotes, and, most important, the way he hears the music, Dyer imaginatively reconstructs scenes from the embattled lives of some of the greats: Lester Young fading away in a hotel room; Charles Mingus storming down the streets of New York on a too-small bicycle; Thelonious Monk creating his own private language on the piano. However, music is the driving force of But Beautiful, and wildly metaphoric prose that mirrors the quirks, eccentricity, and brilliance of each musician's style.

About Geoff Dyer

Geoff Dyer is the award-winning author of many books, including But Beautiful, Out of Sheer Rage, Zona (on Andrei Tarkovsky's film Stalker), and the essay collection Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism). A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Dyer lives in Los Angeles, where he is writer-in-residence at the University of Southern California. His books have been translated into twenty-four languages.


Reviews

There is a truism about jazz: some like to just hear the song’s melody played straight; others, appreciate the improvisation that uses the melody as a jumping off point. The latter like jazz. Geoff Dyer states in his title that this is “a book about jazz.” What he doesn’t tell you is that, in looking......more

Goodreads review by Ian

In a Lonely Tenement He awoke at 6am, and slid out of the bed in the 20’s studio apartment he’d leased for six months. It was still dark outside, but he could see a sliver of golden glow in a crack in the curtains. He went over to it, and drew the curtains slightly apart. Across the gap in the horsesho......more