Overview

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.

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9781665228022

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Top-shelf performance . . . Dion Graham delivers the kind of listening experience that you'll want to hear in one sitting.-- AudioFile A masterful effort, which comes as close to the music's essence as prose can go. -- San Francisco Chronicle Achingly gorgeous. -- Entertainment Weekly May be the best book ever written about jazz. -- Los Angeles Times The written equivalent of a jazz performance...[Dyer] has created an unforgettable melody of his own. -- Atlanta Journal Consitution With his wide range of dialects and exceptional ability to immerse himself in a story, Dion Graham delivers the kind of listening experience that you'll want to hear in one sitting and in the dark--a slowly unfolding tableau of moody characters and difficult times...Lifted by Graham's performance, this is an incomparable window onto the world of jazz in mid-century America. Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award. -- AudioFile

Author Information

Geoff Dyer is the author of several novels, a critical study of John Berger, and numerous genre-defying books, including But Beautiful, which won the Somerset Maugham Prize, and Out of Sheer Rage, which was a National Book Critics Circle finalist. The essay collection Otherwise Known as the Human Condition won 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, he is writer-in-residence at the University of Southern California. His books have been translated into twenty-four languages. Dion Graham, from HBO's The Wire, also narrates The First 48 on A&E. Winner of the prestigious Audie Award for best narration, he has performed on Broadway, off Broadway, internationally, in films, and in several hit television series.

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