On reading Geoff Dyer’s But Beautiful …
I’ve been listening to and treating myself to little else than Brazilian sounds of late. The one exception was wasting a Foppish fiver each on Lee Morgan and Horace Silver late ‘60s titles. And if the Brazilian love affair has been triggered by reading Caetano Veloso’s Tropical Truths, then the jazz detour is the fault of Geoff Dyer’s But Beautiful.
As music books go, Tropical Truths is just about the best I’ve ever read. Caetano, self-styled pop star intellectual, shoots off at so many different tangents, and it’s hard not to get caught up in his tropicalismo net. His is the sort of story Geoff Dyer could only dream of being a part of. But at least Dyer has the imagination to cast himself in such a position.
I suspect, but haven’t checked, that Dyer has graced Tangents’ pages before now. If he has, I hope it wasn’t with But Beautiful. I would be kicking myself for missing out. For this is a lovely book about jazz, and ostensibly jazz musicians. And ostensibly it’s a series of vignettes starring some of the jazz greats, like Thelonius Monk, Duke Ellington, Ben Webster, Charlie Mingus, Art Pepper, Chet Baker. Sweet short stories, like snapshots of their lives, capturing the grace, madness, pain and poetry of the jazz life. As we imagine it.
And, continuing a recent theme, the book’s current back cover carries an endorsement from Jonathan Lethem, author of this year’s classic book The Fortress Of Solitude, and Go-Betweens fan. Well, it made me buy it.
What Dyer does is inject new life into jazz cliches, like the drinking, the drugs, the delusions, the dementia, the driving, the darkness, the daring, the discrimination, the dues, the dependencies, the distances, the dreaming, the dames. He knows he is covering familiar ground, but he is a virtuoso, and turns in a set of spectacular performances. Occasionally obvious, over familiar, but beautiful.
And there will be writers sitting in the sunshine somewhere, listening to a soundtrack of Brazilian magic, kicking themselves that they lack the dedication (yeah, something else beginning with d…) to get themselves together to do something as literary and inspirational with the pop medium they love so. Imagine some less obvious characters caught on film, their sacred souls held up to catch certain hints of light and love. But life’s so hectic, and illuminated thankfully by the likes of Dyer. It’s no wonder another of his more recent books is Yoga For People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It. He knows what we’re like. And I really should read that one if I see a copy around.
© 2004 John Carney