But Beautiful

Book Description

5 Reviews

• 1 person find this helpful

  

  The eye hears what ears miss

  Dyer's writing is the best way to describe jazz music. Soft and heartbreaking, each character is next to you when you're reading these pages. Improvising on some real pictures of jazz musicians, Dyer makes you really feel how listening to Lester Young, Bud Powell and Art Pepper (for instance) must h ... (continue)

  Dyer's writing is the best way to describe jazz music. Soft and heartbreaking, each character is next to you when you're reading these pages. Improvising on some real pictures of jazz musicians, Dyer makes you really feel how listening to Lester Young, Bud Powell and Art Pepper (for instance) must have been a life changing experience.

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  Gekko P. said on Dec 5, 2008 about the Paperback edition | Add your feedback

• 

  Jazz can see things, draw things out of people that painting or writing don't see

  The thing I most appreciated is the author's approach to the narration.
  It's a complex book, music and lifes are interlaced as colours in a picture, it's not a biography of some jazzmen, nor the story of jazz, it's like jazz, mood and improvisation.
  The greatness of this book is its ability to spea ... (continue)

  The thing I most appreciated is the author's approach to the narration.
  It's a complex book, music and lifes are interlaced as colours in a picture, it's not a biography of some jazzmen, nor the story of jazz, it's like jazz, mood and improvisation.
  The greatness of this book is its ability to speak as music, it's a kind of concentrate of feelings, rhythm and notes. So we can experience some uncertain lives, divided between music and lonliness, lost in roads without an end or in cold and empty hotel rooms, a will of redemption for people that don't have anythig but jazz. Jazzmen are depicted as ghosts who live in their music, as if they didn't belong to this world, but they would be a kind of spirits, able only to live of their music, in their notes, upset and suffocated into the deep sadness we can breath in the soul of jazz. I don't think it's possible to write anything else better about jazz.

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  Howling Black said on Apr 7, 2010 about the Paperback edition | Add your feedback

• 

  wonderful

  wonderful fiction-nonfiction book about some of the key players in jazz. i.e. thelonious monk, dizzy gillespie, charles mingus, etc. very nice read all the way thru. it's a very visual book due to the way it's written.

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  colectivofuturo said on Mar 2, 2010 about the Paperback edition | Add your feedback

• Just beautiful

  One of the most beautiful books I've read.
  It's not just about Jazz...

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  Liangihan said on Dec 8, 2009 about the Paperback edition | Add your feedback

• 

  The best book on Jazz I have ever read.

  The beautifully intertwined facts and fictions of the musician's bios is the closest literature can come to mimicking improvisation.

  If that weren't enough, at the end of the book is the "definitive essay on jazz".

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  Halfadrop said on Nov 21, 2008 about the Paperback edition | Add your feedback

Book Details

• Rating:
  (15)
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• English Books
• Others 240 Pages
• ISBN-10: 0312429479
• ISBN-13: 9780312429478
• Publisher: Picador USA
• Pub date: Nov 10, 2009
• Also available as: Paperback, Hardcover and eBook
• In other languages: other languages Deutsche Bücher

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