Quite simply, But Beautiful is one of the most astonishing books I’ve ever read. An impressionistic, semi-fictionalised series of portraits of early jazz legends — Lester Young, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, Ben Webster, Chet Baker, Charles Mingus et al — it’s also one of the great books about popular music, period. Dyer’s starting points are first-hand accounts of these great musicians’ lives, memoirs and liner notes, and particularly photographs — his destinations are gloriously creative evocations of a time and a sound, of the immense spirit of these extraordinary players, and the cities with which their lives and music became entwined.
The following paragraph, based around a Milt Hinton photograph of Ben Webster, Red Allen, and Pee Wee Russell, not only hints at this thesis underpinning for the entire book — why not extrapolate, extend and imagine fictions drawn out of documentary material? — but also suggests photography’s power in terms of both extending and fracturing narrative around image (and therefore also its immensely seductive attraction for early 20thC modernists, and heavy influence on other visual art cf. futurism, cubism, collage/montage etc. That jazz is often associated with the abstract expressionists and…
