BOOKS OF THE TIMES
BOOKS OF THE TIMES;Jazz's Dark Forces and the Artists Who Love Them
By RICHARD BERNSTEIN
Published: March 20, 1996
BUT BEAUTIFUL A Book About Jazz By Geoff Dyer 227 pages. North Point Press. $21.
The subtitle of this marvelously literate, mostly fictional love letter about music and musicians could be "The Inherent Danger of Jazz," even if Geoff Dyer, an Englishman who has utterly mastered a peculiarly American idiom, seems to have gotten something backward. In form, "But Beautiful" is a series of semifictional portraits of several of the great jazz pioneers: Duke Ellington driving across country with Harry Carney, Lester Young spiritually dying in a hotel room overlooking Birdland in Manhattan, Thelonious Monk instigating an episode of police brutality by asking in "a saliva strangle of sound" for a "glassawar" -- a glass of water -- in a roadside hotel.
Common to all of the dramatis personae is a struggle with the dark forces, with violence, despair, self-destruction, racial hatred, heroin addiction, alcohol and the unbearable pressure to keep the touch of genius in an art form whose very essence is spontaneity and improvisation. Mr. Dyer looks in on most of his musicians just at the moment when the touch is disappearing, or when they stare Early Death in its pallid face. This is what justifies the author's statement, made in a nonfictional essay at the end, that "there is something inherently dangerous in the form," something that "has apparently wreaked havoc on those who play it."
Some, including this not-very-musical reviewer, might put things the other way around. It isn't an inherent danger in the form that leads to destruction, but something dangerous in the men who adopt jazz as their medium of expression. In the same way, to take a parallel suggested by Mr. Dyer, was there some "inexorable logic in the poetry of Sylvia Plath" that "drove her to suicide"? Or isn't it more likely that something urgent in Plath drove her both to her poetry and to her death?
Never mind. Whether it is correct or not in its ordering of the dark forces and the artistic temperament, "But Beautiful" is . . . beautiful, an ingenious and brilliantly written book. Even readers not fascinated by jazz above other kinds of music are likely to find Mr. Dyer too good a literary craftsman to put the book down. The Army officers who turned Lester Young's stint in the Army into a racial nightmare were "knuckle-faced men who each day subjected their jaws to shaving as though they were boots to be polished." Young's girlfriend felt that he "was the gentlest man she had ever known, his sound was like a stole wrapped around bare shoulders, weighing nothing."
Or here is the great Charles Mingus playing the bass: "Some people played the bass like sculptors, carving notes out of an unwieldy piece of stone; Mingus played it like he was wrestling, getting in close, working inside, grabbing at the neck, and plucking strings like guts." Mr. Dyer writes: "Then he'd touch the strings softly as a bee landing on the pink petals of an African flower growing some place no one had ever been. When he bowed it he made the bass sound like the humming of a thousand-strong congregation in church."
This is the writing of an aficionado, and Mr. Dyer's very informed appreciation of the music is a contagious pleasure. He makes you want to run out and buy a bunch of the recordings that he lists in a convenient "select discography" that serves as an appendix to his novel. Mr. Dyer's approach is to mimic the improvisational nature of the music itself, assembling a text made up of quick sketches, shifts in time and mood. There is no story here in the conventional sense, even as Mr. Dyer manages to write a narrative of lives lived precariously, eccentrically, like biographical equivalents of the art.
"Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom," Charlie Parker said. Parker, who died at the age of 34, is a good illustration of Mr. Dyer's observation, that "anyone interested in jazz is struck very early on by the high casualty rate of its practitioners." Parker himself went on: "If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn."
The same could probably be said about Mr. Dyer, who seems to have lived jazz, at least as a close observer, and put into his book his experience, his thoughts and his wisdom. "But Beautiful," which is about as intricate a mixture of biographical essay and make-believe as is likely to be written, does raise two old questions: How does the reader know what is truth and what is fiction? And does it matter?
On the first question: the reader doesn't know. Mr. Dyer, in a nonfictional foreword, informs us that he made up dialogue and action, but even as he created fictional scenes, they were "intended as commentary either on a piece of music or the particular qualities of a musician." Some of the events, he tells us, are based on known episodes -- Mr. Dyer gives the example of Chet Baker (the sole white musician in Mr. Dyer's black pantheon) getting his teeth knocked out in a coffee shop when he couldn't pay his drug dealer. Mr. Dyer tells us generally, however, to keep the musical analogy in mind: assume that he is improvising on "identifying facts," or in some instances making "original compositions," even if they quote from earlier works.
Does it matter? Clearly Mr. Dyer has taken justifiable license with men who made it up as they went along, and, at the same time, remained true to a remarkable craft. That scene of Chet Baker losing his teeth, for example, could never be reconstructed from historical data. In Mr. Dyer's hands it is electrifying, a terrible gem. And it helps in understanding what Mr. Dyer means in one of his typically gemlike passages of criticism.
"Chet left a song feeling bereft," he writes. "When he played it the song needed comforting; it wasn't his playing that was packed with feeling, it was the song itself, feeling hurt. You felt each note trying to stay with him a little longer, pleading with him. The song itself cried out to anyone who would listen: please, please, please."
Photo: (Valeria Guglielmi/North Point Press)