But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz was published by Jonathan Cape in 1991 and won the Somerset Maugham Award. It is the book that established Dyer’s method and reputation: a work that refuses to be categorized as fiction, criticism, history, or memoir and instead invents its own form — one that mirrors the improvisatory freedom of its subject.
The book consists of eight interconnected pieces, each centered on a jazz musician: Lester Young, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, Ben Webster, Charles Mingus, Chet Baker, Art Pepper, and Duke Ellington. These are not biographies — Dyer invents scenes, imagines interior states, attributes thoughts and feelings without documentation. Nor are they fiction — they are rooted in biographical fact, in the actual music, in documented incidents. They are something else: acts of imaginative sympathy that try to convey what it felt like to be these people, making this music, living these damaged and extraordinary lives.
Dyer’s prose mimics the music it describes: rhythmic, improvisatory, moving between lyrical flights and sudden descents into the mundane. His portrait of Lester Young’s final days — the sadness, the withdrawal, the fragility — captures something essential about the relationship between creative genius and personal destruction. His Monk is simultaneously comic and tragic — a man whose eccentricity is inseparable from his artistry. The book influenced a generation of writers who wanted to write about music without the deadening apparatus of conventional criticism.
Collecting But Beautiful
First edition (Jonathan Cape, London, 1991): Cloth binding, dust jacket. Somerset Maugham Award winner.
Market values:
- First UK edition in dust jacket: $40–$100
- First US edition (North Point Press, 1996): $15–$35