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In the essential essay “Camera Lucida” (1980), Roland Barthes, while looking back at various photographs of his deceased mother, in search of the hidden truth among the countless snapshots of her life, focuses on a photo of her as a child with her siblings under the palms of the Winter Garden. In a detail of his mother's hands, he sees the “punctum,” or the particular that captures attention, is imprinted on the memory, and reveals a hidden reality. Barthes says about it: “A detail comes to disrupt my entire reading; it is a living change of my interest, a flash. Because of the imprint of something, the photo is no longer just any photo. This something has gone 'tilt', it has transmitted a slight vibration to me.”
It is precisely the Barthesian punctum that the Englishman Geoff Dyer grasps in the photos of some giants of modern Jazz to construct the series of portraits in “But Beautiful” – Instar Books, 1993. “Any photo” – writes Dyer – “despite capturing an infinitesimal moment of reality, has a perceptual duration that extends for several seconds, both before and beyond the moment frozen by the shot, to include what just happened and what is about to happen [...] good photographs should therefore be listened to, not just looked at [...] Thus, through Carol Reiff’s photo capturing Chet Baker at Birdland, we come to hear not only the sound of musicians packed onto the small stage enclosed in the frame but also the background hum of the venue and the clinking of glasses.”
This is, in my opinion, the greatest charm of this book, which sets it apart from many already published “jazz histories,” reconstructing the lives of some protagonists of “heroic” jazz through a few but emblematic episodes on which Dyer then embroidered, improvised, just like a jazz player would starting from a standard. In his most successful portrait, for example, the author describes the tribulations of the refined saxophonist Lester Young, The President, called to arms in 1944 and tormented by the obtuse Lieutenant Ryan, observing with melancholic irony: “If he had been born thirty years later, he would have had slightly gay tastes; thirty years earlier he would have been an aesthete. In 19th century Paris he could have been a decadent fin de siècle figure, yet here he is, stuck mid-century, forced to be a soldier.”
Of course, behind these liberties that Dyer takes, there is also a profound knowledge of the subject, already evident with the choice of the great Duke Ellington as the protagonist of the framework connecting the different episodes: The Duke, a figure who has traversed the golden years of jazz while remaining, however, always aloof from various currents and difficult to categorize, during a long journey on the road accompanied by his baritone driver to reach a concert venue, comes up with the idea of dedicating one of his famous suites to some contemporary jazz musicians: The bewildered and defenseless Lester Young (“Lester’s sound was soft and lazy [...] his music was a stole laid on bare shoulders, weightless”), the clumsy and wild Thelonious Monk (“A large part of jazz is the illusion of spontaneity, and Monk played the piano as if he had never seen one before”), the silent madness of Bud Powell (“Music hasn't taken anything from you. Life has raided you. Music is what you got in return, but it wasn’t enough by far”); the vagabond and cosmopolitan existence of Ben Webster (“He played ballads so slowly that you could feel time weighing on him. In a way, the slower it was, the better: he had lived so much and there were too many things he had to squeeze into every note”); that hurricane of creativity that was Charlie Mingus (“When he used the bow, the sound of the double bass was like the murmur of thousands of devotees gathered inside a church”); the “white narcissus” Chet Baker (“Chet put nothing of himself in his music, and that’s what gave it its pathos. The music felt abandoned by him”); the talented but addict convict, Art Pepper (“Every note he played tended towards the consolation of the blues, and even the simplest phrases would seize your heart like a great requiem. He knew it, and he was almost certain of one thing he had mulled over, suspected, and hoped for a long time. No, he didn’t waste his talent by ruining himself that way because, as an artist, weakness was necessary for him: in his music, it was a principle of strength”).
Ultimately, a fascinating and successful operation which I hope Dyer will want to repeat in the future by evoking in this way, for example, some great legends of rock music, from the past of course, because today, to quote an old war movie, it is no longer a time for heroes.
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