But Beautiful

By the time the reader gets to the chapter on Art Pepper and finds him face down in his own vomit, he will have had quite enough of Geoff Dyer's half-invented biographical sketches of jazz musicians. Which works out well, since Pepper is the last in the series and is followed by a much more useful general essay about jazz's history and meaning. Dyer is fixated on the drugs and drinking and suffering of artists like Bud Powell and Chet Baker because he believes that from this pain comes the beauty of the music. But he soon begins to sound like a sad voyeur.