Let’s begin with a bit of nonsense: “Historically… writing on jazz has been of such a low standard, has failed so signally to convey any sense of the animating dynamics of the music as to be irrelevant except… insofar as it conveys facts: when a given album was recorded, who played with whom, etc.” So says Geoff Dyer in his long and generally insightful afterword to But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz. Even allowing for the fact that it was first published (in Britain) in 1991, before some of the books listed below came out, and even though But Beautiful itself is among my chosen texts, I don’t know how anyone who’s read as much about jazz as I presume Dyer has could believe that statement. There’s been lots of very good writing about jazz. Much of it, it’s true, dwells to a considerable extent on recording dates and who played with whom, because that kind of information is crucial to sorting out a music in which bands with stable, let alone permanent, line-ups are rare and so many musicians have performed or recorded with so many other musicians. But none of the books I’ve chosen (from critical anthologies to autobiography) fails—signally or otherwise—to convey any sense of jazz’s animating dynamics, and there are plenty more where they came from. Continue reading “My Favourite Jazz Books: A Baker’s Dozen (Tim Powis)” →