SOURCE: “Lullaby of Birdland,” in New Statesman and Society, June 21, 1991, p. 44.

In the following review of But Beautiful, Widgery commends Dyer's ability to convey his passion for jazz, but finds shortcomings in his conventional interpretations and apolitical stance.

There has been “little first-rate writing on jazz,” thinks Geoff Dyer (sorry, Hentoff, Russell and Balliet, Wilmer, Case and Fordham). Until, it is implied, now. Well, some of these jazz fictions are superb, but others are an infuriating mixture of the pretentious and the vacuous. The lovely lines are offset by bits of young love in Paris and jazz-loving-cops-suddenly-horrified-by-life.

If Dyer's literary background yields nothing more profound than calling Chet Baker “the pale Shelley of bebop” and dropping the odd Adorno tag, it hasn't helped us a lot. Nor do conceits such as “Good photographs are there to be listened to as well as looked at.” But Beautiful's promise...