"Achingly gorgeous...evokes the lives of working musicians so that you taste the whiskey, smell the stubbed cigarettes, hear the gentle clicking of the valves, the coughs, and shuffling feet between studio takes." --Jonathan Lethem, Entertainment Weekly
"The only book about jazz that I have recommended to my friends. It is a little gem." --Keith Jarrett
"Dyer turns jazz into poetry and his subjects into a beautiful sad music....Few will be unmoved by his passion and eloquence and the harrowing portraits of jazz's haunted geniuses." --Tom Graves, The Washington Post Book World
"A gorgeous and lyrical collection of nocturnal jazz reveries." --The New Yorker
"But Beautiful is just that, a moving and highly original tribute to Black American music." --Bryan Ferry
"An ingenious and brilliantly written book." --Richard Bernstein, The New York Times
