A poetic meditation on the last year of tenor saxophonist Lester Young’s life, of joyful playing and self-willed dying.
In 1959, at the age of fifty, jazz greaet Lester Young—a lyrical player, his airy tone haunted by a breathy melancholy—died alone in the Arvin Hotel in Manhattan. As Meltzer explains, “No Eyes is a book about death, and Young sits in for a metaphor for the artist living and dying for and with his art.”
An “inside” biography, No Eyes is a brilliant jazz-world evocation, composed in free verse whose flow is arrested to capture significant moments, Meltzer creates a layered narrative of vivid colors and textures, the material facts of Young’s story dissolving into internalized, projected truths of erotic understanding and spiritual sympathy with the “sweet and isolate lovely other.”
- ISBN10 1574231294
- ISBN13 9781574231298
- Publish Date 13 July 2000 (first published 1 January 2000)
- Publish Status Out of Stock
- Out of Print 3 March 2015
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher David R. Godine Publisher Inc
- Imprint Black Sparrow Press,U.S.
- Format Paperback (US Trade)
- Pages 200
- Language English