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Lester Young slowly dying of malnutrition and alcohol:
"He ate almost nothing, but he still had his preferences when it came to food: Chinese was his favorite, that was the food he didn't eat most of."
"He was disappearing, fading into the tradition before he was even dead... When he played now cats said he limped along after himself, a pale imitation of those who played like him... He'd been thrown out of the Fletcher Henderson band for not sounding enough like Hawk. Now he was being thrown out of his own life for not sounding enough like himself."
Geoff Dyer - "but beautiful: a book about jazz"
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