Charles mingus biography book
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About the Book
Charles Mingus is one of the most important—and most mythologized—composers and performers in jazz history. Classically trained and of mixed race, he was an outspoken innovator as well as a bandleader, composer, producer, and record-label owner. His vivid autobiography, Beneath the Underdog, has done much to shape the image of Mingus as something of a wild man: idiosyncratic musical genius with a penchant for skirt-chasing and violent outbursts. But, as the autobiography reveals, he was also a hopeless romantic. After exploring the most important events in Mingus’s life, Krin Gabbard takes a careful look at Mingus as a writer as well as a composer and musician. He digs into how and why Mingus chose to do so much self-analysis, how he worked to craft his racial identity in a world that saw him simply as “black,” and how his mental and physical health problems shaped his career. Gabbard sets aside the myth-making and convincingly argues that Charles Mingus created
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Richard Williams
For some readers, perhaps the name of Charles Mingus will shake free a chain of recollection undisturbed in twenty years: coffee bars, beatniks, baggy sweaters, leather sandals, the solemnised union of jazz and poetry, a world whose high priests included the three &#;M&#;s: Miles and Monk and Mingus.
Jazz has often been pressed into service as a symbol for non-conformist values. The Jazz Age, obviously, was the first such occasion; the arrival of the Beat Generation was another; as it happens, another minor eruption is taking place even now among the present set of bohemian ungdom, whose avant-garde is discovering for itself that piquant combination of primitive origins and intellectual illegitimacy, emotional generosity and technical rigour.
Such passing fancies have not done jazz musicians, particularly black jazz musicians, much good. They have always had an idea of their own worth, knowing that their tradition and training equips them for certain achievement
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Beneath the Underdog
autobiography by Charles Mingus
Hardcover edition | |
| Author | Charles Mingus |
|---|---|
| Original&#;title | Beneath the Underdog: His World as Composed by Mingus |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Non-fiction |
| Publisher | Alfred A. Knopf |
Publication date | |
| Publication place | United States |
| Media&#;type | |
| Pages | pp. |
| ISBN | |
Beneath the Underdog: His World as Composed by Mingus is the autobiography of jazz bassist and composer Charles Mingus. It was first published in , by Alfred A. Knopf.
Background
[edit]Mingus worked on his autobiography for more than two decades.[1] One newspaper indicated in October that the book "is due out in a couple of weeks".[2] The following year, The New York Times reported that author Louis Lomax was collaborating with Mingus in the writing and editing of "an eight-year-old, portly, angry manuscript of 1, pages", and that publishers in France and Japan had bid for the book.[3&