Myself When I Am Real: The Life and Music of Charles Mingus [Paperback]

In an art form known for its outrageous characters, Charles Mingus stood out. To paraphrase Walt Whitman, he was a man of "multitudes." He was a forceful, virtuosic bassist. He was an imaginative and original composer and arranger second only to Duke Ellington. He was also a social critic, bully, lady's man, father, and hypersensitive man-child who simply wanted to be appreciated for his work. Making sense of this larger-than-life personality presents an imposing challenge to any biographer. Enter Gene Santoro. The author of Dancing in Your Head and Stir It Up: Musical Mixes from Roots to Jazz, Santoro updates Brian Priestley's Mingus: A Critical Biography; separates the fact from the fiction of Mingus's rowdy autobiography, Beneath the Underdog; and produces the literary equivalent of a masterful Mingus composition, complete with labyrinthine surprises and complexities.

A light-skinned African American with Native American and Asian bloodlines who was born in 1922, Mingus endured a difficult childhood in Los Angeles, forever stung by the rampant racism that halted his dreams of a career in the classical music field. Undaunted, Mingus went on to work with several jazz giants, including Lionel Hampton, Dizzy Gillespie, and Duke Ellington, before creating his own record company (Debut) and composing over 300 iconoclastic compositions, including "Eclipse," "Haitian Fight Song," "Goodbye Porkpie Hat," "Cumbia and Jazz Fusion," and many other jazz standards. Santoro writes that the music "is overwhelming in its torrent of musical styles and psychological switchbacks and emotional punch, its tumble of raucous gospel swing, luminous melodies, European classical threads, bebop tributes, Mexican and Colombian and Indian music and sounds from anywhere and everywhere."

In addition to his keen insights into the music (including a thorough discography), Santoro deftly analyzes Mingus's mercurial personality. From the highs (his celebrated recordings Blues & Roots and Mingus Ah Um) to the lows (his horrible Epitaph concert, his eviction from his New York apartment, his numerous assaults on sidemen, and his slow death from Lou Gehrig's disease in 1979), Santoro fairly and faithfully lays bare the mind, body, soul, and art of an American original who influenced everyone from Wynton Marsalis to Joni Mitchell. "Mingus' music was autobiography in sound," Santoro writes. "Everyone in his life had a role. His portraits, his musical tributes, his insistence on forcing his sidemen to find themselves in what he imagined, his clamor for recognition, his emphasis on his originality ... these were more than stylistic trademarks. They were the essence of who he was." Myself When I Am Real captures this essence brilliantly. --Eugene Holley Jr. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Santoro, who covers music for New York's Daily News, has attempted not only to capture the complex, contradictory character of jazz bassist and composer Mingus, but also to assert his music's towering significance in American culture as a whole. With such an ambitious goal in mind, it is hard to understand why he dispenses with a critical approach to the man and his music in favor of hagiography, portraying Mingus as a larger-than-life genius who was beyond reproach. Misdeeds often attributed to Mingus, whether they be numerous betrayals of friends and lovers or an alarming tendency to pull knives on people, are explained away as the eccentricities of an artist. This rambling book is not without revealing details about Mingus's life, however. In the Watts section of Los Angeles, where he grew up, Mingus, with his light complexion, could pass for neither black nor white, which, Santoro argues, cemented the feeling of being an outsider that both haunted and drove the musician for the rest of his life. When writing about Mingus's actual musicmaking, Santoro is in his element. He does an admirable job of describing the rough-and-tumble atmosphere of the jazz workshops. There is also an abundance of anecdotes about Mingus's legendary onstage hijinks, including smashing his bass (he did it before Pete Townshend), haranguing the audience and sitting down to a steak dinner in the middle of a performance. Yet Santoro ultimately fails to marshal his sources into a nuanced portrait, producing a mythological figure, not the man himself. (July)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Over the past few years, several exceptional biographies on key jazz artists such as Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, and Sun Ra have appeared. Santoro (music critic, the New York Daily News; Dancing in Your Head) has produced a work that belongs with this elite group. Mingus!s super-human energy and creativity are the hinges of this work, which is filled out with numerous anecdotes and short, insightful quotes from family, friends, and colleagues. The historical setting is also valuable, showing how Mingus influenced and was affected by events and movements during his lifetime (e.g., the so-called 1960s counterculture). Other fascinating facets come to light, including Mingus!s heritage (he had Native American, Chinese, black, and white ancestors). Mingus!s opinionated, boisterous, and often mean-spirited personality was balanced by his desire to impart musical ideas and other thoughts to those willing to listen and learn"it!s amazing that there were so few who ended up totally antagonized after the Mingus treatment. After reading this work, Mingus!s fictionalized account of his life, Beneath the Underdog (Vintage, 1991. reprint), makes much more sense. Highly recommended for public, academic, and music libraries."William G. Kenz, Moorhead State Univ., MN
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

`Review from previous edition Physically bearish and imposing, Mingus always seemed even larger psychically, a figure to fill the room, alter the vibes, suck up all the air - a cross between Falstaff and Othello. In his marvellous hall of mirrors, Myself When I Am real, Gene Santoro has grasped him whole, or at least as whole as one can expect from mere prose. Some passages suggest the hammering rhythms of a drum solo, others the sprawl of a Mingusian piano meditation. It is a stunning achievement.' Gary Giddins, author of Visions of Jazz

`Mingus's creative turbulence comes alive. we see how his life and times, including his battles with racism and the musci business and himself, were intimately entwined with his remarkable music.' Cassandra Wilson

`An admirably objective attempt to come to terms with the personal and musical complexity that was Charles Mingus. Gene Santoro's comprehensively researched and critically insightful book makes Mingus as fascinating and as outrageous as Mingus himself seemed to have always wanted to be.' Albert Murray, author of Stomping the Blues

A pioneering bassist and composer, Mingus redefined jazz's terrain. He penned over 300 works spannig gutbucket gospel, Colombian cumbias, orchestral tone poems, multimedia performance, and chamber jazz. By the time he was 35, his growing body of music won increasing attention as it unfolded into one pioneering musical venture after another, from classical-meets-jazz extended pieces to spoken-word and dramatic performances and television and movie soundtracks. But Mingus got headlines lessfor his art than for his volatile and often provocative behaviour, which drew fans who wanted to watch his temper suddenly flare onstage. Keeping up with the organized chaos of Mingus's art demanded gymnastic improvisational skills and openness from his musicians, which is why some of them called it "the Sweatshop". He hired and fired musicians on the bandstand, attacked a few musicians physically and many more verbally, twice threw Lionel Hampton's drummer off the stage, and routinely harangued chattering audiences, once chasing a table of inattentive patrons out of the FIVE SPOT with a meat cleaver. But the musical and mental challenges this volcanic man set his bands also nurtured deep loyalties. Jey sidemen stayed with him for years and even decades. In this biography, Santoro probes the sore spots in Mingus's easily wounded nature that helped make him so explosive: his bullying father, his interracila background, his vulnerability to women and distrust of men, his views of political and social issues, his overwhelming need for love and acceptance. Of black, white, and Asian decent, Mingus made race a central issue in his life as well as a crucial aspect of his music, becoming an outspoken (and often misunderstood) critic of racila injustice. Santoro gives us a vivid portrait of Mingus's development, from the racially mixed Watts where he mingled with artists and writers as well as mobsters, union toughs, and pimps to the artistic ferment of postwar Greenwich Village, where he absorbed and extended the radical improvistation flowing through the work of Allen Ginsbert, Jackson Pollock, and Charlie Parker. Indeed, unlike most jazz biographers, Santoro examines Mingus's etra-musical influences - from Orson Welles to Langston Hughes, Farwell Taylor, and Timothy Leary - and illuminates his achievement in the broader cultural context it demands. Written in a lively, novelistic style, "Myself When I Am Real" draws on dozens of new interviews and previously untapped letters and archival materials to explore the intricate connections between this extraordinary man and the extraordinary music he made.

16 pp halftone plates

"The best examination yet of an American Original" -The Washington Post

"The great bassist and composer's wild, turbulent life [is] wonderfully captured by Santoro." -Rolling Stone

"Santoro's unconventional but meticulously researched biography is deliciously entertaining examination not only of jazz's 'angry man' and his music, but of the times in which both flourished. Santoro casts Mingus as a central character in the restless drama of a postwar America wrestling to find its identity politically, socially, and artistically." -The Boston Globe

"Santoro brings his readers into the mind of this conflicted genius." -Philadelphia Inquirer

"Santoro's ambitious and engrossing biography has the vivd force of a bravura performance by one of its subject's classic Jazz Workship ensembles." -The San Francisco Chronicle

"The definitive Mingus biography." -The Boston Book Review

"Written with the elegant hand of an experienced journalist and the insight of a musician with first-rate ears, the book accomplishes the seemingly impossible task of casting a revealing light upon the inner life of its enigmatic subject." -Los Angeles Times

A former Fulbright scholar, book editor and musician, Gene Santoro is a music critic at the New York Daily News and columnist at The Nation and Chamber Music. The author of Dancing in Your Head and Stir It Up, he has written articles and essays for The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times, The Village Voice, Spin, Rolling Stone, and Down Beat. He divides his time between New York City and Shokan, New York.