Myself When I am Real: The Life and Music of Charles Mingus [Hardcover]

To add some different ideas, close to my heart is this book as it reads as if American Historian(in the true, not fictional history sense) Howard Zinn might write if he was autoring a biography of a very influential and complex musician.

To me, who grew up listening to Mingus since the early 70s, and living through life in this land of absurdos, the USA as an "outsider looking in" during the times that Mingus was at his most influential, Mr Santoro writes about CM without the usual biases,(those are , the fawning "groupie" or the hypercritical "harpie")
~Mr Santoro writes about Mingus, warts and all,...we are privledge to observe that we should not lionize our heroes as "perfection incarnate", but rather distill what is useful and enjoyable from their "best they have to give", and leave it at that.

Mingus we see in the decades he roamed this planeta,influenced by his own inner visions and carnal vices and the world around him at vantagepoint of his contemporaries and adversaries who influenced from without..
.Mr. Santoro seems to reserve his own biases MUCH better than most authors , and reports the fruits of his research into the "multitudes of Mingus" speak for itself. From the overview of each decade that passes to the minutia of Mingus' royalty earnings, the book is absorbing to readalmost 400 pages ride by TOO quickly...Doesnt this indicate that this is a very good book to read?? Case closed, story told, hehehe! but I more little bone I must pick as a sidebar.......

I am interested in Sue Mingus'book on Mingus, I never have been too enthusiastic about these "strong" women types that appear (to me) to consume and spit out the bones of their famousjazzman husbands, Laurie Pepper and Susan Mingus, or in rockmusics, the obnoxious Yoko Ono in particular...
..they seem to do the right things(tirelessly promote their old man's art)for the wrong reasons(I may be unfair, I only have "2nd hand" info and how I interpret it)
but they appear to live vicariously thru the musician's sucesses. but I digress.....

A book to enjoy if you are both aplicado discipulo or novice to this great but flawed man, the wonderful musics that Mingus left us are his Epitaph, and Mr Santoro's book is a loving tribute!

It appears as though Gene Santoro has tried to write the jazz biography as jazz - his transitions are abrubt and curl back on themselves, he reuses several motifs and phrases (sometimes so often they become annoying), and he stitches together various pieces to form a supposedly illuminating whole. However, this book is a patchwork that never really adds up to more than the sum of its parts. Most of the details are here - the ex-wives, the feuds over the music and money, the revolving door of bandmates. Without a doubt there are funny and poignant stories, otherwise what's the point of Mingus? But we never really understand why Charles Mingus is in the pantheon of great 20th Century composers (American or otherwise), or how he started out wanting to be the Orson Welles of jazz and ended up its Aaron Copland. And Santoro's attempts to put either Mingus behavior or Mingus music into the rapidly evolving political and social contexts of the 50s and 60s are the usual broad strokes of jazz biography.

The definitive Mingus biography is still waiting to be written. Read Sue Mingus's "Tonight at Noon" for a touching summation of his later years, read the liner notes to "Black Saint and the Sinner Lady" if you want a glimpse of what music meant to Charles Mingus. Most of all, listen to Mingus. And if you read this book while listening to its subject, don't be surprised if your mind wanders from the printed page.