Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I think it VERY difficult to critique not only the rich and complex mind, musics,and moods of Charles Mingus, and much has ALREADY been said pros and cons about Mr Santoro's excellent (IMO) biography here on the Amazon.[com.]

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!

Any biography of Mingus should, by the nature of its subject matter, earn at least 3 stars. Mingus is too explosive, too mercurial, too much of an American Original, to have his story add up to anything less. Anything more, of course, is in the hands of the author.

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.

Contrary to the other reviewers, I thought that this was an excellent book. The author places Mingus in the context of the pop culture of the 1940's through the first half of the 1970's. He relates Mingus's life to other major jazz musicians, the Beat generation poets and icons, popular music, the chi chi movers and shakers, big city life, jazz clubs, fusion, wives, jazz festivals, periods of violent acting out and self destruction, etc. This book is a cultural history (probably why the other critics didn't like it) of the middle of the 20th century. He does make a few obvious errors. For example, the distance from Monterey to Berkeley is about half of the 200 miles he maintains. It's not Camarillo State Prison, but Camarillo State Hospital where Parker was hospitalized (a big difference). He was about a year off when talking about the release of Kind of Blue. He also overworked the term "noodling". On the other hand, if you are interested in jazz history in the context of the middle of the 20th century and a very interesting look a Mingus's life, this is a great place to start.

This biography is a very rough read. Santoro presents a barrage of blunt, declarative sentences that present irrelevant facts along with the interesting details, indiscriminately. His attempts to make sense of Mingus's life and work are fitful and mostly unsupported, and therefore not completely convincing. His attempts to fit Mingus into the broader picture of jazz history, race, and society are also clumsy and half-baked. There is also a numblingly large number of one-sentence paragraphs that come off as nonsequiters, when the author clearly thought that they would make sense to the reader. Again, this is the result of the inclusion of pointless facts and a fatal lack of flow.

You get the sense that he did tons of interviews and wrote each fact on an index card, and then transferred those cards to manuscript with little "connective tissue" and few attempts to edit out the irrelevant details and mold the relevant ones into a compelling story. This book could have used a couple of rewrites, with a couple of severe edits thrown in for good measure.

The word "biography" literally means "life picture." With Santoro's book, you don't get a clear portrait of Mingus, but rather a jumble of mundane facts and clumsy, broad brushstrokes. Mingus deserves better, and I, for one, plan to turn to Priestly's biography in the hopes that I can get the sense of Mingus as a man and artist that I didn't get from Santoro's book.

This is a very bad book.

If you are interested in the monthly payments Charles Mingus made on his car loan, this may be the book for you. If you are interested in Mingus' music, don't bother - Santoro has very little to say other than cliche.

This was an engaging read, but ultimately a little disappointing as it didn't really give a clear picture of the people Mingus was involved with throughout his life. Mingus himself comes through clear enough (though even here, the reasons for his breakdown in the late 60s are still a little mysterious), but consider someone like Eric Dolphy. A major figure in the history of jazz, and someone who was important enough to Mingus that he named his son after him, but Santoro doesn't give us much of a sense of who Eric Dolphy was. He doesn't even tell us how he died. The same is true of other figures like Booker Ervin, Jaki Byard, and so on. If you're a jazz fan coming to this book hoping to learn more about these guys and how they worked with Mingus to create all that amazing music, you're going to come away no more enlightened than when you started.

Santoro does get a little hung up on extraneous financial details at the expense of giving a clear sense of these human characters. He also gives some pretty pat and unnecessary capsules of the history of the times through which Mingus lived. (Do we really need anyone to tell us that the 60s were a time of upheaval?) The research shows, but at times he doesn't seem to have fully digested all this material, and he is reduced to quoting Mingus's tax bills and throwing around some fairly meaningless refrains like "He was feeling the zeitgeist again" or "He was his father's son." 2 stars don't seem like quite enough, but 3 seems a little generous. In default of a 2.5 star option, it will do. Oh well.

This book chronologically tells the story of the legendary bassist's life but this is no narrative. Santoro employs testimony from Mingus' bandmembers, ex-wives, kids and various folks in the know but I doubt any of these folks would dig how much of the book is based on Santoro's own opinions on Mingus' career choices and experiences which shaped his music. For example, the author wastes too many pages ruminating on interracial love, a topic he seems mildly disturbed by. I gave this book one extra star for the thorough discography to the rear of the book, but the book itself is utterly disposable.

It is a shame that a respectable press like Oxford would publish a book this poorly written and clearly not proof-read. It abounds with grammatical and stylistic errors (ranging from "a unusual" to shifting tense to a complete lack of logical flow). It is also a shame that this is likely to be taken as the standard for some time to come.

For me the worst thing about the book is the wealth of inaccuracies regarding the music. Frequently the author gets song titles mixed up ("Meditations On Integration" was never renamed "So Long Eric" -- those are two entirely different pieces, as anyone who examined a few recordings would know). He gets confused on other points as well (Dolphy is not on "Mingus At Monterey" nor is "Ghost Of A Chance" a Mingus original!). How can I trust his presentation of biographical facts (which I cannot easily check) when he can't get these simple things right?

I was also rather disappointed that the book did not really examine the music in any depth (it is "the life AND MUSIC of..." after all). The fabled 1959 Columbia sessions are given little more than a page each. Few connections are drawn with other works, no mention is made of the augmented instrumentation used on some pieces. He doesn't do any better on other recordings. (Perhaps this just reflects my personal obsessions, but how could one summarize the 1964 European tour by discussing only the Oslo video, never discussing the various performances that have been available to fans over the years? This is a great way to examine Mingus' approach to his music on an almost day-by-day basis). Frankly, my impression is that Santoro hasn't really listened to a lot of the music and perhaps isn't all that interested. Thus I cannot see how one could praise Santoro's "keen insights into the music" (see the Amazon Editorial Review). Calling his discography "thorough" is also misleading.

Other reviewers have pointed out stylistic problems and I heartily concur. The choppiness is not only distracting but can even be misleading. Did Mingus meet Allen Ginsberg in the early 1930s? One might think so from the author's mention of Ginsberg in conjunction with Farwell Taylor at that point in the book, but when one gets to the mid-forties one finds that it was in the forties that they first met. This is not an isolated incident in this shoddily constructed book.

The reason I give it even 2 stars is that it does present a great deal of information not in Priestly's much better book. One really must read both, but the Priestly is MUCH better!!

This bio was compelling yet painful to read. Compelling in terms of subject (the life and times of Charles M.) but agonizing in terms of "kicking back" with a comfortable tome. The "narrative" consists of facts, statements and opinions being thrown at the reader without (generally) any context or follow-up. Characters and scenarios are brought up one moment and abruptly dropped the next. The book will occasionally read like a parody of Larry King's USA Today column! I highly recommend Brian Priestley's Mingus: A Critical Biography over this sophomoric effort.

Was it David Sedaris (author of Me Talk Pretty One day) that said he won't date anyone who uses the word Zeitgeist? Too many times this word gets used in this book. I think this book still deserves to be read, especially along with _Beneath the underdog_ written by Mingus himself. I thought in terms of Jazz history, this book does better than _Miles_ for example. This kind of book is written out of love, and we should be thankful for Mr. Santoro's efforts. I did not know much about Mingus' life, and it gives me different insight into his world when I listen to his music now.