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.
A trade-off (Rating 2 of 5)
» JChris
Gene Santoro has done his research. His book is a montage of statistics, historical events, and various anecdotes derived from the life of Charles Mingus; accurate, I assume, but hardly captivating.
Santoro's style, in its attempt to garner and then to hold the audience's attention, falls short of its mark and becomes choppy, disorganized, and in some cases even irrelevant. The author shows little regard for unity or storyline in the biography, and simply offers the reader a barrage of statistics in purely chronological order, marked too often and too feebly by ineffective one-sentence throwbacks to Hemingway.
Myself When I Am Real is well-researched, and Santoro has the good fortune of outlining the life of a man who was interesting in his own right. The facts and statistics of Charles Mingus' life, however disjointed, are interesting to learn about -- however, it is up to the prospective reader to decide whether he or she thinks it is worth the slogging-through-cement experience of reading the over-400-page volume, which leaves the impression of being an extremely thorough and also extremely underdeveloped outline of a potentially interesting piece of writing
Amused, it is tougher to review a book than a recording (Rating 5 of 5)
» Peppino
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
A Jazz History of the 50's, 60's and 70's (Rating 5 of 5)
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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
A major disappointment (Rating 2 of 5)
» M.R.
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
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