A wild, lyrical, and anguished autobiography, in which Charles Mingus pays short shrift to the facts but plunges to the very bottom of his psyche, coming up for air only when it pleases him. He takes the reader through his childhood in Watts, his musical education by the likes of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Charlie Parker, and his prodigious appetites--intellectual, culinary, and sexual. The book is a jumble, but a glorious one, by a certified American genius.
Mingus was one of jazz’s true weirdos, a titanically gifted bassist and composer who moved to a rhythm all his own, both musically and figuratively. It’s no surprise that his autobiography is far from traditional: Beneath the Underdog is an expressionistic, poetic, hilarious and strange book, inflamed by Mingus’ intellectual and musical iconoclasm as well as his anger.
Bass player extraordinaire Charles Mingus, who died in 1979, is one of the essential composers in the history of jazz, and Beneath the Underdog, his celebrated, wild, funny, demonic, anguished, shocking, and profoundly moving memoir, is the greatest autobiography ever written by a jazz musician. It tells of his God-haunted childhood in Watts during the 1920s and 1930s; his outcast adolescent years; his apprenticeship, not only with jazzmen but also with pimps, hookers, junkies, and hoodlums; and his golden years in New York City with such legendary figures as Duke Ellington, Lionel Hampton, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, and Dizzy Gillespie. Here is Mingus in his own words, from shabby roadhouses to fabulous estates, from the psychiatric wards of Bellevue to worlds of mysticism and solitude, but for all his travels never straying too far, always returning to music. “This book is the purest of dynamite. Like the autobiographies of Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday and like A. B. Spellman's Four Lives in the Bebop Business, it says more about the American psyche in general and black survival in particular than the sociologists and psychologists ever can in their stiff, soulless vocabularies.... Somber, comic, disturbing, boastful, confessional, sentimental, contradictory, poetic, irascible, impish...lyrical, nasty, angelic, reflective...expressionistic, picaresque, jive...this is a powerful book.”— Rolling Stone
By turns volatile, heartbreaking, self-mythologising and honest, the jazz great's autobiography is unforgettable
Originally titled Half Yaller Schitt-Colored Nigger and edited down from 2,000 furious pages, Beneath the Underdog is a seething, wounded self-mythologising yarn.
Mingus wrote the book in the Sixties, and invents himself just like he invented a certain kind of music. Possibly all lies, but ferociously honest, it reflects Mingus's volatile, brooding, revolutionary music and his mean, arrogant intensity, as well as his dangerously intelligent, frightened and frightening mind. The sound of every word is as important as its meaning. God - ie Mingus - knows what anger, fretting and heartache was cut out from the original manuscript, but what's left is plenty of sweaty boasting about sexual exploits, a dream-fevered New York possessed by jazz greats and one of the great opening sentences in 20th century literature. Paul Morley
-<p>By turns volatile, heartbreaking, self-mythologising and honest, the jazz great's autobiography is unforgettable</p><p>Originally titled Half Yaller Schitt-Colored Nigger and edited down from 2,000 furious pages, Beneath the Underdog is a seething, wounded self-mythologising yarn.</p><p>Mingus wrote the book in the Sixties, and invents himself just like he invented a certain kind of music. Possibly all lies, but ferociously honest, it reflects Mingus's volatile, brooding, revolutionary music and his mean, arrogant intensity, as well as his dangerously intelligent, frightened and frightening mind. The sound of every word is as important as its meaning. God - ie Mingus - knows what anger, fretting and heartache was cut out from the original manuscript, but what's left is plenty of sweaty boasting about sexual exploits, a dream-fevered New York possessed by jazz greats and one of the great opening sentences in 20th century literature. Paul Morley</p>
