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

Gene Santoro (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 29, 2001

Charles Mingus was one of the most innovative jazz musicians of the 20th century, and ranks with Charles Ives and Duke Ellington as one of America's greatest composers. By temperament, he was a high-strung and sensitive romantic, a towering figure whose tempestuous personal life found powerfully coherent expression in the ever-shifting textures of his music. Now, acclaimed music critic Gene Santoro strips away the myths shrouding "Jazz's Angry Man," revealing Mingus as more complex than even his close friends knew. 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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

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.

From Publishers Weekly

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.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 480 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (November 29, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195147111
• ISBN-13: 978-0195147117
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,455,764 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Growing up in a two-room basement apartment in Brooklyn, Gene Santoro didn't know people like him could become writers--never mind make a living at it. But for nearly thirty years, he's managed to do just that. Besides his own books and essays appearing in compilations, his writings about music, pop culture, and history have journalism have appeared in the New York Daily News, The Nation, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times, The Washington Post, New Yorker, New York, The Village Voice, Chamber Music, Spin, Rolling Stone, Down Beat, Discover, and Business 2.0. Currently Santoro is an editor-writer at Weider History Group, where he is reviews editor at American History and World War II magazines and helms the annual film-based special issue.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Not just poorly written, but lacking in accuracy as well, January 22, 2001

By 

Thelonious "music, philosophy and math" (West Coast, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Myself When I am Real: The Life and Music of Charles Mingus (Hardcover)

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!!

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Subject Matter Itself Worth 3 Stars, August 25, 2002

By 

Arch Stanton (Bondurant, WY USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Myself When I Am Real: The Life and Music of Charles Mingus (Paperback)

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.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Seemingly well researched but terribly written, December 11, 2000

By 

H. B. Bennett (Allison Park, Pa. USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Myself When I am Real: The Life and Music of Charles Mingus (Hardcover)

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.