Customer Reviews

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

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

 

 

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!!

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.

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.

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.

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 book was a major disappointment. I am a huge Charles Mingus fan and looked forward to this book with great anticipation. To give Santoro his due, he does do a great job situating Mingus in a broader context, not just of the jazz world but of the contemporary avant-garde arts scene. And one certainly does get a good feel for the personality and life of Mingus here. But the writing style is sophmoric, full of throw-away phrases and juvenile attempts to be hip. How many times does he conclude a paragraph with (I can't remember the exact words) something like, "He felt the zeitgesist working again." Santoro also shies away from discussing Mingus's music--rarely does he venture an opinion on a particular concert or recording. He also gives short shrift to Mingus's sidemen. I would recommend this as a pretty good read, but start with Brian Priestly's bio and be prepared for an extrememly annowing prose style.

The complex genius of Charles Mingus gets his due in Gene Santoro's new book. Gene's passion ( for the music) and his compassion (for the man) shine through in this engrossing biography which also provides a commentary on race, culture and music in America during the 40's 50's and 60's. While reading this detailed, well-researched book, I had a sense of Mingus as a deep character who was multifaceted and in some ways, way ahead of his time. His fascination with Eastern philosophy and spirtuality, his visionary-ness, his relationships with jazz colleagues, women, his children -- all defy being put into a 'neat little box with a neat little wrapper' -- he defies categorization. From the childhood years in Los Angeles through music scenes, financial ups and downs, marriages, emotional breakdowns, the last days of writing music from a wheelchair (due to muscle wasting from 'Lou Gehrigs' disease) -- to the final spread of MIngus' ashes over the Ganges River by his wife, Sue -- it's a fascinating story. Also, well-written and well-researched.

I enjoyed this book and would recommend it.

Mingus was mighty. And though Santoro introduces him with great praise and passion, he almost portrays him as a buffoon through his many contradictory phases. And for a music critic, his descriptions of the music and compositions is pretty awful (awkwardly described, incorrect or minus any true appreciation). A few more details about Mingus' personal life than Priestley's musical biography, but otherwise, Priestley's book is infinitely better!

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 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.