LoveReading Says
Unique and lyrical voice, this memoir of the legendary Charles Mingus charts the highs and lows of a
life lived to the full. Beneath the Underdog is also a portrait of life
in the Forties and Fifties, of ideas of identity and race in America and
the ways in which they affected the young Mingus. Above all, it is a
powerful tale told through the eyes of an inspiring, anguished and
extraordinary musician.
Sarah Broadhurst
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Beneath the Underdog Synopsis
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.
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