Beneath the Underdog by Charles Mingus
“Mingus by Mingus. These are the celebrated, wild, funny, demonic, anguished, shocking, and above all, profoundly moving memoirs of the late Charles Mingus, bass player and jazz composer. Completed eight years before his death in 1979, Beneath the Underdog is the story of growing up in the Watts of the twenties and thirties, ruled by a strap-wielding father, a Bible-quoting stepmother, and an unremitting fear of the Lord; Mingus’s 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 the music.”
