Charles Mingus

Beneath the Underdog opens with its author splitting into three people arguing with each other, and never really settles into the shape a jazz memoir is supposed to have. Charles Mingus wrote far more of it than survives; Nel King edited a very long manuscript down to the book Knopf published in 1971, and long stretches concern his sexual life and a period he said he spent living off sex work rather than the bandstand. What music there is comes in flashes: Watts, the Los Angeles of the forties, Duke Ellington firing him after a fight with Juan Tizol. Mingus lived from 1922 to 1979, played bass, composed Pithecanthropus Erectus and The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, and ran his own label when nobody else would record what he wanted. He was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and died in Cuernavaca in January 1979, aged fifty-six.