Charles Mingus was one of the most innovative jazz musicians of the twentieth century and ranks with Ives and 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. Acclaimed music critic Gene Santoro strips away the myths shrouding "Jazz's Angry Man", revealing Mingus as more complex than even his lovers and close friends knew.

Myself When I Am Real draws on dozens of new interviews and previously overlooked archival materials to highlight the intricate connections between this extraordinary man and his music. A pioneering bassist and composer, Mingus penned over 300 works spanning gut-bucket gospel, Colombian cumbias, orchestral tone poems, multimedia performance, and chamber jazz. Although early critics and musicians debated his musical merits and his personality, by the late 1950s he was widely recognized as a major jazz star. But Mingus got headlines less for his art than for his volatile and often provocative behaviour, which drew fans who wanted to watch his temper suddenly flare onstage. Santoro probes the sore spots in Mingus's easily wounded nature that made him so explosive: his bullying father, his interracial background, his vulnerability to women and distrust of men, his views of political and social issues, and his overwhelming need for love and acceptance. He also traces Mingus's musical development, from racially mixed Watts, where he mingled with artists and writers as well as mobsters, union toughs, and pimps, to postwar Greenwich Village, where he absorbed and extended the radical improvisation of Allen Ginsberg, Jackson Pollock, and Charlie Parker.

CONTENTS:
Growing Up Absurd; Black Like Me; Making the Scene; Life During Wartime; Portrait of the Artist; The Big Apple, or On the Road; Pithecanthropus Erectus; Mingus Dynasty; Camelot; The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady; One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest; Beneath the Underdog; Let My Children Hear Music; Changes; Don't Be Afraid, the Clown's Afraid, Too; Notes; Bibliography; Discography; Acknowledgments; Index.

GENE SANTORO, a former Fulbright scholar, book editor and musician, is a music critic at the New York Daily News and columnist at The Nation and Chamber Music. The author of Dancing in your Head and Stir It Up, he has written articles and essays for, among others, New York Times, Village Voice, Rolling Stone and Down Beat.

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