Like Duke Ellington, whom he greatly admired, Charles Mingus created his own space within jazz. For three decades his music, uniquely his own, constituted an idiom. Full of colour, drama and incident, it echoed the turmoil in his own life. Yet despite Mingus's stature as a jazz musician there has been only one major biography about him while Ellington's life has attracted some 20 biographers of various stripes and shades since Barry Ulanov's Duke Ellington in 1946.
Today Mingus remains a largely misunderstood figure whose accomplishments are too big to ignore, yet forbiddingly complex to contemplate. A virtuoso bassist, he was also a composer and arranger who shrewdly manipulated ensemble textures with an acute ear for the blues. He was also an unpredictable man; his wife once said that all he ever wanted was to be loved, yet he once famously assaulted his trombonist, a close friend, removing a front tooth in a flash of rage.
Yet while Mingus offers a rich subject for the potential biographer, he also demands discretion and insight. His life, his music and the tensions that gave rise to his creativity all contain the potential to trip the unwary. But Gene Santoro, a music writer with two books of previously published articles to his name, has waded in, all guns blazing, oblivious to any pitfalls.
For Myself When I Am Real, he adopts a tone of jivey assertiveness either in response to Mingus's own strange, rambling semi-autobiographical memoir Beneath the Underdog from 1971 or in a mistaken belief that it adds (street) credibility to his work. Short sentences, eight-word paragraphs and hip phrases tumble over each other in a kind of Kerouac-ian stream-of-consciousness.
But by talking the talk he not only distances us from Mingus in a way a biographer of, say, Shakespeare would do if today the author wrote in Elizabethan English, he also demeans his subject. He exploits the complexity of Mingus's life for the melodramatic moment while his rakish, side-of-the-mouth delivery conceals the book's poor construction. Adopting this role of "hip insider" also proves to be Santoro's undoing in another way. He is eager to show off his knowledge of jazz and its environs, a common fault among jazz biographers, and his quiet desperation results in errors and hazy, unsubstantiated assertions.
The Miles Davis "Birth of the Cool`' session, for example, was apparently "born partly of what Davis heard in Los Angeles." Really? So how come, after 50 or so years, this is the first we get to hear about it? Among many errors of fact, Santoro seems to believe Billie Holiday had a Cabaret Card, for example. She didn't; and neither was Mingus's composition Meditations in "complex meters." It was in simple 4/4. Equally, Mingus's famous album Tijuana Moods from 1957 is referred to as New Tijuana Moods, which is how it was renamed when it was re-released 30 years later with new material - while Doris Parker, Charlie Parker's third wife, is referred to as "Doris, his white second wife."
Repetition doesn't trouble Santoro either, so that in the space of the book's opening few pages we are told Mingus's date of death three times (bad construction), and about every 40 pages Mingus "feels the Zeitgeist," totalling about eight times in all (bad editing). Santoro, himself a former editor of books and a harsh critic of jazz literature, is here hoist by his own petard by failing to aspire to the standards he demands of others.
Stuart Nicholson has written biographies of Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday; his latest book is A Portrait of Duke Ellington: Reminiscing in Tempo