Charles Mingus & the Jazz World

Mingus speaks of himself in the third person. He details his early life referring to himself as "my boy." The effect is to place a certain distance between himself and his childhood, perhaps showing that memories of that time are too painful. Later in the book he shifts from first to third person, showing that he remains a divided personality well into his adult life.

For Mingus, the indignities began in childhood as his parents abused him. His father was violent toward the young boy and helped create the second person noted above, the frightened animal who attacks before he is attacked. He develops a secondary personality as a way of protecting himself, but in another way his personality remains unformed and underdeveloped, with little self-esteem and little awareness

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tories about how the word came into being. The word was originally "jass" and may have come from an obscene underworld word from Chicago. That is one of the stories told to Crow, but there are several others. The mixtures of these stories reflects the uncertainty of the word itself and even of the music, for Crow intertwines stories in a series not unlike jazz music, with the different storytellers acting as musicians, each playing his or her particular riff to produce a combination that is improvisatory as well as expressive. There seems to be no right answer to this and other questions raised in the book, but it is the attempt to use different voices to find answers that mimics jazz. Crow examines different issues in the development of jazz and jazz musicians, citing several who became musicians in the early years, considering some of the musical forms they created, and featuring specific types of expression. He analyses not only the music but much of the jazz world surrounding the music, from the bars and other dives in which the music was first played to issues of jazz as a business involving managers, agents, and recordings. Crow does not ignore some of the darker sides of the jazz story, such as the racial prejudice d
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1590
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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