Charles Mingus

Charles Mingus's autobiographical book, Beneath the Underdog, details his involvement with jazz, offers his view of life as a black American, and reveals some of the history of jazz from his point of view and through his experiences. The title of the book gives the general tenor of the work--he sees himself as beneath the underdog, meaning that he is even lower on the scale than those who are seen as at a disadvantage in our society. The story told by Mingus shows that he has been faced throughout his life with a sense of being on the lower end of the social scale; indeed, more than this, he has been so subjected to punishments, indignities, and discrimination that he seems to have come to expect it.

Mingus's attitude toward himself is revealed in the opening paragraph, a statement delivered to his psychiatrist during a session:

In other words I am three. One man stands forever in the middle, unconcerned, unmoved, watching, waiting to be allowed to express what he sees in the other two. The second man is like a frightened animal that attacks for fear of being attacked. Then there is an over-loving gentle person who lets people into the uttermost sacred temple of his being. . . and when he realizes what's been done to him he feels like killing and destroying everything around him including himself for being so stupid (7).

It is the middle man who sets out to write this book, the observer who wants to report on the other two, but often it seems that the third figure

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searching for a close relationship for that particular reason. Where Mingus excels is in his music, and as his career develops, he has much to say about the development of jazz, the music industry in the U.S. and elsewhere, and especially about the prejudice and discrimination marking that industry. On the one hand, the industry benefited greatly from the development of jazz, while on the other the industry did not treat the black musicians who developed the form fairly. The importance of this to his life is evident early in the book as he describes the reality he faced to his psychiatrist, noting that others do not want him to be a success and are against him. His psychiatrist asks who they would be, and he answers, Agents and business men with big offices who tell me, a black man, that I'm abnormal for thinking we should have our share of the crop we produce. Musicians are as JimCrowed as any black motherfucker on the street and the. . . the. . . well, they want to keep it that way" (7). Mingus found that the prejudice he encountered in his personal life was also endemic in the music industry, and he saw himself and other blacks as treated lower than the underdog. he also saw white musicians becoming rich and famous

Category: Arts - C