^#smrgSAHAF Beneath the Underdog: His World as Composed by Mingus -

Mingus: violent, funny, charting his wildly impressionistic way through childhood, marriages, success and sex.

Mingus, black musician in a world owned by the white man, out with the pimps and the hustlers and the whores, playing with the geniuses of jazz: Ellington, Hampton, 'Bird', Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie.

'Written out of pain, hate and, paradoxically, a kind of loving: a gigantic, baffling, obscene and innocent cry from the soul in which this pioneering musician - and, now, astonishing writer - attempts to prove everything, to illuminate every recess of the mind. Its tone is fantastic, apocalyptic, metaphysical and sexual... an unforgettable, haunting book' -Derek Jewell in the Sunday Times