Charles Mingus with Red Norvo Trio

[Niko]

I read Underdog recently and enjoyed it though its a challenging read and from this distance (both time and circumstances) its hard to know what is truth or fiction (or exaggeration?). If I understand it right it was cut down from a much larger manuscript. Wonder if any more of it exists anywhere? Did he write much else, any great liner notes?

some of the unreleased passages are read on Hal Willner's Mingus Project "Weird Nightmare"... (an enjoyable CD though I would not get it for those texts alone..)

I must listen to this again. I like Wilner's albums and have this (just the disc, no liners) so if its all on the CD I should be fine. Thanks for the prompt.

someone typed most of the liner notes into German wikipedia

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weird_Nightmare:_Meditations_on_Mingus

apparently, the spoken word passages on tracks 8 and 10 are from the unreleased parts of Beneath the Underdog ("aus unveröffentlichten Teilen von Beneath the Underdog") though I'm pretty sure I read about the Coconut Grove incident elsewhere... (or why should I otherwise know the bass player in that story was Jack Lesberg)

btw, if you want to see how to turn (almost) the same youth into a rather boring book look no further than Buddy Collette's autobiography, mostly interesting as a contrast to Beneath the Underdog imho

Edited July 7, 2010 by Niko

[Big Beat Steve]

btw, if you want to see how to turn (almost) the same youth into a rather boring book look no further than Buddy Collette's autobiography, mostly interesting as a contrast to Beneath the Underdog imho

Maybe that's because Buddy Collette wasa quite different personality and epxerienced and handled the same period and location in quite a different way? I remember reading the first part of the Central Avenue Sounds book (gave up for the second half as the book IS a bit repetitive the way it's structured) and what struck me, among other things, was that most everybody (both in that book and in other sources too) semed to agree when talking about the early Westcoast years of Charles Mingus: He was gifted (though he seemed to have taken a while to really get on course), had great ideas but apart from the musical impact he left they all remembered him as a notorious hotspur and irascible person who wasn't one to avoid confrontations.

Edited July 7, 2010 by Big Beat Steve

[Niko]

Maybe that's because Buddy Collette wasa quite different personality and epxerienced and handled the same period and location in quite a different way? I remember reading the first part of the Central Avenue Sounds book (gave up for the second half as the book IS a bit repetitive the way it's structured) and what struck me, among other things, was that most everybody (both in that book and in other sources too) semed to agree when talking about the early Westcoast years of Charles Mingus: He was gifted (though he seemed to have taken a while to really get on course), had great ideas but apart from the musical impact he left they all remembered him as a notorious hotspur and irascible person who wasn't one to avoid confrontations.

yes, of course, different personalities lead them to different perceptions of what was going on around them and to writing a totally different book... Lucky Thompson's autobiography would have been something... (Collette is still around btw as far as i can see)

Edited July 7, 2010 by Niko

[king ubu]

Oh, Mingus tempers... the second half of chapter 33 is then dedicated to his famous fight with Juan Tizol during his abbreviated stay with Ellington that followed his leave from Norvo's trio... hilarious, how - in Mingus' words (and I guess pretty much freely invented, but who knows) Ellington describes the acrobatics that Mingus and his bass performed to run away from Tizol's knife

[king ubu]

The booklet of the Uptown "Baron Mingus" disc is another great source for this era of Mingus' career. The music and pictures are sort of an illustration of what he (freely) describes (muses on) in the book, I guess.

[Kyo]

Love the Norvo trio stuff with Mingus, time to play that Savoy compilation mentioned above!