‘Less than a dog’ has been edited. The world I composed’, the memoir of the double bass player-creator of ‘Mingus Ah Um’, where he dismantles jazz myths with large doses of orgasms
Several of jazz’s most powerful albums bear the same signature: Charles Mingus. Always with his last name first, works like ‘Dinasty’ or ‘Ah Um’ contain themes of compositional complexity and street noise. But in addition to music, this double bass player, Dizzy Gillespie’s favorite, wrote a memoir entitled ‘Less than a dog. The world I composed’ (Libros del Kultrum), which is being republished in Spanish.
Born in Arizona in 1922 and passed away in Mexico in the late 1970s, after magical cures for the disease that haunted him, Mingus confidently creates a story that focuses on his sexual prowess. From his first splurges as a “light” middle class African American boy, to the prostitution that existed in the back room of the places where he made a living or on his Mexican travels.
By devoting most of the book to reviewing those orgasmic adventures in which he himself succumbed to the blackmail of some proprietor, he evades his own musical greatness. He tells little about his career and his creative process in this curious autobiography, but what there is is worth its weight in gold, because of the same informality with which the story progresses.
Using foul language, though without being false as it is in keeping with the rest of the work, Mingus details mythical sessions, few of which are now recorded. In these few chapters, treated as parentheses throughout the work, names that history has taken upon itself to place on a pedestal – rightly so – such as Duke Ellington, ‘Bird’, Miles Davis or Thelonius Monk. But he also saves other, lesser-known figures such as Dodo Marmarosa or Buster Smith.
Physical strength was important to Mingus, as was verbal fighting. This edition reproduces the letter he wrote to Davis, with whom he had a long relationship of admiration and disgust. He reproached him for what he considered unfair treatment of Monk, now regarded as the most original composer of those years. The passionate and funny Mingus here shows his “anger” and “I’m not hiding it because it’s real.”
As he did in ‘Fables of Faubius’, where he protested the segregation that oppressed him, in his book he also stands up to inequality, such as when he tells that singer Peggy Lee made gold imitating Billie Holiday, while saying “She lay on the street and everyone said she was a junkie.” But he says, “That was jazz in the beginning. Escape the normal lane, the routine, the bowling ».
Source: La Verdad
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