• Beneath The Underdog

  • By: Charles Mingus
  • Narrated by: Mark Ebulue
  • Length: 10 hrs and 51 mins
  • 3.8 out of 5 stars (31 ratings)

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Beneath The Underdog  By  cover art

Beneath The Underdog

By: Charles Mingus
Narrated by: Mark Ebulue
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Publisher's summary

Charles Mingus is a musician, a mongrel musician who plays beautiful, who plays ugly, who plays lovely, who plays masculine, who plays feminine, who plays all sounds, loud, soft, unheard sounds, sounds, sounds, sounds....

Beneath the Underdog is the memoir of the Angry Man of jazz, Charles Mingus - the genius whose adventures began at the feet of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Charlie Parker, and led him on a tour of every bottle, bar and bed in the world.

An unparalleled self-portrait of an artist, Beneath the Underdog is a tour as dizzying, otherworldly, raging and sexy as the man and his music.

©1998 Charles Mingus (P)2019 Canongate Books Ltd

What listeners say about Beneath The Underdog

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It's not about music at all.

This book is profane. I stopped it because it's about nothing but sex with a small hint about Mingus as a musician. If there were half as much detail put into Mingus the musician as wasted on his sexual prowess, this could possibly be bearable. This is far too graphic and unnecessary.

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I'm Lost

About 5 years ago I had a friend ask me who my top 4 all time jazz musician are and I listed Charles Mingus as my number one.
After listening to this version of his life and I'd like to believe I understood the picture being painted of his life in this telling and while I still believe he was the greatest bass player ever,..This was truly the worst written, worst told, immaturely illustrated and superficially focused piece of (I really hesitate to call it) literature. Because I so appreciate his artistic quirks I listened to the entire book hoping that even one nugget of real value would be revealed. Hint....It wasn't. To date I have read or listened to 8 stories of the lives of what I would consider the most incredible jazz figures to walk the earth. Most if not all of them were considered geniuses in their element. Their stories as "crazy" as their lives were at time were all told with clarity. This felt like a middle school student with no restrictions or structure on telling the story, wrote it!!

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