Book Musik Episode 5: Charles Mingus – “Beneath the Underdog: His World as Composed by Mingus”

Charles Mingus Beneath the Underdog book cover

Tosh & Kimley discuss Beneath the Underdog: His World as Composed by Mingus, the memoir by iconic jazz musician and composer Charles Mingus. Mingus’s memoir is known for its picaresque telling of his childhood growing up in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles and his travels to the California Bay Area as well as his time in New York City. While the book doesn’t give a lot of detail on his musical work or his playing with all the greats of his era, it does give an illuminating perspective on race and growing up and living as a black man in America in the twentieth century. Not to mention his many escapades with pimps, prostitutes and assorted other riveting characters. This book swings like few others!

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Theme music: “Behind Our Efforts, Let There Be Found Our Efforts” by LG17

Book Musik Episode 4 – “Ennio Morricone: In His Own Words”

Ennio Morricone in his own Words book cover

Tosh & Kimley discuss Ennio Morricone: In His Own Words (Ennio Morricone in conversation with Alessandro De Rosa.) The great Italian composer whose music everyone knows even if they don’t know his name has scored literally hundreds of films, first gaining fame for his scores for the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone (A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good, the Bad & the Ugly) and then working with a who’s who of Italian directors (Pier Paolo Pasolini, Bernardo Bertolucci, Giuseppe Tornatore to name a few) and eventually getting noticed by Hollywood and beyond. Terrence Malick, Brian de Palma, Pedro Almodóvar, and Quentin Tarantino have all been lucky enough to have an Ennio Morricone score for their films. His IMDB page currently lists 519 composer credits! And that does not include his incredible output of “Absolute Music” and his work with the Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza where things get really interesting.

Listen on Substack or your favorite podcast app

Theme music: “Behind Our Efforts, Let There Be Found Our Efforts” by LG17