PART I A Circus in a Bathtub

You had to see how difficult it was to cram himself into the confines of black or white American society. It was like putting a circus into a bathtub.

Janet Coleman, Mingus/Mingus

MODERNISM YEAR ONE

Charles Mingus was born in 1922, the same year that James Joyce's Ulysses and T. S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" appeared in print. On the basis of those two literary behemoths alone, Kevin Jackson has written an entire book about 1922, which he calls "Modernism Year One." Joyce and Eliot displayed so much erudition that even serious graduate students in English departments have failed to master their works. But without question, Joyce transformed the novel just as Eliot remade lyric poetry. In the same year, another modernist icon, Franz Kafka, published "The Hunger Artist," the allegorical tale of a circus performer whose death-defying art audiences ignore. Mingus's seminal recording from 1957, "The Clown," carries a similar message. Also in 1922, Marcel Proust published a section of Remembrances of Things Past, yet another novel that transformed the genre. Mingus, the shape-shifter, the genre-buster, and author of the most captivating autobiography by a major jazz artist, was born just as a new day was dawning in Western literature.

Mingus was also born in the same year that the tomb of King Tutankhamen was opened in Egypt's Valley of the Kings. It was the year Benito Mussolini seized power in Italy and Joseph Stalin was appointed general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The Ottoman Empire was abolished in 1922, and construction began on Yankee stadium. The presidency of Warren G. Harding was upended by the Teapot Dome scandal, and Christian K. Nelson patented the Eskimo Pie. At the movie houses, Americans could see the first important documentary film, Robert J. Flaherty's Nanook of the North, a view of the primitive life of an Inuit tribe. With life in the "civilized" world suddenly becoming faster, louder, and more mechanized, the world of Nanook must have offered pleasures both reassuring and nostalgic.

More significantly for the career of Charles Mingus, 1922 was the year that Bert Williams, possibly the most popular black entertainer of his day, who performed in a tattered tuxedo with black shoe polish on his face, passed away. Also that year, a new era in African American art began when Louis Armstrong left New Orleans for Chicago, where he joined the Creole Jazz Band and his idol, King Oliver. Less than a year later, Armstrong and Oliver went into a recording studio for the first time, and Jelly Roll Morton and his orchestra also made their first recordings. Many consider the music that these artists committed to vinyl in 1923 to be the first "real" jazz records.

But even without these epochal recordings, Mingus was born into the "Jazz Age," a term introduced by F. Scott Fitzge