One of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists, Toby Litt, author of Corpsing, deadkidsongs, Exhibitionism, Finding Myself and Ghost Story brings us a monthly selection on cult literature.

This month features: Beneath the Underdog by Charles Mingus - old edition
Published by: Payback Press
ISBN: 0862415454
Price: £8.99

Beneath the Underdog by Charles Mingus - new edition
Published by: Canongate
ISBN: 1841955701
Price: £7.99

For a jazz autobiography, there is very little music in Beneath the Underdog.

Instead, we have:

'In other words I am three. One man stands forever in the middle, unconcerned, unmoved, watching, waiting to be allowed to express what he sees to the other two. The second man is like a frightened animal that attack for fear of being attacked. Then there?s an over-loving gentle person who lets people into the uttmost sacred temple of his being and he?ll take insults and be trusting and sign contracts without reading them and get talked down to working cheap or for nothing, and when he realizes what?s been done to him he feels like killing and destroying everything around himself for being so stupid. But he can't ? he goes back inside himself.'

'Which one is real?'

'They're all real.'

This, a fictionalized dialogue between Mingus-who-is-three and his psychologist.

And Mingus's understanding of himself is, from the start, clearly much more acute than any psychologist could approach. Which doesn't mean that he's any more settled or in control of himself.

I love the music that Charles Mingus played and composed. Beginning as one of the few bassists able to keep up with the bebop genius of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, Mingus grew to become a composer worthy of comparison with his idol, Duke Ellington.

To listen to Mingus' music is to be confronted with a contradictory, self-parodic, sentimental, grotesque, extraordinarily living personality. Jazz usually mimics cities ? struttin' and sweaty like New Orleans at midnight, lonesomely deserted like Manhattan at three in the morning ? but Mingus, I'd say, gives us instead a wild, friendly neighbourhood. There's a sanctified church, where preachers inspire their congregations to frenzied prayer, tearful testifying and speaking in tongues; there's a whorehouse, in which langorous and dishevelled ladies wait, dance, cry; there's a jazz club, visited by every possible style of group from ragtime to hard bop; there's an academy of classical music; there's restaurants, trolley cars, busy tenement blocks, clothes shops, schools and nurseries. Mingus creates one of the most inclusive soundworlds of any composer, in any idiom.

His autobiography is that of a profoundly troubled, often bitter man who never feels loved enough but constantly undermines those loves offered to him. To say Mingus was difficult is a bit like saying Proust didn't get out much. He was an ornery and self-destrutive type who, throughout his life, inspired the deepest affection and loyalty.

Beneath the Underdog is a memoir of day-to-day survival. Mingus, like almost all jazz musicians, was routinely ripped off. In order to pay the rent, he turned his hand to any number of things - perhaps the most notorious of which was pimping. Typically for Mingus, though, he was unable to separate business and pleasure, love and money. On this subject, Mingus' autobiography is explicit.

Apart, of course, from a large stack of records to listen to whilst reading Beneath the Underdog (and otherwise to improve your life in every conceivable way), there are a couple of necessary accompanying texts. First is Sue Graham Mingus' own other-side-of-the-mirror autobiography, Tonight at Noon: A Love Story. Second is Myself when I Am Real: The Life and Music of Charles Mingus, Gene Santoro's definitive biography. Also recommended is the DVD documentary Triumph of the Underdog.