(Easy Piano Personality). 17 tunes from this master composer and bassist arranged for easy piano solo: Better Get Hit in Your Soul * Boogie Stop Shuffle * Celia * Chair in the Sky * Diane (Alice's Wonderland) * Duke Ellington's Sound of Love * Goodbye Pork Pie Hat * Hora Decubitus * Invisible Lady * Jelly Roll * Noddin' Ya Head Blues * Nostalgia in Times Square * Peggy's Blue Skylight * Portrait * Song with Orange * Sue's Changes * Sweet Sucker Dance.

Michael Brecker calls these new collections "a fantastic resource for music students and professionals alike" and Billy Taylor says they make "the music of Mingus become more accessible than ever." These book/CD packs available in C, Eb, Bb and BC editions include two CDs featuring both trio and quartet versions of 14 classic Mingus compositions performed by Mingus Big Band members; musical charts; performance notes; rare photographs; a biography; and historical commentary. Songs include: Fables of Faubus * Goodbye Pork Pie Hat * Gunslinging Bird * Jelly Roll * Peggy's Blue Skylight * Portrait * Slippers * Sue's Changes * and more.

Bass player extraordinaire Charles Mingus, who died in 1979, is one of the essential composers in the history of jazz, and Beneath the Underdog, his celebrated, wild, funny, demonic, anguished, shocking and profoundly moving memoir, is the greatest autobiography ever written by a jazz musician. It tells of his God-haunted childhood in Watts during the 1920s and 1930s; his outcast adolescent years; his apprenticeship, not only with jazzmen but also with pimps, hookers, junkies, and hoodlums; and his golden years in New York City with such legendary figures as Duke Ellington, Lionel Hampton, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, and Dizzy Gillespie. Here is Mingus in his own words, from shabby roadhouses to fabulous estates, from the psychiatric wards of Bellevue to worlds of mysticism and solitude, but for all his travels never straying too far, always returning to music.