Tonight At Noon: A Love Story [Paperback] Review

I purchased this book because I have loved the music of Charles Mingus since I first purchased Ah Um. What I expected was a breezily written collection of Mingus stories, colorful anecdotes involving gigs and musicians and glimpses of the magic of creation. And certainly there is some of that in this book - Mingus' diet foibles and paranoid fears and erratic public behaviors elicit laughter and disbelief in the reader. Mingus opinions are never tepid - Miles' voice gets lost in his later fusion era, and Coltrane became a musical preacher that never changed his sermon. Those who played completely free (Archie Shepp and Pharoah Sanders, for instance) were participating in a shuck and trying to trick both a white audience and themselves while neglecting the fact that any music has to come from an historical common place.
For a man as massive in stature and appetites as Mingus, his fragility is touching.He is demanding, mercurial, and larger than life; all qualities that get clearly demonstrated by the author. There is also some material that covers Sue's upbringing in an undemonstrative household that initially seems distracting but eventually becomes appropriate to the narrative. The tense switches from past to present on occasions, as though journal entries have been inserted.
However, the book is really, as advertised, a love story. Detailed at length is the Mingus household's battle with Lou Gehrig's disease, from the initial diagnosis to the increasingly desperate attempts to obtain a cure, to the heart attack that eventually takes Mingus' life. Underlying all the voodoo and the iguana blood cocktails and the wildly exploratory midnight rides through the Mexican countryside is a testament to the power of human love and kindness.

The reason I hoped this book would be a lightly written witness to Mingus is because I purchased it as something to read during the nights I am spending at the bedside of my dying father. Instead there is much that is grimly familiar here - after weeks of caregiving you find yourself not knowing what day it might be, idly speculating of ways to end a loved one's life that might look perfectly natural, wrestling with your own spiritual loneliness. Nevertheless, this is a great book for music fans in general, and Mingus fans in particular.

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