Watts, the towers and the bass

Mingus grew up in Watts, in Los Angeles. He started on the trombone and the cello, and came to the double bass as a teenager.

Simon Rodia's towers

Down the road, a tile setter named Simon Rodia spent more than thirty years building towers of steel, cement, glass and shell by hand, alone. Mingus wrote about them in Beneath the Underdog.

This journal entry is demo copy, written for this example site from published histories.