In the tradition of Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential and Gelsey Kirkland's Dancing on My Grave, Mozart in the Jungle delves into the lives of the musicians and conductors who inhabit the insular world of classical music.

In a book that inspired the Amazon original series starring Gael Garcia Bernal and Malcolm McDowell, oboist Blair Tindall recounts her decades-long professional career as a classical musician, from the recitals and Broadway orchestra performances to the secret life of musicians who survive hand to mouth in the backbiting New York classical music scene, trading sexual favors for plum jobs and assignments in orchestras across the city. Tindall and her fellow journeymen musicians often play drunk, high, or hopelessly hungover, live in decrepit apartments, and perform in hazardous conditions. These are working-class musicians who schlep across the city between low-paying gigs, without health-care benefits or retirement plans―a stark contrast to the rarefied experiences of overpaid classical musician superstars.

An incisive, no-holds-barred account, Mozart in the Jungle is the first true, behind-the-scenes look at what goes on backstage and in the Broadway pit.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

By age 16, the author of this alternately piquant and morose memoir was dealing marijuana, bedding her instructors at a performing arts high school and studying the oboe. Later, her blossoming career as a freelance musician in New York introduced her to a classical music demimonde of cocaine parties and group sex that had her wondering why she "got hired for so many of my gigs in bed." But the vivace of the chapters on her bohemian salad days subsides to a largo as she heads toward 40 and the sex and drugs recede along with dreams of stardom; the reality of a future in Broadway orchestra pits (where she reads magazines as she plays to stave off boredom) sets in. Tindall escaped to journalism, but her resentment of an industry that "squeezed me dry of spontaneity" and turns other musicians into hollow-eyed "galley slaves" is raw. She mounts a biting critique of the conservatories that churn out thousands of graduates each year to pursue a handful of jobs, the superstar conductors and soloists who lord it over orchestral peons and a fine arts establishment she depicts as bloated and ripe for downsizing. Tindall's bitterness over what might still strike many readers as a pretty great career is a bit overdone, but she offers a fresh, highly readable and caustic perspective on an overglamorized world. Photos. Agent, James Fitzgerald. (July) 

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

From The New Yorker

For the author, an oboist and journalist, a certain Upper West Side apartment building, long popular with musicians, is a metaphor for classical music in America today: a Beaux-Arts façade masking an increasingly decrepit infrastructure. Tindall's book, her first, is hardly free of false notes. Paragraphs full of dire predictions and alarming statistics jibe a little too conveniently with her tales of professional disappointment and sexual promiscuity. As Tindall sleeps her way to the bottom, we learn more than we probably need to about the sex lives of some more or less prominent American musicians. But Tindall's central complaint—that the classical-music world has created a crisis by training too many musicians and supporting a culture of exorbitant pay for a few fortunate stars—is difficult to refute. 

Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

From the Author

"Mozart in the Jungle" travels around the globe, from performances in Vienna's Staatsoper, Rio's Teatro Colon and a remote Brazilian rainforest, then on to New York City, where Tindall and her musician colleagues live in the squalor of a decrepit west side tenement. A metaphor for the classical music business, the building has fallen from glory, its elaborate stone carving chipped, windows patched with cardboard, and its elegant décor plastered over by a greedy landlord and her predatory handyman. Outsiders have never looked farther than the ornate facade…until now.

Inside, music transforms a schoolteacher into a beautiful diva, and sustains a renowned pianist who endures two heart transplants to perform with the stars who pay him a pittance. An American goddess of the arts struggles to fulfill a dream, her ominous future mirrored by an older musician whose fantasies drain away in her lonely apartment upstairs. A stunning cellist becomes an AIDS-infected crack addict and prostitute; a Metropolitan Opera violinist is jailed for selling cocaine; and an African-American virtuoso becomes so lost inside the elitist white arts world that he smashes his $185,000 eighteenth-century French violin into splinters.

The drama of "Mozart in the Jungle" opens during America's Cold War-era optimism, and follows four musicians as their world dissolves into a culture of entitlement for a new generation of classical musicians, who are deaf to changing American tastes and demand. By weaving memoir with investigative arts journalism, Tindall shatters rhetoric about the arts in the United States -- in an real-life tale from a musician whose career paralleled America’s late twentieth-century culture boom. As "Mozart in the Jungle" races to its dramatic conclusion, Tindall reveals music as a simple, spiritual gift accessible to all. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

About the Author

Journalist and oboist Blair Tindall writes about classical music for the New York Times and has performed, toured, and recorded with the New York Philharmonic and many other musical groups. She has taught journalism at Stanford University and the oboe at the University of California, Berkeley.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

PRELUDE

Janet directed the taxi driver to stop just past Manhattan School of Music on 122nd Street, where I heard students practicing violin scales, trumpet etudes, and clarinet melodies in the inexpensive apartments nearby. The cab stopped halfway down Claremont Avenue, on a somewhat seedy block bordering Harlem, and I followed Janet inside the foyer of a narrow tenement. As the front door buzzed open, we passed under the hall’s murky light, then out the fire escape door to a barren airshaft. A bulb lit up an old paint-blistered door. Music was throbbing from behind it.

"It's just me, Donald," shouted Janet, punching the mechanical doorbell with a pinging clunk. One, two, then a third deadbolt unlocked. The door creaked open and music blasted out.

A window shot open up above. "Jesus fucking Christ will you shut the fuck up!" A Gristede's bag sailed out the window over our heads, just missing me but spraying coffee grounds everywhere else.

A scruffy man in a stained yellow T-shirt pulled us inside, barricading the door with a five-foot pole lock anchored to the floor. Two Virgin Mary candles from a local bodega flickered in the darkness to the beat of music pulsing from huge, old Klipsch speakers. I could smell, faintly, gas leaking from somewhere, and mildew creeping across the gray walls. Through the metal accordion grate on the windows, mountains of garbage accumulated in the shaft. My heart started beating faster.

--How did classical music ever bring me to this place?

Three men I knew howled with laughter on the frayed brown sofa. "Dude, I never can get over him fucking his sister," Stan choked on his words. "It's so out." Donald shrugged and smoked the fat joint that was making its rounds.

"Yeah, I know. Now their kid's fucking his aunt," interrupted Milton, pushing his stringy blonde bangs aside to see the knobs on a large vacuum-tube amplifier. "Listen to this riff. Man, you're not gonna believe." The record blared, and they were silent for a moment. "Those cats could really play," sighed Stan one during a lull in the music.

I watched Janet bend over the desk to snort cocaine through a straw. I’d never done coke, but I was feeling pressured to try Donald’s stash too. Donald drummed his fingers on the table, regarding me suspiciously. Suddenly, his attention shifted to Milton, who sprang back to the couch to roll a crisp $100 bill into a tube.

"Miltie’s chasing the dragon, man," Billy sputtered, "he’s totally chasing that shit." He doubled over with laughter, gasping for breath. Confused, Janet looked at Milton and cocked her head, the straw dangling between her fingers.

"You know how it is, man, trying to stay up, get the buzz back, you gotta do more blow. Gotta chase the dragon," said Milton almost defensively, cutting two lines of coke on the coffee table. He leaned over with his $100 tube and the lines disappeared.

"No, man, I meant the real dragon," chortled Billy, knocking a tin of Szechuan noodles onto the rug. "The one in the opera. It's Siegfried, man. The giant turns into a dragon. Guards the trolls' gold. Shit. People think Star Wars invented this fucking shit." An operatic bass wailed through the record's pops and scratches.

"God damn, sounds like he's coming," said Milton, sneezing violently. "Wagner's so out. What's with those Valkyries?" The words tumbled out and he choked on his own laughter. "Pointy. Pointy, dude. Torpedo tits."

Billy got up and switched records, carefully slipping one into its faded jacket. He dropped the needle, and brass instruments played a religious tune. "Valhalla, man." He sighed, folding his hands reverentially. "Castle of the gods. Power. Power and glory, man." The window vibrated as the music rose and fell.

Milton took a long swig of Beck’s. "What kind of Wagner tubas they playing? Paxman? Alexander? It's Vienna Phil, Solti, right? Damn, they're nailing it," he shouted over the din. He wiped his nose, and then smeared back a cowlick in a seamless motion.

These guys had fire in their bellies, I thought. I watched Janet hand Donald $250, then tuck a baggie of coke into her purse. Young and inexperienced, I wanted this "in" crowd of classical musicians to accept me, so I would be asked to play in the city’s hottest orchestras and chamber music groups with them. I’d already started playing oboe as a substitute in the New York Philharmonic even though I was still in school. I was too scared to do coke, though, and I tried to appear nonchalant by propping my black alligator sandals on the coffee table.

"Oooh, nice shoes, Blair. What'd you play at the Phil tonight? No, wait wait wait," spewed Milton, ogling my feet. With a toothpick, he arranged a cocaine flower pattern on my toenail and snorted through the bill. Everyone exploded in laughter.

"I need more blow, Donald. I got stage band rehearsal tomorrow," said Stan. "C'mon, how much? Gimme a break. Meistersinger, dude. Six hours long, man!" The intercom buzzed and Donald walked to answer it.

"Billy, you got Götterdämmerung?" Billy nodded, pulling a box of LPs from a ripped Associated Supermarkets paper bag.

"Twilight of the gods. The end, man. Redemption, oh, man. Beautiful. Gold. Oh yeah, magic fire." I wiggled my toes, admiring the expensive shoes bought with one of my New York Philharmonic paychecks. "The gods go up in flames," bubbled Milton. Billy dropped the needle, and everyone listened hard. As the music grew to its climax, he screamed over the finale.

"Nothing like it," he shouted. "Don't you love when Valhalla finally crashes down?" --This text refers to the Paperback edition.