The Life and Music of Charles Mingus.

By Gene Santoro.

Illustrated. 452 pp. New York:

Oxford University Press. $30.

IN the late 1950's, the comedian Louis Nye would appear on television in a black beret and turtleneck while standing in the spotlight and ''playing'' the door as if it were a string bass. With his eyes half shut in a transport of musical inspiration, he embraced, stroked and thumped the unhinged door. The audience knew without asking who was behind the door: Charles Mingus, the beatnik avatar of jazz.

Mingus was to jazz in those days what Jack Kerouac was to the novel, what Jackson Pollock was to painting, though Mingus's genius then seemed more decisive. He was an action painter of jazz tone poems, a virtuoso player and composer. Musical heir to Wellman Braud and Jimmy Blanton, Mingus so quickly advanced the bass as a solo and lead instrument that critics compared him to the guitarist Andres Segovia.

Mingus was larger than life, a man whose appetites for rare beef, red wine, good-looking women, talk and violence made him an instant legend. He fit the image of the mad genius, a romantic figure America glorifies while resenting it as egocentric and inegalitarian.

He was born in Nogales, Ariz., in 1922, the third child of a mulatto Army sergeant and a woman of Chinese, black and Caucasian blood. She died soon after Charles's birth, when they had moved to Los Angeles. The only boy, he was overindulged by his family, who called him Baby until he was a teenager.

Mingus had a quick mind, read books and practiced the cello, then the bass, obsessively. As Gene Santoro writes in his biography, ''Myself When I Am Real,'' Mingus ''taped his index and middle fingers together to hobble them, forcing his ring finger to build strength and agility.'' At the age of 18 Mingus was a wunderkind; he played professionally with Louis Armstrong in 1942. By 1945 he had formed his own sextet. Married for the first of four times, and with the first of many children crying in the background, Mingus shut himself in a clothes closet to focus on his bass.

After touring with Lionel Hampton and then with the Red Norvo trio, Mingus settled in New York in 1951. There he became a bebop sideman, working with Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, Miles Davis and others before founding the band that became famous in 1955 as the Charles Mingus Jazz Workshop. In nightclubs like the Cafe Bohemia in Greenwich Village, the goateed, charismatic Mingus was a magnet for the Beats. Kerouac, Pollock and Allen Ginsberg came to hear Mingus's soaring solos, as well as his manic tirades against ''the system.'' Smelling blood, later audiences flocked to the workshop hoping to see Mingus explode.

Mingus was selfish and mean and violent. So was his father. Santoro describes the Minguses at home in 1950: ''He and his son drank ice water and ate chitlins, and threw rocks at pigeons they'd tied to stakes with kite string. They'd try to fly, hit the ground and get up dazed to try it again.''

As a dinner guest, young Charles would eat most of the food on the table. He threatened and abused his wives, and neglected or teased his children. In 1948 he pushed the drummer Curley Hammer off his stool and into the audience. In 1949 he did it again. He would snarl at the customers, ''Drink or listen, but shut up.'' He cracked a bullwhip over their heads, literally. When one promoter underpaid him, Mingus tore off the dressing room door and carried it onstage. He kicked a fan's tape recorder to pieces. He ripped the strings out of a piano with his bare hands. Mingus demanded the impossible of his wives, sidemen, audiences, producers and society, and then raged or cried like a baby when he did not get his way. He blamed his troubles on racism. The saxophonist John Handy said: ''He had a mental problem. He hadn't grown up.''

In 1956, Mingus, crazed by amphetamines, tried to punch the saxophonist Jackie McLean in the mouth, and McLean drove him back with a knife. Six years later, at the height of his fame, Mingus swung on Jimmy Knepper, a trombonist and arranger who was utterly devoted to him, but Knepper was not so lucky. As Santoro writes, ''To hit a horn player in the mouth is like breaking the fingers of a pianist.'' Knepper lost a front tooth and an octave of range on his trombone. He sued Mingus, and for years Mingus found himself blacklisted by arrangers and copyists. This was the turning point. Clinical depression, financial and artistic ruin soon followed.

Mingus's sensational perfectionism, personal disorder, paranoia and persecution mania have been widely discussed for decades. Santoro, the jazz critic for The Nation, is laboring in the shadow of two vivid portraits in two previous biographies: Brian Priestley's elegant ''Mingus: A Critical Biography'' (1982), and Mingus's own fanciful autobiography ''Beneath the Underdog'' (1971) -- not to mention the formidable journalism of Nat Hentoff.

To fill gaps in the record, Santoro has made good use of the Mingus archive at the Library of Congress with its letters, bankbooks and contracts. He has also interviewed Mingus's wives, sisters, children and several dozen musicians and business associates. Where Priestley loses track of Mingus after his mental breakdown in 1967, Santoro covers that dark passage, 1967 to 1972, when Mingus nearly stopped playing, and then details his struggle to regain his health and reputation before dying of Lou Gehrig's disease in 1979.

Santoro presents his story like a documentary film collage, with talking heads directing the discourse every page or two -- Hentoff, the wives, Knepper, Mingus himself. While these italicized quotations are informative, they stagger Santoro's narrative. Rarely able to sustain the story line longer than a few paragraphs, he leaps fitfully from Mingus's private life to his music, from his checkbook to great moments in the civil rights movement. Each chapter breaks down into 40 or 50 sections, which crumble away into little paragraphs, eroded by tiny sentences. These fragments make for slow going.

Finally, Santoro's incessant romanticizing of his subject is wearying. ''It's an old saw that geniuses and artists are basically children,'' he declares, with paternal indulgence, before describing Mingus chasing fans out of a nightclub with a meat cleaver. The notion is poisonous, neither true nor ''an old saw.'' What made Mingus great was his discipline and maturity as a musician. His refusal to grow up made him nothing but newspaper copy, a sideshow and a heartache to everyone who loved him.