Blair Tindall's behind-the-scenes look at classical musicians chasing freelance gigs in New York is a raucous, ribald and often raunchy romp through a community of artists that are held up as mysterious sacred cows, but often live in near-poverty.

She spares no one and nothing, right down to her fellow musicians' sexual proclivities.

"Every instrument player had a unique sexual style," Tindall states in her bold, in-your-face voice. ". . . Trumpet players pumped away like jocks, while pianists' sensitive fingers worked magic. French horn players their instruments the testiest of all, could rarely (consumate the encounter), but percussionists could make beautiful music out of anything at all. One of them even specialized in making instruments from refrigerators, auto taillights and other castoffs he'd found at junkyards."

A regular contributor to The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and San Francisco Examiner, Tindall also has played with the New York Philharmonic and the New York City Ballet, and in Broadway musicals, including Wicked! and Les Miserables. The cymbal-clashing of these two disciplines is the exact double whammy needed to bring this story to life.

Tindall tells her personal tale of climbing through Manhattan's classical musical jungle as a rising and then accomplished oboist.

As a gifted teen oboist, Tindall found herself living the young musician's dream at the North Carolina School of the Arts. Tindall's initiation into her new world included a private lesson with an oboe teacher who was a Fulbright scholar and had played with the Alabama Mobile Symphony and the Atlanta Symphony.

She describes the scene as the teacher instructs her:

"First, you'll learn to breathe properly. Play a D like this." The room rang with a sound so beautiful, it was pure tone. As I imitated him, Robinson gazed at my torso.

"Guess your lungs are still developing," he chortled, rising for a closer look at my developing breasts. Next, he guided my hand to his abdomen, demonstrating how his belly expanded when he inhaled. "Right below the belt," he said, to illustrate proper breathing technique.

It wasn't long before she was living in New York, where she quickly learned the realities of life among those who toil in the orchestra pits but never make superstar status - people who trade in sex and drugs as much as on their talent, often play drunk or high, and live in apartments far from the glamorous lofts of their more famous peers.

Tindall writes of her time at New York's Allendale Apartments - a holding house of sorts for struggling writers, musicians, artists and eccentrics. She calls the owner and manager Brunnhilde and Yoda - "for reasons of appearance, not wisdom."

The maintenance man doesn't fare much better: "Angelo, a superintendent with no discernible skills outside reproduction, lived in a sprawling basement hellhole. I often found one of his thirteen children from three different mothers smoking dope in the cellar's maze. Angelo's teenage children produced grandchildren with impressive frequency. When temperatures plunged in winter, Brunnhilde sent him for sweaters and blankets at Goodwill. He layered them around the roof's labyrinth of pipes, but could not stop our hot water from freezing fourteen days straight . . .

"His helper, Hippolito, haunted the stairwell after dark, peering through the keyholes of old service doors long sealed shut, (ejaculating) into a filthy rag."

A confident journalist, Tindall also exposes government's, benefactors', and society's mismanagement of the classical art. Such alleged supporters, she points out, have hindered, as often as helped, the music world.

Financial support, adds Tindall, often comes from the most unlikely of places. Her description of Richard Nixon's patronage, for example, shows how money can go for good causes - as well as ridiculous ones.

In 1971, Tindall notes, Nixon increased the National Endowment for the Arts budget, by eight times, to $40 million.

Leonard Garment, a lawyer and clarinet player who was Nixon's special counsel, "advised the president that such a dramatic increase could win the political allegiance of arts groups' board members, who were usually influential corporate and community leaders as well."

The NEA gave $350,000 to the American Ballet Theater, "but also proposed $400,000 for a new chamber orchestra competing with struggling groups. . . . Some $100,000 was allocated for artists' housing, $80,000 for helping art school graduates, $50,000 to preserve Hawaii's natural beauty (through a conference on development), and $10,000 to help a poet move to a warmer city."

Tindall tends to wander off into interesting but diverting "side stories," but she tells a tale that is at once frightening and redeeming. Artists, after all, are expected to suffer.

Any artist who's ever tried to make it as a purist in a world where the rent's forever past due will undoubtedly find solace and familiarity in Tindall's scathing, intimate look at the classical musician's world.

All others will enjoy Mozart in the Jungle because it's an exhilarating, albeit often excruciating, ride.

Cathie Beck is a Denver writer. She recently completed a memoir, "Cheap Cabernet: A Friendship."