A sonic exploration and tonal analysis of contemporary creative music in a myriad of improvisational/composed settings, textures, and expressions.
Welcome to Sound Projections
I'm your host Kofi Natambu. This online magazine features the very best in contemporary creative music in this creative timezone NOW (the one we're living in) as well as that of the historical past. The purpose is to openly explore, examine, investigate, reflect on, studiously critique, and take opulent pleasure in the sonic and aural dimensions of human experience known and identified to us as MUSIC. I'm also interested in critically examining the wide range of ideas and opinions that govern our commodified notions of the production, consumption, marketing, and commercial exchange of organized sound(s) which largely define and thereby (over)determine our present relationships to music in the general political economy and culture.
Thus this magazine will strive to critically question and go beyond the conventional imposed notions
and categories of what constitutes the generic and stylistic definitions of ‘Jazz’, ‘classical music’, ‘Blues.’
'Rhythm and Blues’, ‘Rock and Roll’, ‘Pop’, ‘Funk’, ‘Hip Hop’, etc. in order to search for what individual
artists and ensembles do cretively to challenge and transform our ingrained ideas and attitudes of what
music is and could be.
So please join me in this ongoing visceral, investigative, and cerebral quest to explore, enjoy, and pay
homage to the endlessly creative and uniquely magisterial dimensions of MUSIC in all of its guises and expressive identities.
Saturday, April 18, 2015
Charles Mingus (1922-1979): Legendary, iconic and innovative bassist, pianist, composer, arranger, ensemble leader, teacher, and critic
SOUND PROJECTIONS
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
WINTER, 2015
VOLUME ONE NUMBER TWO
THELONIOUS MONK
Featuring the Musics and Aesthetic Visions of:
ESPERANZA SPALDING January 31-February 6
MARY LOU WILLIAMS February 7-13
STEVE COLEMAN February 14-20
JAMES BROWN February 21-27
CURTIS MAYFIELD February 28-March 6
ARETHA FRANKLIN March 7-13
GEORGE CLINTON March 14-20
JAMES CARTER March 21-27
TERENCE BLANCHARD March 28-April 3
BILLIE HOLIDAY
April 4-10
[In glorious tribute and gratitude to this great legendary artist we celebrate her centennial year]
In one of the typical ironies of his life, the only time composer Charles Mingus was nominated for a Grammy award was for his liner notes, not for the music they accompanied, for his Columbia album “Let My Children Hear Music,” released in 1971.
Liner notes to “Let My Children Hear Music”
WHAT IS A JAZZ COMPOSER? by Charles Mingus
Each jazz musician when he takes a horn in his hand- trumpet, bass, saxophone, drums-whatever instrument he plays-each soloist, that is, when he begins to ad lib on a given composition with a title and improvise a new creative melody, this man is taking the place of a composer. He is saying, “listen, I am going to give you a new complete idea with a new set of chord changes. I am going to give you a new melodic conception on a tune you are familiar with. I am a composer.” That’s what he is saying.
I have noticed that there are many kinds of composers in this so-called jazz. For instance, there are musicians who simply take rhythmic patterns and very spare notes-very limited invention melodically-and play in a soulful swinging way. Some people in the audience, when asked what they think about jazz, say, “I just go by the feeling, I go by the feeling the guy gives me.” Now, whether there is feeling or not depends upon what your environment or your association is or whatever you may have in common with the player. If you feel empathy for his personal outlook, you naturally feel him musically more than some other environmental and musical opposite who is, in a way. beyond you.
I, myself, came to enjoy the players who didn’t only just swing but who invented new rhythmic patterns, along with new melodic concepts. And those people are: Art Tatum, Bud Powell, Max Roach, Sonny Rollins, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Parker, who is the greatest genius of all to me because he changed the whole era around. But there is no need to compare composers. If you like Beethoven, Bach or Brahms, that’s okay. They were all pencil composers. I always wanted to be a spontaneous composer. I thought I was, although no one’s mentioned that. I mean critics or musicians. Now, what I’m getting at is that I know I’m a composer. I marvel at composition, at people who are able to take diatonic scales, chromatics, 12-tone scales, or even quarter-tone scales. I admire anyone who can come up with something original. But not originality alone, because there can be originality in stupidity, with no musical description of any emotion or any beauty the man has seen, or any kind of life he has lived. For instance, a man says he played with feeling. Now he can play with feeling and have no melodic concept at all. That’s often what happens in jazz: I have found very little value left after the average guy takes his first eight bars-not to mention two or three choruses, because then it just becomes repetition, riffs and patterns, instead of spontaneous creativity, I could never get Bird to play over two choruses. Now, kids play fifty thousand if you let them. Who is that good?
Today, things are at the other extreme. Everything is supposed to be invented, the guys never repeat anything at all and probably couldn’t. They don’t even write down their own tunes, they just make them up as they sit on the bandstand. It’s all right, I don’t question it. I know and hear what they are doing. But the validity remains to be seen -what comes, what is left, after you hear the melody and after you hear the solo. Unless you just want to hear the feeling, as they say.
When I was a kid and Coleman Hawkins played a solo or Illinois Jacquet created “Flyin’ Home,” they (and all the musicians) memorized their solos and played them back for the audience, because the audience had heard them on records. Today I question whether most musicians can even repeat their solos alter they’ve played them once on record. In classical music, for example people go to hear Janos Starker play Kodaly. They don’t go to hear him improvise a Kodaly, they go to hear how he played it on record and how it was written. Jazz was at one time the same way. You played your ad lib solo, you created it, and if it was worthwhile, then you played it in front of the public again.
Now, on this record there is a tune which is an improvised solo and which I am very proud of. I am proud because to me it has the expression of what I feel, and it shows changes in tempo and changes in mode, yet the variations on the theme still fit into one composition. (It is not like some music I hear where the musician plays eight bars and then the next eight bars sound like he is playing another tune). I would say the composition is on the whole as structured as a written piece of music. For the six or seven minutes it was played (originally on piano), the solo was within the category of one feeling, or rather, several feelings expressed as one. I’m not sure whether every musician who improvises can do this. I think I do it better on bass, although most people in the past did not understand the range I used to play (nowadays most all bass players use this range when they solo-the full scope of the bass), because they didn’t really listen, they thought I was just playing high to play high, rather than realizing that my composition began some place and developed to another. I have never struggled to be accepted as a great bassist-I imagine I could have been if I had seen my available musical goal there. If people really knew the qualification of a good bass player, they would flip-because I know thirty or forty bass players who have the technique that I have.* Whether or not they are as inventive is something else because when you study the instrument, it calls for a technique that jazz has not even begun to express yet, with the bow or with pizzicato. The full-developed bass player masters harmonics with a sense-I don’t mean just scraping the bow across and making squeak sounds, I mean he can play compositions in harmonics. There are a million bowings that could and probably do duplicate a horn better. For instance, my dream has been to put basses, or maybe two basses in a reed section, in place of the baritone saxophone. I never had the chance so I could never say how it really sounds, it is only in my mind that I can say I hear it and it would work better than most baritone saxes. I had a classical student who was in the symphony in Minneapolis. He used to study through the mail and, for his lessons, I would write things for him and he would re-tape them and send them back. That was when I realized how much more could done, musically, by using the boss with the bow, by utilizing all the possibilities of this instrument. Back to the record: the music on this record is involved with my trying to say what the hell I am here for. And similar ideas. Another one is: let my children hear music -for God’s sake-they have had enough noise. But mainly I am saying: Do you really know Mingus, you critics? Here is a piece I wrote in 1939 and I wrote it like this because thought in 1939 I would probably get it recorded some day. But when you have to wait thirty years to get one piece played-what do you think happens to a composer who is sincere and loves to write and has to wait thirty years to have someone play a piece of his music? That was when I was energetic and wrote all the time. Music was my life. Had I been born in a different country or had I been born white, I am sure I would have expressed my ideas long ago. Maybe they wouldn’t have been as good because when people are born free-I can’t imagine it, but I’ve got a feeling that if it’s so easy for you, the struggle and the initiative are not as strong as they are for a person who has to struggle and therefore has more to say.
Part of the reason I am a composer is that I studied composition with Lloyd Reese. Lloyd Reese taught Eric Dolphy; Harry Carney also studied with him and so did Ben Webster and Buddy Collette, to name a few. Art Tatum highly recommended him. When Art found out I was studying with Lloyd, he asked me to come and play for him. Lloyd Reese was a master musician, he knew jazz and all the fundamentals of music from the beginning. (He used to be the first alto player in Les Height’s band.) And he could play anything. I remember he turned a record on to me one time. (In my era the record stores weren’t crowded with The Beatles’ records or rock & roll or hillbilly. They had a few hillbilly and a few records they called rhythm & blues. But it wasn’t a big market then. The record stores were mainly for white people. They had classical music, I remember Richard Strauss, Debussy, Ravel, Bach, Beethoven. I remember my favorites: Debussy, Stravinsky and I liked Richard Strauss very much-the one who wrote “Death and Transfiguration.”) In any case I remember one day when I came to Lloyd’s house, he said: “What is this?” and he played a record, I didn’t know the title at the time, but he said: “What do you think is going on in this particular movement right there?” And I said: “I don’t know, man, but there’s a whole lotta shit going on. There’s too much to figure out.” The timpani was playing and the basses were playing and the piano was playing a percussional sound with the bass- you could hardly hear the piano-and the flutes were playing syncopated chop rhythms, the trumpets were playing cock valves, and this cat said: “Well, here it is,” and he took a C-Seventh chord-I remember it started on the Third, and he played E, G, B flat, and D natural, and he said: “This is what the clarinets are doing . . .” and he began to decipher down what was going on. He said: “Here’s the French horn part” and it came in on G, B flat, D, F an octave down and ended A natural, which clashed against the B flat the clarinets were playing in the E, G, B flat, D natural line, and it made a beautiful sound. I said: “Whaaa? What is that?”
So I’m saying briefly that people don’t know what a black man (it’s nice to say black man)-people don’t know what it took to make a jazz musician. In my young days, we were raised more on classical music than on any other kind. It was the only music we were exposed to, other than the church choir. I wasn’t raised in a night club. I wasn’t raised in a whore house (there wasn’t any music in them, anyway- in the bars). Today, I don’t know how they train kids musically. But my point about Reese is that if you told the average person Lloyd Reese took the music of Stravinsky off a record, he would say you were crazy. There are millions of musicians, however, who have the capability of hearing and reproducing what they hear. It wasn’t called ear training; I don’t know what he called it, He would just say: ”Now you take the trumpet part. Now, what’s the French horn doing?” It was to show you structure, I imagine.
As I was saying, each jazz musician is supposed to be a composer. Whether he is or not, I don’t know. I don’t listen to that many people. If I did, I probably wouldn’t play half as much to satisfy myself. As a youth I read a book by Debussy and he said that as soon as he finished a composition he had to forget it because it got in the way of his doing anything else new and different. And I believed him. I used to work with Tatum, and Tatum knew every tune written, including the classics, and I think it got in the way of his composition, because he wasn’t a Bud Powell. He wasn’t as melodically inventive as Bud. He was technically flashy and he knew so much music and so much theory that he couldn’t come up with anything wrong; it was just exercising his theory. But as far as making that original melodic concept, as Bird and Bud did, Art didn’t do this for me in a linear sense. I would say he did it more in a chordal-structure sense. Bud and Bird to me should go down as composers, even though they worked within a structured context using other people’s compositions. For instance, they did things like “All The Things You Are” and “What Is This Thing Called love.” Their solos are new classical compositions within the structured form they used. It is too bad for us that they didn’t compose the whole piece instead of using other people’s tunes to work within. If they had, they would have been put in the same class as Bartok and Debussy-to anyone who knows. Bud wrote a few things and so did Bird. But they were still within the simple chord changes you were used to-either the blues (which shows how great they really were, to be able to create-with new and good melodic structures-on such simple chord progressions). In other words, if they had created anything complex, I am sure they could have upset the world.
For instance, Bird called me on the phone one day and said: “How does this sound?” and he was playing- ad-libbing-to the Berceuse, or lullaby, section of Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite! I imagine he had been doing it all through the record, but he just happened to call me at that time and that was the section he was playing his ad lib solo on, and it sounded beautiful. It gave me an idea about what is wrong with present-day symphonies: they don’t have anything going on that captures what the symphony is itself, after written. I’d like to write a symphony, myself, on this form-the old western form of classical music-I’d like to write a suite of three or four hours and have a solo in spots that is like Charlie Parker, with Bird in mind, playing ad lib.
I think the music on this record is serious in every sense. I say, let my children have music. I said it earlier. For God’s sake, rid this society of some of the noise so that those who have ears will be able to use them some place listening to good music. When I say good I don’t mean that today’s music is bad because it is loud. I mean the structures have paid no attention to the past history of music. Nothing is simple. It’s as if people came to Manhattan and acted like it was still full of trees and grass and Indians instead of concrete and tall buildings. It’s like a tailor cutting clothes without knowing the design, It’s like living in a vacuum and not paying attention to anything that came before you. What’s worse is that critics take a guy who only plays in the key of C and call him a genius, when they should say those guys are a bitch in C-natural. Pop music is still another story. Even tune structures are stolen. The music I’ve heard from the late pop groups (many of which are from England) seems to stem from a mixture of many different American composers and American music. ” I Found A New Baby.” “Nature Boy.” “Ain’t Necessarily So.” I hear these tunes, certain tunes, all through The Beatles’ music, for instance. I don’t know if they just surround themselves with this kind of music and compose from it. But it doesn’t come out ringing true to me as English composition. For instance, Schillinger used to say that you could take a sheet of music, turn it upside down-alter you wrote a cer- tain movement-eight or ten bars-copy it upside down, then copy it backwards, from the end of the page back, turn the page over and copy it backwards and upside down. This would give you eighty bars or more of the same mood without working for it. It’s the same as taking a tape recorder melody and splicing it up several thousand different ways. To me that’s not spiritual music. It leaves the feeling and emotion out. It seems to me that it should come from the heart, even though it’s composed.
I think it is evident when a person is stealing or copying a form of music which is not his own. Other musicians recognize it, but I don’t think it is important enough to them to say anything about it. Why, at least, doesn’t the public, or don’t the critics point it out? I heard a lot of Bird’s solos in the music of this past and present rock music era. The names are not important. But what they do, more or less, is just take a melody created by a jazz soloist and put words to it. They add words to a solo with a few of the notes left out. That is what it sounds like to me and others I’ve discussed it with.
As I say, let my children have music. Jazz-the way it has been handled in the past-stifles them so that they believe only in the trumpet, trombone, saxophone, maybe a flute now and then or a clarinet (not too many of our “bad”- that is great-people go for the clarinet. Probably because there is not much work available for clarinetists, except for those who play in the studios). But it is not enough. I think it is time our children were raised to think they can play bassoon, oboe, English horn, French horn, lull percussion, violin, cello. The results would be-well the Philharmonic would not be the only answer for us then. If we so-called jazz musicians who are the composers, the spontaneous composers, started including these instruments in our music, it would open everything up, it would get rid of prejudice because the musicianship would be so high in caliber that the symphony couldn’t refuse us.
In fact, who wants to be in the symphony anyway, nowadays? If you stop and take note of what jazz has done, and the kind of musicianship which has developed from each instrument (take the trumpet: Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, Maynard Ferguson, Cat Anderson, or the pyrotechniques of Dizzy Gillespie; you never hear that kind of high- note playing in symphonic works), it becomes obvious that it has made each player a virtuoso. That is probably why most European musicians now choose to be jazz musicians rather than classical players because they are always proving that the instrument can do more than is possible. I mean, the range has doubled in octaves. For instance, Stravinsky wrote a piece for a high trumpet. He used a special trumpet-a piccolo trumpet-to play high, but Cat Anderson played off the piano with an ordinary trumpet-played higher than the piano goes, higher than piccolos. So do Maynard Ferguson, Snooky Young, Ernie Royal, Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, Freddie Webster, Dizzy Gillespie, Fats Novarro, Clifford Brown. Hobart Dotson, Kenny Durham.
There are many other instruments besides the trumpet which jazz musicians have made do the impossible. And they can play, for hours on end, technical, involved, difficult, educated lines that have melodic sense. They are all virtuosi. The same goes for string bass. The same goes for saxophone, although it is not used much in symphony. But anything Milhaud has done in classical music, McPherson and Bird, alone, do with ease as well as human warmth and beauty. Tommy Dorsey, for example, raised the range of the trombone two octaves. Britt Woodman raised it three. And take Jimmy Knepper. One of his solos was taken off a record of mine and written out for classical trombone in my ballet. The trombone player could barely play it. He said it was one of the most technical exercises he had ever attempted to play. And he was just playing the notes-not the embellishments or the sound that Jimmy was getting.
That about covers it.
Let my children have music! Let them hear live music. Not noise. My children! You do what you want with your own!
-- Charles Mingus
Liner notes by Charles Mingus for the album“Let My Children Hear Music” on Columbia Records, 1971.
*["Which, incidentally, brings to mind another thought; along with the jazz hump music and nigger contests, there has never been a contest to decide who is the King of the Trumpet in the Symphony. Or who is the Best Violin Soloist-Jascha Heifetz, Yehudi Menuhin, Isaac Stern, or Salvatore Accardo? Or which is the Best String Quartet of the Year-Budapest or Juilliard?"]
One of the most important figures in twentieth century American music, Charles Mingus was a virtuoso bass player, accomplished pianist, bandleader and composer. Born on a military base in Nogales, Arizona in 1922 and raised in Watts, California, his earliest musical influences came from the church– choir and group singing– and from “hearing Duke Ellington over the radio when [he] was eight years old.” He studied double bass and composition in a formal way (five years with H. Rheinshagen, principal bassist of the New York Philharmonic, and compositional techniques with the legendary Lloyd Reese) while absorbing vernacular music from the great jazz masters, first-hand. His early professional experience, in the 40’s, found him touring with bands like Louis Armstrong, Kid Ory and Lionel Hampton.
Eventually he settled in New York where he played and recorded with the leading musicians of the 1950’s– Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Bud Powell, Art Tatum and Duke Ellington himself. One of the few bassists to do so, Mingus quickly developed as a leader of musicians. He was also an accomplished pianist who could have made a career playing that instrument. By the mid-50’s he had formed his own publishing and recording companies to protect and document his growing repertoire of original music. He also founded the “Jazz Workshop,” a group which enabled young composers to have their new works performed in concert and on recordings.
Mingus soon found himself at the forefront of the avant-garde. His recordings bear witness to the extraordinarily creative body of work that followed. They include: Pithecanthropus Erectus, The Clown, Tijuana Moods, Mingus Dynasty, Mingus Ah Um, The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, Cumbia and Jazz Fusion, Let My Children Hear Music. He recorded over a hundred albums and wrote over three hundred scores. Although he wrote his first concert piece, “Half-Mast Inhibition,” when he was seventeen years old, it was not recorded until twenty years later by a 22-piece orchestra with Gunther Schuller conducting. It was the presentation of “Revelations” which combined jazz and classical idioms, at the 1955 Brandeis Festival of the Creative Arts, that established him as one of the foremost jazz composers of his day.
In 1971 Mingus was awarded the Slee Chair of Music and spent a semester teaching composition at the State University of New York at Buffalo. In the same year his autobiography, Beneath the Underdog, was published by Knopf. In 1972 it appeared in a Bantam paperback and was reissued after his death, in 1980, by Viking/Penguin and again by Pantheon Books, in 1991. In 1972 he also re-signed with Columbia Records. His music was performed frequently by ballet companies, and Alvin Ailey choreographed an hour program called “The Mingus Dances” during a 1972 collaboration with the Robert Joffrey Ballet Company.
He toured extensively throughout Europe, Japan, Canada, South America and the United States until the end of 1977 when he was diagnosed as having a rare nerve disease, Amyotropic Lateral Sclerosis. He was confined to a wheelchair, and although he was no longer able to write music on paper or compose at the piano, his last works were sung into a tape recorder.
From the 1960’s until his death in 1979 at age 56, Mingus remained in the forefront of American music. When asked to comment on his accomplishments, Mingus said that his abilities as a bassist were the result of hard work but that his talent for composition came from God.
Mingus received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Smithsonian Institute, and the Guggenheim Foundation (two grants). He also received an honorary degree from Brandeis and an award from Yale University. At a memorial following Mingus’ death, Steve Schlesinger of the Guggenheim Foundation commented that Mingus was one of the few artists who received two grants and added: “I look forward to the day when we can transcend labels like jazz and acknowledge Charles Mingus as the major American composer that he is.” The New Yorker wrote: “For sheer melodic and rhythmic and structural originality, his compositions may equal anything written in western music in the twentieth century.”
He died in Mexico on January 5, 1979, and his wife, Sue Graham Mingus, scattered his ashes in the Ganges River in India. Both New York City and Washington, D.C. honored him posthumously with a “Charles Mingus Day.”
After his death, the National Endowment for the Arts provided grants for a Mingus foundation created by Sue Mingus called “Let My Children Hear Music” which catalogued all of Mingus’ works. The microfilms of these works were then given to the Music Division of the New York Public Library where they are currently available for study and scholarship – a first for jazz. Sue Mingus has founded three working repertory bands called the Mingus Dynasty, Mingus Orchestra, and the Mingus Big Band, which continue to perform his music. Biographies of Charles Mingus include Mingus by Brian Priestley, Mingus/Mingus by Janet Coleman and Al Young, Myself When I Am Real by Gene Santoro, and Tonight at Noon, a memoir by Sue Mingus.
Mingus’ masterwork, “Epitaph,” a composition which is more than 4000 measures long and which requires two hours to perform, was discovered during the cataloguing process. With the help of a grant from the Ford Foundation, the score and instrumental parts were copied, and the piece itself was premiered by a 30-piece orchestra, conducted by Gunther Schuller, in a concert produced by Sue Mingus at Alice Tully Hall on June 3, 1989, ten years after Mingus’ death.
The New Yorker wrote that “Epitaph” represents the first advance in jazz composition since Duke Ellington’s “Black, Brown, and Beige,” which was written in 1943. The New York Times said it ranked with the “most memorable jazz events of the decade.” Convinced that it would never be performed in his lifetime, Mingus called his work “Epitaph,” declaring that he wrote it “for my tombstone.”
The Library of Congress purchased the Charles Mingus Collection, a major acquisition, in 1993; this included autographed manuscripts, photographs, literary manuscripts, correspondence, and tape recordings of interviews, broadcasts, recording sessions, and Mingus composing at the piano.
Sue Mingus has published a number of educational books through Hal Leonard Publishing, including Charles Mingus: More Than a Fake Book, Charles Mingus: More Than a Play-Along, Charles Mingus: Easy Piano Solos, many big band charts– including the Simply Mingus set of big band music charts– and a Mingus guitar book.
Charles Mingus A musician beyond category By Nat Hentoff From Gadfly
April 1999
Mingus had little patience for jazz critics. They tried to find a category, a convenient term, to describe him. But, as he told me one day, "I am trying to play the truth of what I am. The reason it's difficult is because I'm changing all the time."
Charles Mingus was not only the most powerfully original bassist in jazz history, but he was one of the few legendary soloists and band leaders to leave an utterly distinctive body of continually unpredictable compositions. In that respect, he was in the rare company of Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk.
I used to hear directly, sometimes early in the morning, that he was indeed changing all the time. I'd pick up the phone and hear not a voice, but music, music I'd never heard before. After a few minutes, Mingus would break in.
"What'd you think of that?" he'd say. It was a new work in progress.
From time to time, Mingus would also change shape. Deciding to lose weight, with characteristic determination, he'd lose so much that he'd have to buy new clothes. But then, after awhile, he'd tower over the bandstand again.
Mingus was so opposed to predictable, routine music that in a nightclub, he would sometimes actually interrupt a soloist in his group. "Don't play your usual licks," he'd shout. "What do you want to say now!"
"He would never let us coast," one of his sidemen told me.
And Mingus was like Lester Young, who once said to an interviewer about his continual evolution, "I'm not a repeater pencil."
During one conversation, Mingus told me how he became so compelling a bassist that his solos could drive a crowded room into rapt attention. "Way back, I'd practice the hardest things incessantly. The third finger is seldom used, so I used it all the time. For awhile, I concentrated on speed and technique almost as ends in themselves. I aimed at scaring all the other bass players. There seemed to be no problems I couldn't solve.
"Then one night, when I was eighteen or nineteen, all this changed. I began playing and didn't stop for a long time. It was suddenly me, it wasn't the bass any more. Now I'm not conscious of the instrument as an instrument when I play. I'm up there trying to express myself. It's like a preacher, in a sense. And the instrument, any instrument, shouldn't get in the way."
The reason Mingus reached so many people around the world was the depth—sometimes the explosive depth—of his expressions, his emotions. My favorite memory of how forcefully he could express himself is of one night at a New York club. It was between sets, and we were standing at the bar. I was telling Mingus of music of another kind that probes so deeply into the soul that you could hear the innermost life forces of the performer. I meant the Jewish cantorial music of my youth—the spiraling improvising of singers who sounded sometimes as if they were arguing with God.
Mingus was interested, but as we spoke, a very black musician started to continue what he had shouted at Mingus during the previous set: "You're not black enough to play the blues!"
Mingus was indeed not easily categorized by his color. His skin was not deep blue, but it wasn't white. At the bar, when the very black musician started up his indictment, Mingus—about to conclude the argument with his fists—suddenly thought better of it. He got the bass and plunged into a bass solo that got so deeply into the very core of the blues that his tormenter, blown back as by a fierce wind, slunk out the door.
Unlike some of the younger players at the time, Mingus was acutely conscious of his roots in black music.
"All the music I heard when I was a very young child," he told me, "was church music. My family went to the Methodist church; in addition, my stepmother would take me to the Holiness church and other such churches.
"The blues was in the churches—moaning and riffs and that sort of thing between the audience and the preacher."
Another penetrating influence on the young Mingus was the utterly singular kaleidoscopic music of Duke Ellington.
"When I first heard Duke Ellington in person," Mingus said, "I almost jumped out of the balcony. One piece excited me so much that I screamed."
Ellington, too, did not like to be categorized. Many years ago, he went to Fletcher Henderson, leader of another influential jazz orchestra, and suggested, "Why don't we call what we do 'black music' instead of 'jazz'? That way there'll be no confusion." Henderson wouldn't go along.
Mingus also seldom used the word "jazz." "What I do," he'd say, "is Mingus music."
But he had great respect for the vintage jazz musicians. He had worked as a young man, with Louis Armstrong and Kid Ory, and he loved the driving intensity of swing-era trumpeter Roy Eldridge whom some of the young bop musicians considered an old-timer compared to Dizzy Gillespie.
I once recorded for the Candid label a session on which both Mingus and Roy Eldridge played together for the first time. When the session was over, Roy said to Mingus, "I'm glad I made this. I wanted to find out what bag you're in. Now I know you're in the right bag. There are some people coming up who are so busy being busy on their horns that they forget the basics. They don't get all the way down into the music. You do, baby. It's good to know. There are very few of us left out here."
Mingus was delighted. There was another time when he connected with just the kind of listeners he wanted. "A lot of what the kids get to hear," he said one afternoon, "with rock music all over the place is noise. It's so limited in how it expresses what little it does have to say. But kids are able to hear more, much more. Not long ago I played with my band during one of the free concerts, for the Jazzmobile, on the streets of Harlem.
"Before we started to play, one of the guys with me said, 'Mingus, you can't play what you usually do for these kids here. They don't dig it!' But I did play what I usually do. And I did some more. I took the music as far out as I could and they still liked it.
"All those kids," Mingus was smiling broadly, seeing them again, "following the truck, wanting more. Of course they wanted to hear it. It's their music, man. It's their lives. It goes back so far and has so much farther to go."
To hear how far and deep Mingus went, I suggest the following recordings:Charles Mingus: The Complete Mingus Recordings 1956-1961 (Rhino); Cumbia & Jazz Fusion (Rhino); New Tijuana Moods (Bluebird); Mingus Ah Um (Columbia); The Complete Candid Recordings, the sessions I produced, (Mosaic); Let My Children Hear Music (Columbia); Mingus Plays Piano (Impulse).
Mingus's resilience was never more evident than during the bleakest part of his life. In the late 1960s, he rarely appeared in public. Sometimes I'd see him on the street, on the lower East Side of New York, and he seemed subdued, so low in spirits that his usual lust for life had gone.
He didn't call me any more to talk passionately about politics, the dynamics of race prejudice, the ignorance of jazz critics, the cheating of players by club owners, record companies and booking agents.
A friend of his told me, "He'll never come back. He just used himself all up."
Finally, after several years, there were signs that he was coming back. He began making a new recording. I talked to him in an editing room at Columbia Records to find out where he'd been.
Mingus, a bearded Buddha in black shirt, white tie and black pants, was puffing at a large curved pipe.
"For about three years," he said, "I thought I was finished. Sometimes I couldn't even get out of bed. I wasn't asleep; I just lay there. But living where I do, deep down on the lower East Side, I began to learn about people, and that started me coming back.
"In that neighborhood, they didn't know me from the man in the moon, but they took an interest in me. I'd go to a bar, sit by myself, and I'd hear someone say, 'There's something wrong with this guy. He doesn't come out of his house for four or five days at a time.' And they'd invite me to join them.
"I got to know what friends are. Ukrainians, blacks, Puerto Ricans—a house painter, a tailor, a woman who owns a bar, her bartender, a maintenance man who says, 'I'll walk you home tonight if you get drunk. And if I get drunk, you walk me home.'
"It's hell down there. I've been robbed four times. They stole almost everything I had. So now I've got locks on my doors, bars on my windows, and a baseball bat near at hand. But I'm not going to move. Even with the danger. I want to stay because it's family. We all look out for each other. Not just against muggers and robbers. There was a time when I had no money left at all, but the tailor on the block made sure I had enough to eat. I don't know if I could have come out of the graveyard if it hadn't been for them."
He came back to record many more albums, play concerts in many countries, and he kept on composing. He composed almost to the very end. Mingus became afflicted with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's disease). Eventually, he could no longer walk or play his bass, but one afternoon, in his apartment, I watched as he hummed a new melody, and accompanying parts, into a tape recorder. Later, an arranger would orchestrate the composition for a new Mingus recording.
The last time I saw Mingus was at a jazz concert that president Jimmy Carter hosted on the south lawn of the White House. Carter clearly knew a lot about jazz, having visited jazz clubs when he was in the Navy and afterwards. And he said as he introduced the first set, "It's long past time that a real tribute was paid to jazz musicians here at the White House. Jazz has never received the full recognition it deserves in America—because of the racism in this country."
Mingus was seated in a wheel chair in the front row, next to his wife, Sue, who has continued his legacy by forming the Mingus Big Band which plays with his exultant spirit. That afternoon at the White House, the president came over to Mingus and hugged him. Mingus couldn't move, but you could see the appreciation in his eyes—and his desire to keep on living.
Mingus and Sue kept traveling in search of continued life for him, but at last, he died in Cuernavaca, Mexico, in 1979. He was 57.
Of all the conversations we had, I keep coming back to this one:
"It's not a question of color any more. It's getting deeper than that. I mean it's getting more and more difficult for a man or a woman to just love. People are getting so fragmented, and part of that is that fewer and fewer people are making a real effort any more to find exactly who they are and to build on that knowledge.
"Most people are forced to do things they don't want to do most of the time, and so they get to the point where they feel they no longer have any choice about anything important, including who they are. We create our own slavery.
"But I'm going to keep on getting through and finding out the kind of man I am through my music. That's the one place I can be free."
"Mingus was something else. A pure genius. I loved him."
--Miles Davis
All,
April
22, 2012 marks the 90th birthday of the late, great bass player and
Jazz composer Charles Mingus (1922-1979). Mingus was one of the most
important and pivotal artists, musicians, and composers in the 20th
century and he played a profound role in contributing to and leading a
revolutionary movement in the history of Jazz in the post 1945 era--one
of the most significant and transformative periods in what can only be
called a true 'golden age' in the music and thus the culture(s) of the
African American people, its diaspora, and American society and culture
generally. Thus in homage to, and especially deep appreciation and
joyous celebration of, this fact we present the man and his
extraordinary, groundbreaking music through the following video material
and texts. Enjoy!
Happy Birthday Charles Mingus! (1922-1979) b. April 22, 1922
Charles
Mingus, Jr. was born on April 22, 1922 in Nogales, Arizona on a
military base and raised in Watts, California. Charles first became
interested and exposed to music through the church and when he was eight
he heard Duke Ellington on the radio for the first time. Mingus began
learning music on trombone and later cello. Charles later studied bass
formally with H Rheinshagen from the New York Philharmonic and studied
composition with Lloyd Reese. By the time Mingus was in his teens he was
already composing advanced pieces that would be considered in the
'third stream' movement of Jazz. Charles later recorded these early
compositions in 1960 with Gunther Schuller and called the album
'Pre-Bird'. Mingus quickly created a name for himself in Jazz and in the
1940s toured with Louis Armstrong, Russell Jacquet, Howard McGhee and
Lionel Hampton. In the early 1950s Charles joined the New York scene and
performed with Charlie Parker who was a major influence for Mingus.
During this period Charles also played with Miles Davis, Bud Powell, Max
Roach, Art Tatum and Duke Ellington. Also in the '50s Mingus formed his
own publishing and recording company with Max Roach to document and
protect his music. The most notable album on Debut Records from this
period is the 'Massey Hall' concert with Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie
Parker, Bud Powell and Max Roach.
Mingus
pursued one of his visions around this time called the 'Jazz Workshop'
which enabled musicians to come together and support each other in
testing their limits and pushing ahead to new ground in Jazz. These
groups led to Mingus developing the sound we know him for today and some
of the musicians who played in the Jazz Workshop were Pepper Adams,
Jaki Byard, Booker Ervin, John Handy, Jimmy Knepper, Charles McPherson
and Horace Parlan. In the late '50s and into the 1960s Mingus began
releasing albums as a leader at an incredible pace especially
considering the originality in all of his music. Charles began with
'Pithecanthropus Erectus' in 1956 with Mal Waldron, Jackie Mclean and J.
R. Monterose followed by 'The Clown' in 1957. In 1959 Mingus released
three of his most legendary albums; 'Blues and Roots', 'Mingus Ah Um'
and 'Mingus Dynasty'. In 1960 he recorded 'Charles Mingus Presents
Charles Mingus' with Eric Dolphy, Dannie Richmond and Ted Curson.
Incredible music kept flowing from Mingus and he recorded 'The Black
Saint and the Sinner Lady' in 1963 which is considered a masterpiece and
one of greatest works of arranging and orchestration in Jazz history.
Also is '63 Mingus showed us his skills on the piano with the album
'Mingus Plays Piano' which features only Charles playing solo piano.
Charles
was a warrior for civil rights and his music reflects his willingness
to put himself out there for what he believed in. Mingus’ tune ‘Fables
of Faubus’ best demonstrates his willingness to call it as he sees it
and if you search the song title on Jazz On The Tube you can hear the
version of this song with words by Charles as well. In the late 1960s
and early ‘70s Charles’ incredible pace slowed just a little bit but the
music didn’t stop. In 1971 Mingus was awarded the Slee Chair of Music
and spent a semester teaching at the State University of New York at
Buffalo. Also in ’71 his autobiography was published entitled ‘Beneath
the Underdog’. In 1974 he formed a band with Richmond, Don Pullen, Jack
Walrath and George Adams and they recorded the albums ‘Changes One’ and
‘Changes Two’. During the mid 1970’s Mingus also toured Europe, Asia,
South America and America until he developed a rare nerve disease in
1977. Even though Charles could no longer play after this, he still
composed by singing tunes into a tape recorder, showing his love and
determination to create. Charles Mingus passed away in 1979 and his
ashes were scattered in the Ganges River in India. Both New York City
and Washington D.C. honored him after his passing with a “Charles Mingus
Day”
Charles
Mingus recorded over 100 albums and wrote over 300 scores in his life
and leaves a legacy as one of greatest composers in American history and
certainly in the history of Jazz. Some of the awards Mingus has
received include being inducted into the Down Beat Hall of Fame, Grammy
Lifetime Achievement Award, his album ‘Mingus Dynasty’ was inducted into
the Grammy Hall of Fame, the U.S. Postal Service issued a stamp in his
honor, and the National Endowment of the Arts provided grants for a
nonprofit called “Let My Children Hear Music” in which they cataloged
all of Mingus’ works and made them available at the New York Public
Library. Charles Mingus was a genius, a Jazz master, a warrior for civil
rights and in my humble opinion a true American hero.
“Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity.” "In
other words I am three. One man stands forever in the middle,
unconcerned, unmoved, watching, waiting to be allowed to express what he
sees to the other two.
The second man is like a frightened animal that attacks for fear of being attacked.
Then
there's an over-loving gentle person who lets people into the uttermost
sacred temple of his being and he'll take insults and be trusting and
sign contracts without reading them and get talked down to working cheap
or for nothing, and when he realizes what's been done to him he feels
like killing and destroying everything around him including himself for
being so stupid. But he can't - he goes back inside himself. Which one
is real? They're all real." – Charles Mingus
THE
MUSIC OF CHARLES MINGUS: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF
RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS
WITH MR. MINGUS:
CHARLES MINGUS (1922-1979):
Charles Mingus (1968) Documentary on Charles Mingus Directed by Thomas Reichman:
'TRIUMPH OF THE UNDERGROUND' (1998) DOCUMENTARY ON CHARLES MINGUS DIRECTED BY DON MCGLYNN:
A true master, a genius, and one of America's greatest composers.
Mix--Charles Mingus Interviewed by Nesuhi Ertegun (Parts 1- 9):
Charles Mingus - Live in Belgium, Norway & Sweden 1964. Full Concerts:
Charles Mingus bass - Eric Dolphy bass clarinet, flute - Clifford Jordan sax tenor - Jaki Byard piano - Dannie Richmond drums: Filmed in Belgium on April 19,1964 00:00-00:45 Intro 00:46-05:33 So Long Eric 05:35-11:20 Peggy's Blue Skylight 11:23-32:03 Meditations On Integration.(Eric Dolphy on Bass Clarinet and Flute)
Filmed in Norway on April 12.1964. 32:30-54:46 So Long Eric 56:30-1:11:40 Orange Was The Colour Of Her Dress,Then Blue Silk 1:13:53-1:16:20 Parkeriana 1:16:22-1:29:05 Take The "A" Train(Eric Dolphy on Bass Clarinet)
Charles Mingus on Bass Eric Dolphy on Alto Sax,Bass Clarinet and Flute Clifford Jordan on Tenor Sax Jaki Byard on Piano Dannie Richmond on Drums Johnny Coles on Trumpet
Mix - Charles Mingus - "Sue's Changes" -
Live At Montreux (1975) [6-12]:
Charles Mingus: bass George Adams: tenor saxophone and vocals Don Pullen: piano Jack Walrath: trumpet Dannie Richmond: drums
The great bassist, composer, and bandleader, at the height of his
powers, with one of the best groups ever in jazz music: Eric Dolphy,
Clifford Jordan, Jaki Byard. The video quality is great and, better yet,
so’s the sound.
Filmed in Belgium on April 19,1964:
00:00-00:45 Intro
00:46-05:33 So Long Eric
05:35-11:20 Peggy’s Blue Skylight
11:23-32:03 Meditations On Integration.(Eric Dolphy on Bass Clarinet and Flute)
Filmed in Norway on April 12.1964:
32:30-54:46 So Long Eric
56:30-1:11:40 Orange Was The Colour Of Her Dress,Then Blue Silk
1:13:53-1:16:20 Parkeriana
1:16:22-1:29:05 Take The “A” Train(Eric Dolphy on Bass Clarinet)
Sweden:
1:30:05-1:33:55 So Long Eric
1:34:02-1:59:50 Meditations On Integration (Eric Dolphy on Flute and Bass Clarinet)
Charles Mingus on Bass
Eric Dolphy on Sax,Bass Clarinet and Flute
Clifford Jordan on Tenor Sax
Jaki Byard on Piano
Dannie Richmond on Drums Johnny Coles on Trumpet
Charles Mingus - The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady (Full Album)--1963:
The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady is a studio album by American jazz
musician Charles Mingus, released on Impulse! Records in 1963. The album
consists of a single continuous composition—partially written as a
ballet—divided into four tracks and six movements.
0:00 Solo Dancer 6:40 Duet Solo Dancers 13:23 Group Dancers 20:45 Trio and Group Dancers/ Single Solos and Group Dance/ Group and Solo Dance
Personnel:
Charles Mingus -- bass, piano, composer Jerome Richardson -- soprano and baritone saxophone, flute Charlie Mariano -- alto saxophone Dick Hafer -- tenor saxophone, flute Rolf Ericson -- trumpet Richard Williams -- trumpet Quentin Jackson -- trombone Don Butterfield -- tuba, contrabass trombone Jaki Byard -- piano Jay Berliner -- acoustic guitar Dannie Richmond -- drums
Charles Mingus - 'Mingus Ah Um' (Full Album and Bonus Tracks--1959:
Mingus Ah Um is a studio album by American jazz musician Charles Mingus,
released in 1959 by Columbia Records. It was his first album recorded
for Columbia. The cover features a painting by S. Neil Fujita.
Track list: Better Git It in Your Soul -- 0:00 Goodbye Pork Pie Hat -- 7:19 Boogie Stop Shuffle -- 12:59 Self-Portrait in Three Colors -- 18:01 Open Letter to Duke -- 21:12 Bird Calls -- 27:00 Fables of Faubus -- 33:17 Pussy Cat Dues -- 41:30 Jelly Roll -- 50:43
Bonus Tracks: Pedal Point Blues -- 56:58 GG Train -- 1:03:30 Girl of My Dreams -- 1:08:07
Charles Mingus - 'Mingus Plays Piano'- (full album):
Myself When I Am Real 00:00 I Can't Get Started 07:38 Body And Soul 11:21 Roland Kirk's Message 15:56 Memories Of You 18:39 She's Just A Popular Hybrid 23:18 Orange Was The Color Of Her Dress; Then Silk Blues 26:30 Meditations For Moses 30:46 Old Portrait 34:28 I'm Getting Sentimental Over You 38:16 Compositional Theme Story...Medleys, Anthems And Folklore 42:03
Charles Mingus - The Clown (1957) [Full Album]
(Sorry for that little 12 second delay in the beginning)
1. Haitian Fight Song - 0:12 2. Blue Cee - 12:11 3. Reincarnation Of A Lovebird - 20:07 4. The Clown - 28:43 5. Passion Of A Woman Loved - 41:02 6. Tonight At Noon - 50:52
"Haitian Fight Song” (Composition by Charles Mingus)
[BFJO 2006]
BFJO : Big Friendly Jazz Orchestra (Takasago High School Jazz Band), They played Mingus at the Japan Student Jazz Festival
August 20, 2006:
The following excerpt come from the original liner notes to his 1957 Atlantic recording from his album entitled ’The Clown' and are statements made by Mingus himself.
On "Haitian Fight Song", Mingus said "[...] It has a folk spirit, the kind of folk music I've always heard anyway.[...] My solo in it it's a deeply concentrated one. I can't play it right unless I'm thinking about prejudice and persecution, and how unfair is it. There's sadness and cries in it, but also determination. And it usually ends with my feeling 'I told them! I hope somebody heard me!'".
"Moanin' "/ BFJO (Composition by Charles Mingus): BFJO : Big Friendly Jazz Orchestra (Takasago High School Jazz Band)
They played at The 27th Charity Concert, July 18, 2009 BFJO Takasago High School is a Jazz Orchestra of ALL JAPANESE GIRLS!!: Composer : Charles Mingus Arranger : Andrew Homzy "Boogie Stop Shuffle #2" / BFJO Takasago (Composition by Charles Mingus):
[BFJO 2006] BFJO : Big Friendly Jazz Orchestra (Takasago High School Jazz Band), They played on 5/28/2006.
Composer: CHARLES MINGUS
Happy Birthday Charles Mingus (1922-1979) b. April 22, 1922 Happy Birthday Charles Mingus!
Charles
Mingus, Jr. was born on April 22, 1922 in Nogales, Arizona on a
military base and raised in Watts, California. Charles first became
interested and exposed to music through the church and when he was eight
he heard Duke Ellington on the radio for the first time. Mingus began
learning music on trombone and later cello. Charles later studied bass
formally with H Rheinshagen from the New York Philharmonic and studied
composition with Lloyd Reese. By the time Mingus was in his teens he was
already composing advanced pieces that would be considered in the
'third stream' movement of Jazz. Charles later recorded these early
compositions in 1960 with Gunther Schuller and called the album
'Pre-Bird'. Mingus quickly created a name for himself in Jazz and in the
1940s toured with Louis Armstrong, Russell Jacquet, Howard McGhee and
Lionel Hampton. In the early 1950s Charles joined the New York scene and
performed with Charlie Parker who was a major influence for Mingus.
During this period Charles also played with Miles Davis, Bud Powell, Max
Roach, Art Tatum and Duke Ellington. Also in the '50s Mingus formed his
own publishing and recording company with Max Roach to document and
protect his music. The most notable album on Debut Records from this
period is the 'Massey Hall' concert with Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie
Parker, Bud Powell and Max Roach.
Mingus
pursued one of his visions around this time called the 'Jazz Workshop'
which enabled musicians to come together and support each other in
testing their limits and pushing ahead to new ground in Jazz. These
groups led to Mingus developing the sound we know him for today and some
of the musicians who played in the Jazz Workshop were Pepper Adams,
Jaki Byard, Booker Ervin, John Handy, Jimmy Knepper, Charles McPherson
and Horace Parlan. In the late '50s and into the 1960s Mingus began
releasing albums as a leader at an incredible pace especially
considering the originality in all of his music. Charles began with
'Pithecanthropus Erectus' in 1956 with Mal Waldron, Jackie Mclean and J.
R. Monterose followed by 'The Clown' in 1957. In 1959 Mingus released
three of his most legendary albums; 'Blues and Roots', 'Mingus Ah Um'
and 'Mingus Dynasty'. In 1960 he recorded 'Charles Mingus Presents
Charles Mingus' with Eric Dolphy, Dannie Richmond and Ted Curson.
Incredible music kept flowing from Mingus and he recorded 'The Black
Saint and the Sinner Lady' in 1963 which is considered a masterpiece and
one of greatest works of arranging and orchestration in Jazz history.
Also is '63 Mingus showed us his skills on the piano with the album
'Mingus Plays Piano' which features only Charles playing solo piano.
Charles
was a warrior for civil rights and his music reflects his willingness
to put himself out there for what he believed in. Mingus’ tune ‘Fables
of Faubus’ best demonstrates his willingness to call it as he sees it
and if you search the song title on Jazz On The Tube you can hear the
version of this song with words by Charles as well. In the late 1960s
and early ‘70s Charles’ incredible pace slowed just a little bit but the
music didn’t stop. In 1971 Mingus was awarded the Slee Chair of Music
and spent a semester teaching at the State University of New York at
Buffalo. Also in ’71 his autobiography was published entitled ‘Beneath
the Underdog’. In 1974 he formed a band with Richmond, Don Pullen, Jack
Walrath and George Adams and they recorded the albums ‘Changes One’ and
‘Changes Two’. During the mid 1970’s Mingus also toured Europe, Asia,
South America and America until he developed a rare nerve disease in
1977. Even though Charles could no longer play after this, he still
composed by singing tunes into a tape recorder, showing his love and
determination to create. Charles Mingus passed away in 1979 and his
ashes were scattered in the Ganges River in India. Both New York City
and Washington D.C. honored him after his passing with a “Charles Mingus
Day”
Charles
Mingus recorded over 100 albums and wrote over 300 scores in his life
and leaves a legacy as one of greatest composers in American history and
certainly in the history of Jazz. Some of the awards Mingus has
received include being inducted into the Down Beat Hall of Fame, Grammy
Lifetime Achievement Award, his album ‘Mingus Dynasty’ was inducted into
the Grammy Hall of Fame, the U.S. Postal Service issued a stamp in his
honor, and the National Endowment of the Arts provided grants for a
nonprofit called “Let My Children Hear Music” in which they cataloged
all of Mingus’ works and made them available at the New York Public
Library. Charles Mingus was a genius, a Jazz master, a warrior for civil
rights and in my humble opinion a true American hero.
“Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity.”
"In
other words I am three. One man stands forever in the middle,
unconcerned, unmoved, watching, waiting to be allowed to express what he
sees to the other two.
The second man is like a frightened animal that attacks for fear of being attacked.
Then
there's an over-loving gentle person who lets people into the uttermost
sacred temple of his being and he'll take insults and be trusting and
sign contracts without reading them and get talked down to working cheap
or for nothing, and when he realizes what's been done to him he feels
like killing and destroying everything around him including himself for
being so stupid. But he can't - he goes back inside himself. Which one
is real? They're all real."
Charles Mingus - "Fables of Faubus" from: Jazz on the Tube
In
1957 the Governor of Arkansas, Orval Faubus, ordered the state's
National Guard to prevent the integration of Little Rock Central High
School by nine African-American teenagers. President Eisenhower was slow
to react and enforce the Supreme Court's decision, Brown vs Board of
Education. Twenty days after the initial incident the President
federalized the Arkansas' National Guard and sent in army's 101st
Airborne Division to help the nine students enter the school safely.
This event marked the first time racism in the South was on network
television for the entire country to watch over almost a month long
span. Charles
Mingus wrote the song 'Fables of Faubus' as a response to this event
and show his anger and disgust at the racism endured by black people in
America. The song was first recorded for Mingus' album Mingus Ah Um in
1959 on the Columbia label though they would not allow the lyrics to be
included. In 1960 Mingus was able to record the song on the Candid label
with lyrics on his album Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus. The
lyrics include a call and response between Mingus and drummer Dannie
Richmond.
"Mingus,
as you know, was outspoken. He used the bandstand as a soapbox to
communicate what was on his mind—about the ills of society, the
inequities and the social injustice. He spoke out at all times, not just
about people making noise in clubs during performances but also about
political and social issues. This was a musical communication about his
feelings, not to be confused with political protest. Mingus only wrote
six or seven political compositions with lyrics, but he was not
didactic. His purpose with his music wasn’t to confront social
injustice. He was too much of a composer for that. But he did vent on
the bandstand vocally about anything he felt was wrong or unfair. Back
then, that took courage."
Bass, Vocals - Charles Mingus Drums, Vocals - Dannie Richmond Alto Sax - Eric Dolphy Trumpet - Ted Curson
NOTE FROM POSTER:
Part
of our final project for Brown's US History class. I only included the
first 2 1/2 minutes since we didn't have time to play the full song in
class.
Cornell 1964
Charles Mingus Charles Mingus Sextet With Eric Dolphy Format: Audio CD
The band that Charles Mingus, the doyen of jazz's mercurial polymaths, pulled together for his early-1964 European tour was phenomenal—and here they are playing 130 minutes worth of live music no one’s ever heard. Pianist Jaki Byard, alto saxophonist/flutist/bass clarinetist Eric Dolphy, tenor saxophonist Clifford Jordan, trumpeter Johnny Coles, and longtime drummer Dannie Richmond came together for the Mingus tour knowing that Dolphy would be staying in Europe after their gigs—he died tragically just 12 weeks after this gig. And Coles would come perilously close to death himself with a stomach ulcer within a month of the band’s Cornell date, forcing him off the tour. So the music here is particularly special and musically resplendent. There is considerable overlap with the The Great Concert of Charles Mingus, but that 2-CD set is sans the ailing Coles, who fattens the sound here: playing beautifully as "Johnny O'Coles" on the unlikely "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling." But Eric Dolphy, his every breath is poetry: from his palpitating bass clarinet on the pugnacious "Fables of Faubus" to the tipsy, whirling flute he plays on "Jitterbug Waltz," a tune he loved playing. The sound here is less crisp than The Great Concert, thick in the middle and ill-defined when it comes to Richmond's drums, leaving the group's interplay like an ear-magnet. "Take the 'A' Train" pays soulful, blossoming homage to Billy Strayhorn even as you can hear the band tightening their grip collectively, learning to fly as a unit. Unheard music of this caliber demands a listen, and here the rewards are bountiful. --Andrew Bartlett
Guy Le Querrec/Magnum Photos
Charles Mingus in Paris, 1964
Charles Mingus’s audiences never knew quite what they were going to
get, and this kept them coming. Mingus, the bassist, composer, and
bandleader who reached the height of his fame in the mid-1960s, was
notoriously mercurial. He was known to fire and rehire band members over
the course of a set, and was once fired himself for chasing a
trombonist across the stage with an axe. His reactions to noisy crowds
ranged from announcing, “Isaac Stern doesn’t have to put up with this
shit,” to ordering his band to read books onstage. His music, which drew
omnivorously on the blues, gospel, Dixieland, Duke Ellington, bebop,
and classical music, among much else, was similarly unpredictable. It
blurred the boundaries between improvisation and composition, often
ignoring standard form, and was famous for its rapid shifts in mood and
tempo.
Mingus (1922-1979) would have turned ninety last year, and in celebration, Mosaic has released The Jazz Workshop Concerts: 1964-1965,
a new box set with rare and previously unreleased performances by some
of Mingus’s greatest ensembles. These concerts, recorded near the apex
of Mingus’s career, are visceral and often unvarnished. At times, the
music here can be forbidding—several tracks run beyond thirty
minutes—and though it may not be as uniformly polished as some of his
studio albums, at its best this set captures an element of shock and
surprise that Mingus’s studio recordings sometimes don’t.
“Mingus music,” as he called it, was so complex and so much an
extension of his own personality that it was largely played only by his
own group, the Jazz Workshop. Turnover in the Workshop was high, partly
because he couldn’t afford to pay his musicians very well, partly
because the experience was so grueling (members called it the Jazz
Sweatshop), and partly because so many of them, after sharpening their
skills with Mingus, went on to lead their own bands (Gary Giddins once
called it the Harvard University of Jazz).
Even with Mingus at the helm playing bass (and sometimes piano),
Workshop performances often resembled practice sessions more than
concerts. He did everything in his power to push his players beyond
their limits: while a musician was soloing, he might double the tempo,
cut it in half, or drop the accompaniment of the bass, drums, and piano
entirely, all without warning. Often, players would buckle under the
pressure and songs would grind to a halt, with Mingus screaming
recriminations and heaping shame on everyone in sight. But sometimes his
musicians would rise to the challenge, and it was the possibility of
this transcendence that gave Jazz Workshop performances such an
electrifying sense of expectation and adventure.
The ensemble playing on the first four discs of Mosaic’s collection
is one of Mingus’s best sextets, including, among others, the drummer
Dannie Richmond, one of his longest and closest collaborators; the
pianist Jaki Byard; and the brilliant multi-instrumentalist Eric Dolphy,
whose solo on “Meditations on Integration” is alone worth the price of
the set. Mingus himself is often in exceptional form. His playing on
“Sophisticated Lady” on the first disc, a 1964 concert at Town Hall, is
remarkable for its lyricism; his bass carries the melody in a way that
it was once thought only horns or voice could.
Mingus’s influences were diverse. They began with the church music he
heard growing up in Los Angeles’s Watts neighborhood in the 1920s and
1930s. He had started on the trombone, inspired by the music at the
services he attended with his mother, in which the instrument played a
bass part. “The blues was in the holiness churches,” he said, “moaning
and riffs and that sort of thing between the audience and the preacher.”
(Though it runs through all his music, the gospel strain is perhaps
most audible in Blues & Roots, and his 1959 album Mingus Ah Um).
Classical music also figured largely in Mingus’s early years; he was
especially drawn to Debussy, Ravel, and Richard Strauss, claiming to be
“raised more on classical music than on any other kind. It was the only
music we were exposed to, other than the church choir.”
After church and classical music came Duke Ellington, whose orchestra
Mingus first heard on the radio while still a child, and Charlie
Parker, with whom he played in the 1950s. Parker single-handedly
converted Mingus to the merits of bebop (of which he had been bitterly
critical in his early years on the West Coast), and it was, as Mingus’s
friend and confidante Janet Coleman wrote, his “unannounced ambition…to
train musicians to perform his music with the artistry—and fraternity—of
Charlie Parker.”
By the time Parker died in 1955, Mingus, already a famed bass
virtuoso, was also close to maturity as a composer. In 1956, he released
Pithecanthropus Erectus—its title track
a ten minute tone poem depicting the rise and fall of man—an album that
heralded his arrival on the scene as a master in his own right, and the
beginning of his most productive years.
The performances in The Jazz Workshop Concerts: 1964-1965, all
of them live, are drawn from the tail end of this fertile period, which
was itself not without setbacks. In 1962 Mingus had suffered a disaster
with the failed performance of his wildly ambitious work, “Epitaph” (a
two hour composition for a thirty piece band) at Town Hall: originally
meant to be an open rehearsal, the performance was, without Mingus’s
knowledge, billed as a concert. It did not end well. But by 1963 he had
recorded one of his greatest albums, The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, a critical success that also brought, for a time, a weekly paycheck.
Guy Le Querrec/Magnum Photos
Eric Dolphy (center) with, from left to right: Clifford Jordan, Jaki Byard, and Mingus, Paris, 1964
This was followed by a series of standout concerts, including a
somewhat tumultuous tour of Europe in the spring of 1964 (the last time
he would play with Dolphy, who stayed behind and died of diabetic
complications before the summer was out). Then, Mingus gave a wildly
popular outdoor performance in Monterey, California. The crowd’s roar,
captured on the Mosaic recording, was deafening. Afterward, the papers
compared him to Pablo Casals and Debussy.
This remarkable decade, during which Mingus released more than thirty
albums as a band leader, would come to an end in 1966 when mounting
financial difficulties, waning public interest in jazz, and struggles
with depression drove him to what he called an early retirement from the
music scene, from which he would not fully emerge until the 1970s.
Mingus had hoped to release much of the music recorded at Monterey
and in Europe on his own record label, Charles Mingus Enterprises, which
he had founded in an attempt to wrest control of his music from the
major companies. Sadly, he ran out of money before he was able to issue
all of the material he had amassed. Many of the tracks here languished
in obscurity until his wife, Sue Mingus, whom he had met while in
residence at the Five Spot in the summer of 1964 and later appointed the
co-manager of Charles Mingus Enterprises, recently approached Mosaic
Records with the original tapes.
In the fashion of the Jazz Workshop, the repertoire in these
performances is largely limited to a group of compositions that are
radically reworked, refashioned, and reinterpreted each time they are
played. Listening to several performances of the same song isn’t always
an enticing prospect, but here it can be a pleasure: the two versions of
“Fables of Faubus” included in this set—one about ten minutes long, the
other thirty—verge on being different songs. Perhaps more surprising is
just how exciting the later, lesser known bands are. The album My Favorite Quintet,
recorded in 1965, features the alto saxophonist Charles McPherson
standing in for the late Dolphy. In place of Dolphy’s angular, almost
convulsive phrasing, McPherson plays gorgeous, if more traditional,
lines, firmly in the vein of Charlie Parker.
Listening to these albums brings to mind the breadth of Mingus’s
contributions to jazz. He was a bassist of such lyric and rhythmic skill
that over the course of his career he helped transform the instrument
from a mere time-keeper into an object of attention in its own right. As a bandleader, he encouraged musicians like Dolphy, the saxophonist Jackie McLean, and trombonist Jimmy Knepper.
(Though, on separate occasions, he punched both McLean and Knepper in
the mouth. Knepper lost a tooth, and an octave of his range.)
Mingus composed—as he did most things—his own way. He was well versed
in theory and composition, yet he used notation sparingly, working out
ideas at the piano and playing or singing them to his musicians, who
would learn their parts by ear, a few bars at a time. He sketched out
just enough to give each band member a sense of what he was meant to do,
often providing pedal points or snatches of scales, or even simply
suggesting moods. The reed player Yusef Lateef recalled his own
experience learning Mingus music: “On one composition I had a solo and,
as opposed to having chord symbols for me to improvise against, he had
drawn a picture of a coffin. And that was the substance upon which I was
to improvise.”
In a recent interview, Charles McPherson, who played alto with Mingus
for twelve years, said that Mingus was “painfully honest…he didn’t edit
anything. Whatever he thought, he said.” Much the same could be said
for his music, which can, at times, seem meandering, long-winded, and
eccentric. When he is at his best—as he is in some of the Mosaic
recordings—he lays his influences out for all to see, drawing elements
from disparate and seemingly contradictory traditions, and from them
makes music that manages to be both novel and idiosyncratic without
being self-indulgent, deeply aware of what came before it without being
derivative.
The Monterey 1964 performance of “Meditations on Integration” is a
good example. It is one of Mingus’s most classically influenced
compositions, its haunting melody played by bowed bass and flute. After a
scorching solo by McPherson, the song dissolves into an out-of-tempo
section in which Mingus and Byard, each playing alone and then together,
are joined eventually by Buddy Collette on flute. The three play a trio
reminiscent of Mingus’s famous “conversation”
with Eric Dolphy in “What Love?” (1960). Mingus begins to shout, cuing
trumpeter Ted Curson to enter, after which the rest of the band enters
one by one, each musician alternating between ad-libbed parts and
written parts meant to resemble ad-lib. The resulting collective
improvisation comes to sound like complete chaos but is in fact tightly
scripted. The band ends in unison, and the crowd erupts in applause.
Charles Mingus From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Performance for the U.S. Bicentennial, New York City, July 4, 1976.Photo by Tom Marcello
Background information Birth name: Charles Mingus Jr. Born: April 22, 1922 US Army Base in Nogales, Arizona Origin Los Angeles, California, United States Died January 5, 1979 (aged 56)Cuernavaca, Mexico
Genres Bebop, avant-garde jazz, post-bop, third stream Occupations Bassist, composer, bandleader Instruments Double bass, piano, cello, trombone Years active 1943–1979 Labels Atlantic, Candid, Columbia, Debut, Impulse!, Mercury, United Artists Website www.mingusmingusmingus.com
Charles
Mingus Jr. (April 22, 1922 – January 5, 1979) was an American jazz
musician, composer, bandleader, and civil rights activist.
Mingus's
compositions retained the hot and soulful feel of hard bop and drew
heavily from black gospel music while sometimes drawing on elements of
Third stream, free jazz, and classical music. Yet Mingus avoided
categorization, forging his own brand of music that fused tradition with
unique and unexplored realms of jazz.
Mingus
focused on collective improvisation, similar to the old New Orleans
jazz parades, paying particular attention to how each band member
interacted with the group as a whole. In creating his bands, Mingus
looked not only at the skills of the available musicians, but also their
personalities. Many musicians passed through his bands and later went
on to impressive careers. He recruited talented and sometimes
little-known artists whom he assembled into unconventional and revealing
configurations. As a performer, Mingus was a pioneer in double bass
technique, widely recognized as one of the instrument's most proficient
players. Nearly
as well known as his ambitious music was Mingus' often fearsome
temperament, which earned him the nickname "The Angry Man of Jazz." His
refusal to compromise his musical integrity led to many on-stage
eruptions, exhortations to musicians, and dismissals.[1] Because
of his brilliant writing for mid-size ensembles—and his catering to and
emphasizing the strengths of the musicians in his groups—Mingus is
often considered the heir of Duke Ellington, for whom he expressed great
admiration. Indeed, Dizzy Gillespie had once claimed Mingus reminded
him "of a young Duke", citing their shared "organizational genius."[2] Mingus'
music was once believed to be too difficult to play without Mingus'
leadership, and Gunther Schuller has suggested that Mingus should be
ranked among the most important American composers, jazz or
otherwise.[3] However, many musicians play Mingus compositions today,
from those who play with the repertory bands Mingus Big Band, Mingus
Dynasty, and Mingus Orchestra, to the high school students who play the
charts and compete in the Charles Mingus High School Competition.[4] In
1988, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts[5] made possible
the cataloging of Mingus compositions, which were then donated to the
Music Division of the New York Public Library[6] for public use. In
1993, The Library of Congress acquired Mingus's collected
papers—including scores, sound recordings, correspondence and photos—in
what they described as "the most important acquisition of a manuscript
collection relating to jazz in the Library's history".[7]
Biography
Early life and career Charles
Mingus was born in Nogales, Arizona. He was raised largely in the Watts
area of Los Angeles, California. His mother's paternal heritage was
Chinese and English, while historical records indicate that his father
was the illegitimate offspring of a black farmhand and his Swedish
employer's white granddaughter.[8] In Mingus' autobiography Beneath the
Underdog he recounts a story told to him by his father, Charles Mingus
senior, according to which his white grandmother was actually a first
cousin of Abraham Lincoln. Charles Mingus Sr. claims to have been raised
by his mother and her husband as a white person until he was fourteen,
when his mother revealed to her family that the child's true father was a
black slave, after which he had to run away from his family and live on
his own. The autobiography doesn't confirm whether Charles Mingus Sr.
or Mingus himself believed this story to be true, or whether it was
meant to be merely an embellished version of the Mingus family's
lineage.[9] His
mother allowed only church-related music in their home, but Mingus
developed an early love for music, especially Duke Ellington. He studied
trombone, and later cello, although he was unable to follow the cello
professionally because, at the time, it was nearly impossible for a
black musician to make a career of classical music, and the cello was
not yet accepted as a jazz instrument. Despite this, Mingus was still
attached to the cello; as he studied bass with Red Callender in the late
1930s, Callender would even comment that the cello was still Mingus's
main instrument. In Beneath the Underdog, Mingus states that he did not
actually start learning bass until Buddy Collette accepted him into his
swing band under the stipulation that he be the band's bass player.[9] Due
to a poor education (much of which was because his early teachers did
not think much could come of a black student), Mingus could not read
western notation as a young musician. This had a serious impact on his
early musical experiences: since he could not read music, he felt
ostracized from the classical music world rather than accepted, and
eventually turned from a symphonic path entirely. These early
experiences were also reflected in his music, which often focused on
racism, discrimination and justice.[10] Much of the cello technique he
learned was applicable to double bass when he took up the instrument in
high school. He studied for five years with H. Rheinshagen, principal
bassist of the New York Philharmonic, and compositional techniques with
Lloyd Reese.[11] Throughout much of his career, he played a bass made in
1927 by the German maker Ernst Heinrich Roth. Beginning
in his teen years, Mingus was writing quite advanced pieces; many are
similar to Third Stream because they incorporate elements of classical
music. A number of them were recorded in 1960 with conductor Gunther
Schuller, and released as Pre-Bird, referring to Charlie "Bird" Parker;
Mingus was one of many musicians whose perspectives on music were
altered by Parker into "pre- and post-Bird" eras. Mingus
gained a reputation as a bass prodigy. His first major professional job
was playing with former Ellington clarinetist Barney Bigard. He toured
with Louis Armstrong in 1943, and by early 1945 was recording in Los
Angeles in a band led by Russell Jacquet and which also included Teddy
Edwards, Maurice Simon, Bill Davis and Chico Hamilton, and in May that
year, in Hollywood, again with Teddy Edwards, in a band led by Howard
McGhee.[12] He then played with Lionel Hampton's band in the late 1940s;
Hampton performed and recorded several of Mingus's pieces. A popular
trio of Mingus, Red Norvo and Tal Farlow in 1950 and 1951 received
considerable acclaim, but Mingus' mixed origin caused problems with club
owners and he left the group. Mingus was briefly a member of
Ellington's band in 1953, as a substitute for bassist Wendell Marshall.
Mingus's notorious temper led to him being one of the few musicians
personally fired by Ellington (Bubber Miley and drummer Bobby Durham are
among the others), after an on-stage fight between Mingus and Juan
Tizol.[13] Also
in the early 1950s, before attaining commercial recognition as a
bandleader, Mingus played gigs with Charlie Parker, whose compositions
and improvisations greatly inspired and influenced him. Mingus
considered Parker the greatest genius and innovator in jazz history, but
he had a love-hate relationship with Parker's legacy. Mingus blamed the
Parker mythology for a derivative crop of pretenders to Parker's
throne. He was also conflicted and sometimes disgusted by Parker's
self-destructive habits and the romanticized lure of drug addiction they
offered to other jazz musicians. In response to the many sax players
who imitated Parker, Mingus titled a song, "If Charlie Parker were a
Gunslinger, There'd be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats" (released on Mingus
Dynasty as "Gunslinging Bird"). Based in New York In
1952 Mingus co-founded Debut Records with Max Roach, in order to
conduct his recording career as he saw fit; the name originated with a
desire to document unrecorded young musicians. Despite this, the
best-known recording the company issued was of the most prominent
figures in bebop. On May 15, 1953, Mingus joined Dizzy Gillespie,
Parker, Bud Powell, and Roach for a concert at Massey Hall in Toronto,
which is the last recorded documentation of the two lead
instrumentalists playing together. After the event, Mingus chose to
overdub his barely audible bass part back in New York; the original
version was issued later. The two 10" albums of the Massey Hall concert
(one featured the trio of Powell, Mingus and Roach) were among Debut
Records' earliest releases. Mingus may have objected to the way the
major record companies treated musicians, but Gillespie once commented
that he did not receive any royalties "for years and years" for his
Massey Hall appearance. The records though, are often regarded as among
the finest live jazz recordings. Supposedly
(although in the source cited, it is pure speculation) in 1955, Mingus
was involved in a notorious incident while playing a club date billed as
a "reunion" with Parker, Powell, and Roach. Powell, who suffered from
alcoholism and mental illness (possibly exacerbated by a severe police
beating and electroshock treatments), had to be helped from the stage,
unable to play or speak coherently. As Powell's incapacitation became
apparent, Parker stood in one spot at a microphone, chanting "Bud
Powell...Bud Powell..." as if beseeching Powell's return. Allegedly,
Parker continued this incantation for several minutes after Powell's
departure, to his own amusement and Mingus' exasperation. Mingus took
another microphone and announced to the crowd, "Ladies and gentlemen,
this is not jazz; these are very sick men."[14] This was Parker's last
public performance; about a week later he died after years of substance
abuse. Mingus
often worked with a mid-sized ensemble (around 8–10 members) of
rotating musicians known as the Jazz Workshop. Mingus broke new ground,
constantly demanding that his musicians be able to explore and develop
their perceptions on the spot. Those who joined the Workshop (or
Sweatshops as they were colorfully dubbed by the musicians) included
Pepper Adams, Jaki Byard, Booker Ervin, John Handy, Jimmy Knepper,
Charles McPherson and Horace Parlan. Mingus shaped these musicians into a
cohesive improvisational machine that in many ways anticipated free
jazz. Some musicians dubbed the workshop a "university" for jazz. Pithecanthropus Erectus among other creations The
decade which followed is generally regarded as Mingus's most productive
and fertile period. Impressive new compositions and albums appeared at
an astonishing rate: some thirty records in ten years, for a number of
record labels (Atlantic Records, Candid, Columbia Records, Impulse!
Records and others), a pace perhaps unmatched by any other musicians
except Ellington and Frank Zappa. Mingus
had already recorded around ten albums as a bandleader, but 1956 was a
breakthrough year for him, with the release of Pithecanthropus Erectus,
arguably his first major work as both a bandleader and composer. Like
Ellington, Mingus wrote songs with specific musicians in mind, and his
band for Erectus included adventurous, though distinctly blues-oriented
musicians, piano player Mal Waldron, alto saxophonist Jackie McLean and
the Sonny Rollins-influenced tenor of J. R. Monterose. The title song is
a ten-minute tone poem, depicting the rise of man from his hominid
roots (Pithecanthropus erectus) to an eventual downfall. A section of
the piece was free improvisation, free of structure or theme. Another
album from this period, The Clown (1957 also on Atlantic Records), with
an improvised story on the title track by humorist Jean Shepherd, was
the first to feature drummer Dannie Richmond. Richmond would be his
preferred drummer until Mingus's death in 1979. The two men formed one
of the most impressive and versatile rhythm sections in jazz. Both were
accomplished performers seeking to stretch the boundaries of their music
while staying true to its roots. When joined by pianist Jaki Byard,
they were dubbed "The Almighty Three".[15] Mingus Ah Um and other works In
1959 Mingus and his jazz workshop musicians recorded one of his
best-known albums, Mingus Ah Um. Even in a year of standout
masterpieces, including Dave Brubeck's Time Out, Miles Davis's Kind of
Blue, John Coltrane's Giant Steps, Bill Evans' Portrait in Jazz, and
Ornette Coleman's prophetic The Shape of Jazz to Come, this was a major
achievement, featuring such classic Mingus compositions as "Goodbye Pork
Pie Hat" (an elegy to Lester Young) and "Fables of Faubus" (a protest
against segregationist Arkansas governor Orval E. Faubus that features
double-time sections). Mingus
witnessed Ornette Coleman's legendary—and controversial—1960
appearances at New York City's Five Spot jazz club. Though he initially
expressed rather mixed feelings for Coleman's innovative music: "...if
the free-form guys could play the same tune twice, then I would say they
were playing something...Most of the time they use their fingers on the
saxophone and they don't even know what's going to come out. They're
experimenting." Mingus was in fact a prime influence of the early free
jazz era. He formed a quartet with Richmond, trumpeter Ted Curson and
saxophonist Eric Dolphy. This ensemble featured the same instruments as
Coleman's quartet, and is often regarded as Mingus rising to the
challenging new standard established by Coleman. Charles Mingus Presents
Charles Mingus was the quartet's only album. Only
one misstep occurred in this era: 1962's Town Hall Concert. An
ambitious program, it was unfortunately plagued with troubles from its
inception.[16] Mingus's vision, now known as Epitaph, was finally
realized by conductor Gunther Schuller in a concert in 1989, 10 years
after Mingus's death. The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady and other Impulse! albums In
1963, Mingus released The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, a sprawling,
multi-section masterpiece, described as "one of the greatest
achievements in orchestration by any composer in jazz history."[17] The
album was also unique in that Mingus asked his psychotherapist to
provide notes for the record. Mingus
also released Mingus Plays Piano, an unaccompanied album, in 1963. A
few pieces were entirely improvised and drew on classical music as much
as jazz, preceding Keith Jarrett's landmark The Köln Concert in those
respects by some 12 years. In addition, 1963 saw the release of Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus, an album which was praised by critic Nat Hentoff.[18] In
1964 Mingus put together one of his best-known groups, a sextet
including Dannie Richmond, Jaki Byard, Eric Dolphy, trumpeter Johnny
Coles, and tenor saxophonist Clifford Jordan. The group was recorded
frequently during its short existence; Coles fell ill during a European
tour. On June 28, 1964 Dolphy died while in Berlin. 1964 was also the
year that Mingus met his future wife, Sue Graham Ungaro. The couple were
married in 1966 by Allen Ginsberg.[19] Facing financial hardship,
Mingus was evicted from his New York home in 1966
Changes Mingus's
pace slowed somewhat in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 1974 he
formed a quintet with Richmond, pianist Don Pullen, trumpeter Jack
Walrath and saxophonist George Adams. They recorded two well-received
albums, Changes One and Changes Two. Mingus also played with Charles
McPherson in many of his groups during this time. Cumbia and Jazz Fusion
in 1976 sought to blend Colombian music (the "Cumbia" of the title)
with more traditional jazz forms. In 1971, Mingus taught for a semester
at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York as the
Slee Professor of Music.[20] Later career and death By
the mid-1970s, Mingus was suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis,
in America known as Lou Gehrig's disease, a wastage of the musculature.
His once formidable bass technique suffered, until he could no longer
play the instrument. He continued composing, however, and supervised a
number of recordings before his death. Eminent music journalist Stephen
Davis sympathetically snapshot Mingus's final years in a rare piece
titled "Ten Takes on Charles Mingus" published in Zero: Contemporary
Buddhist Life and Thought, Vol. 3 (Autumn, 1979). Mingus
did not complete his final project of an album named after him with
singer Joni Mitchell, which included lyrics added by Mitchell to Mingus
compositions, including "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat", among Mitchell originals
and short, spoken word duets and home recordings of Mitchell and
Mingus. The album featured the talents of Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock,
and another influential bassist and composer, Jaco Pastorius. Mingus
died aged 56 in Cuernavaca, Mexico, where he had traveled for treatment
and convalescence. His ashes were scattered in the Ganges River. Legacy The Mingus Big Band The
music of Charles Mingus is currently being performed and reinterpreted
by the Mingus Big Band, which, starting October 2008, plays every Monday
at Jazz Standard in New York City, and often tours the rest of the U.S.
and Europe. Elvis Costello has written lyrics for a few Mingus pieces.
He had once sung lyrics for one piece, "Invisible Lady", being backed by
the Mingus Big Band on the album, Tonight at Noon: Three of Four Shades
of Love.[21] In
addition to the Mingus Big Band, there is the Mingus Orchestra and the
Mingus Dynasty, each of which are managed by Jazz Workshop, Inc., and
run by Mingus's widow Sue Graham Mingus. Epitaph Epitaph
is considered to be one of Charles Mingus' masterpieces. The
composition is 4,235 measures long, requires two hours to perform, and
is one of the longest jazz pieces ever written. Epitaph was only
completely discovered during the cataloging process after his death by
musicologist Andrew Homzy. With the help of a grant from the Ford
Foundation, the score and instrumental parts were copied, and the piece
itself was premiered by a 30-piece orchestra, conducted by Gunther
Schuller. This concert was produced by Mingus's widow, Sue Graham
Mingus, at Alice Tully Hall on June 3, 1989, ten years after his death.
It was performed again at several concerts in 2007. The performance at
Walt Disney Concert Hall is available on NPR. The complete score was
published in 2008 by Hal Leonard. Autobiography Written
throughout the 1960s, Mingus's sprawling, exaggerated,
quasi-autobiography, Beneath the Underdog: His World as composed by
Mingus,[9] was published in 1971. Written in a "stream of consciousness"
style, it covered several aspects of Mingus's life that had previously
been off-record. In
addition to his musical and intellectual proliferation, Mingus goes
into great detail about his perhaps overstated sexual exploits. He
claims to have had over 31 affairs over the course of his life
(including 26 prostitutes in one sitting). This does not include any of
his five wives (he claims to have been married to two of them
simultaneously). In addition, he asserts that he held a brief career as a
pimp. This has never been confirmed. Mingus's
autobiography also serves as an insight into his psyche, as well as his
attitudes about race and society.[22] Autobiographic accounts of abuse
at the hands of his father from an early age, being bullied as a child,
his removal from a white musician's union, and grappling with
disapproval while married to white women and other examples of the
hardship and prejudice.[23] Cover versions Considering
the number of compositions that Charles Mingus wrote, his works have
not been recorded as often as comparable jazz composers. About the only
Mingus tribute album recorded in his lifetime was baritone saxophonist
Pepper Adams's album, Pepper Adams Plays Charlie Mingus in 1963. Of all
his works, his elegant elegy for Lester Young, "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat"
(from Mingus Ah Um) has probably had the most recordings. Besides
recordings from the expected jazz artists, the song has also been
recorded by musicians as disparate as Jeff Beck, Andy Summers, Eugene
Chadbourne, and Bert Jansch and John Renbourn with and without
Pentangle. Joni Mitchell sang a version with lyrics that she wrote for
the song. Elvis
Costello has recorded "Hora Decubitus" (from Mingus Mingus Mingus
Mingus Mingus) on My Flame Burns Blue (2006). "Better Git It in Your
Soul" was covered by Davey Graham on his album "Folk, Blues, and
Beyond." Trumpeter Ron Miles performs a version of "Pithecanthropus
Erectus" on his EP "Witness." New York Ska Jazz Ensemble has done a
cover of Mingus' "Haitian Fight Song", as have Pentangle and others. Hal
Willner's 1992 tribute album Weird Nightmare: Meditations on Mingus
(Columbia Records) contains idiosyncratic renditions of Mingus's works
involving numerous popular musicians including Chuck D, Keith Richards,
Henry Rollins and Dr. John. The Italian band Quintorigo recorded an
entire album devoted to Mingus' music, titled Play Mingus. Gunther
Schuller's edition of Mingus' "Epitaph" which premiered at Lincoln
Center in 1989 was subsequently released on Columbia/Sony Records. One
of the ultimate tributes to Mingus came on September 29, 1969 at a
festival honoring him. Duke Ellington performed The Clown at the
festival. Duke himself did Jean Shepherd's narration. As of this date,
this recording has not been issued. Personality and temper As
respected as Mingus was for his musical talents, he was sometimes
feared for his occasional violent onstage temper, which was at times
directed at members of his band, and other times aimed at the
audience.[24] He was physically large, prone to obesity (especially in
his later years), and was by all accounts often intimidating and
frightening when expressing anger or displeasure. Mingus was prone to
clinical depression. He tended to have brief periods of extreme creative
activity, intermixed with fairly long periods of greatly decreased
output. When
confronted with a nightclub audience talking and clinking ice in their
glasses while he performed, Mingus stopped his band and loudly chastised
the audience, stating "Isaac Stern doesn't have to put up with this
shit."[25] Mingus reportedly destroyed a $20,000 bass in response to
audience heckling at New York's Five Spot.[26] Guitarist
and singer Jackie Paris was a first-hand witness to Mingus's
irascibility. Paris recalls his time in the Jazz Workshop: "He chased
everybody off the stand except [drummer] Paul Motian and me... The three
of us just wailed on the blues for about an hour and a half before he
called the other cats back."[27] On
October 12, 1962, Mingus punched Jimmy Knepper in the mouth while the
two men were working together at Mingus's apartment on a score for his
upcoming concert at New York Town Hall and Knepper refused to take on
more work. The blow from Mingus broke off a crowned tooth and its
underlying stub.[28] According to Knepper, this ruined his embouchure
and resulted in the permanent loss of the top octave of his range on the
trombone - a significant handicap for any professional trombonist. This
attack temporarily ended their working relationship and Knepper was
unable to perform at the concert. Charged with assault, Mingus appeared
in court in January 1963 and was given a suspended sentence. Knepper
would again work with Mingus in 1977 and played extensively with the
Mingus Dynasty, formed after Mingus' death in 1979.[29] Mingus
was evicted from his apartment at 5 Great Jones Street in New York City
for nonpayment of rent, captured in the film Mingus: 1968, by Thomas
Reichman, which also features Mingus performing in clubs and in the
apartment, shooting a shotgun, composing at the piano, and discussing
love, art, and politics and the music school he had hoped to create.[30] Awards and honors 1971 Guggenheim Fellowship (Music Composition) 1971: Inducted in the Down Beat Jazz Hall of Fame. 1988:
The National Endowment for the Arts provided grants for a Mingus
nonprofit called "Let My Children Hear Music" which cataloged all of
Mingus' works. The microfilms of these works were given to the Music
Division of the New York Public Library where they are currently
available for study.[5] 1993:
The Library of Congress acquired Mingus's collected papers—including
scores, sound recordings, correspondence and photos—in what they
described as "the most important acquisition of a manuscript collection
relating to jazz in the Library's history".[31] 1995: The United States Postal Service issued a stamp in his honor. 1997: Was posthumously awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. 1999: The album Mingus Dynasty (1959) was inducted in the Grammy Hall of Fame. 2005: Inducted in the Jazz at Lincoln Center, Nesuhi Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame. [edit]
Filmography 1959, Mingus contributed most of the music for John Cassavetes's gritty New York City film, Shadows. 1961, Mingus appeared as a bassist and actor in the British film All Night Long. 1968, Thomas Reichman directed the documentary Mingus: Charlie Mingus 1968. 1991,
Ray Davies produced a documentary entitled Weird Nightmare. It contains
footage of Mingus and interviews with artists making Hal Willner's
tribute album of the same name, including Elvis Costello, Charlie Watts,
Keith Richards, and Vernon Reid. Charles
Mingus: Triumph of the Underdog is a 78 minute long documentary film on
Charles Mingus directed by Don McGlynn and released in 1998. [edit]References ^
NYT review of 1965 UCLA concert
http://www.nytimes.com/1984/09/23/arts/an-irrepressible-65-mingus-concert.html?&pagewanted=all ^
David Simpson. "Myself When I Am Real: The Life and Music of Charles
Mingus, by Gene Santoro". Jazz Institute of Chicago book review.
Retrieved 2008-03-25. ^ See the 1998 documentary Triumph of the Underdog ^
Ernest Barteldes (2009-02-18). "Thirty Years On, The Music Remains
Strong; Charles Mingus’ legacy revisited at the Manhattan School of
Music". nypress.com. Retrieved 2009-10-26. ^ a b NEA press release http://arts.endow.gov/about/40th/mingus.html ^ NYPL catalog page http://catalog.nypl.org/record=b11250454 ^ Library of Congress press release http://www.loc.gov/today/pr/1993/93-081.html ^ Myself When I am Real: The Life and Music of Charles Mingus, Gene Santoro (Oxford University Press, 1994) ISBN 0-19-509733-5 ^ a b c Mingus, Charles: Beneath the Underdog: His Life as Composed by Mingus. New York, NY: Vintage, 1991. ^ "Charles Mingus and the Paradoxical Aspects of Race as Reflected in His Life and Music". Retrieved 11/10/2011. ^ "Charles Mingus | Charles "Baron" Mingus: West Coast, 1945-49". Allaboutjazz.com. 2001-02-01. Retrieved 2009-10-08. ^ Jazz Discography Project. "Charles Mingus Catalog at JazzDisc.org". Jazzdisco.org. Retrieved 2009-10-08. ^ Hentoff, Nat (1978). Jazz Is. W H Allen. pp. 34–35. ^ "Five More Articles on Jazz (Rexroth)". Bureau of Public Secrets article. ^ Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction, Ingrid Monson (University of Chicago Press, 1997) ISBN 0-226-53478-2 ^ Gene Santoro (2000-06-06). "Town Hall Train Wreck". The Village Voice. Retrieved 2011-12-05. ^ Review at Allmusic, by Steve Huey, retrieved 2011-12-05. ^ Hentoff, Nat (1963). Liner Notes, Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus ^ "Jazz". AllAboutJazz.com. 1979-01-05. Retrieved 2009-10-08. ^ The Musical Styles of Charles Mingus, (Warner Bros. Publications, Jazz Workshop, 1982) ^ "Tonight at Noon: Three of Four Shades of Love". Album overview on Allmusic. ^ Ratliff, Ben (1998-01-18). "JAZZ VIEW; Hearing Mingus Again, Seeing Him Anew - The". New York Times. Retrieved 2009-10-08. ^ Friday, October 02, 1964 (1964-10-02). "Jazz: Beneath the Underdog". TIME. Retrieved 2009-10-08. ^
Wynn, Ron; Katz, Mike (1994), Ron Wynn, ed., All Music Guide to Jazz,
M. Erlewine, V. Bogdanov, San Francisco: Miller Freeman, p. 461, ISBN
0879303085 ^ Sue Graham Mingus. Tonight at Noon. ^
Wynn, Ron (1994), "Jazz Venues", in Ron Wynn, All Music Guide to Jazz,
M. Erlewine, V. Bogdanov, San Francisco: Miller Freeman, p. 717, ISBN
0879303085 ^ "Paris When He Sizzles". Village Voice article by Will Friedwald. ^ Santoro, 2000 ^
"Jimmy Knepper - Obituaries, News". London: The Independent. June 16,
2003. Archived from the original on 2010-09-03. Retrieved 2009-10-08. ^ "Mingus 1968". Retrieved 12/10/2011. ^
Library of Congress press release, June 11, 1993. Rule, S. "Library of
Congress buys Charles Mingus Archive", New York Times, June 14, 1993 [edit]Further reading Beneath
the Underdog, his autobiography, presents a vibrantly boastful and
possibly apocryphal account of his early career as a pimp. Myself
When I Am Real: The Life and Music of Charles Mingus by Gene Santoro,
Oxford University Press (November 1, 2001), 480 pages, ISBN
0-19-514711-1 Mingus: A Critical Biography by Brian Priestley, Da Capo Press (April 1, 1984), 340 pages, ISBN 0-306-80217-1 Tonight
At Noon: A Love Story by Sue Graham Mingus, Da Capo Press; Reprint
edition (April, 2003), 272 pages, ISBN 0-306-81220-7. Written by his
widow. Charles
Mingus - More Than a Fake Book by Charles Mingus, Hal Leonard
Corporation (November 1, 1991), 160 pages, ISBN 0-7935-0900-9. Includes 2
CDs, photos, discography, music transcriptions, a Mingus comic book
promoting his anti-bootlegging project, and so on. Mingus/Mingus: Two Memoirs by Janet Coleman, Al Young, Limelight Editions (August 1, 2004), 164 pages, ISBN 0-87910-149-0 I Know What I Know: The Music of Charles Mingus by Todd S. Jenkins, Praeger (2006), 196 pages, ISBN 0-275-98102-9 But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz by Geoff Dyer, Abacus (2006), pages 103–127, ISBN 0-349-11005-0 [edit]External links
Official website
What Is a Jazz Composer—Liner notes from Let My Children Hear Music by Charles Mingus. Charles Mingus by Nat Hentoff MINGUS!—sonic.net Charles Mingus multimedia directory - Kerouac Alley Charles Mingus: Requiem for the Underdog by Alan Goldsher Charles Mingus at the Internet Movie Database Charles Mingus at the Notable Names Database v t e Charles Mingus Studio albums Jazz
Composers Workshop (1954-55) The Jazz Experiments of Charlie Mingus
(1955) Pithecanthropus Erectus (1956) The Clown (1957) East Coasting
(1957) A Modern Jazz Symposium of Music and Poetry (1957) Mingus Ah Um
(1959) Mingus Dynasty (1959) Blues & Roots (1960) Charles Mingus
Presents Charles Mingus (1960) Reincarnation of a Lovebird (1960) Oh
Yeah (1961) Tonight at Noon (1957-61) Tijuana Moods (1962) The Black
Saint and the Sinner Lady (1963) Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus
(1963) Mingus Plays Piano (1964) Let My Children Hear Music (1972)
Mingus Moves (1973) Changes One (1974) Changes Two (1975) Three or Four
Shades of Blues (1977) Cumbia & Jazz Fusion (1978) Live albums Mingus
at the Bohemia (1955) The Charles Mingus Quintet & Max Roach (1955)
Jazz Portraits: Mingus in Wonderland (1959) Charles Mingus Sextet with
Eric Dolphy Cornell 1964 (1964) Town Hall Concert (1964) The Great
Concert of Charles Mingus (1964) Right Now: Live at the Jazz Workshop
(1964) Mingus at Monterey (1964) Charles Mingus and Friends in Concert
(1972) Mingus at Carnegie Hall (1974) Mingus at Antibes (1976)
Discography Mingus Big Band Mingus Dynasty Sue Mingus Mingus (1979) Epitaph (1990)
SUE MINGUS
Since Charles Mingus’ death in 1979, Sue Mingus has
created and continues to direct repertory ensembles that carry on the
music of her late husband. The most well known is the Mingus Big Band, a
New York institution, which performs weekly at the Jazz Standard, and
alternates with the Mingus Dynasty and the Mingus Orchestra. In 1989,
she produced Mingus’ monumental Epitaph in its premiere at
Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall. She has produced numerous
Grammy-nominated recordings with Mingus repertory bands and the 2011
Grammy winning Mingus Big Band Live at Jazz Standard, as well as several legacy recordings.
Sue Mingus has published educational books including, Charles Mingus: More than a Fake Book, and several Charles Mingus: More than a Play Alongs,
distributed by Hal Leonard Publishers. Other publications include
Mingus Big Band charts, a book of guitar chars, and a special series for
students called “Simply Mingus.” In 2008, she founded the Charles
Mingus High School Competition which has been held annually at the
Manhattan School of Music.
In 2002, Pantheon (Random House) released Sue’s memoir of her life with Mingus entitled Tonight At Noon,
which was a New York Times Notable Book and a Los Angeles Times Best
Book of the Year. It was released in paperback by DaCapo press and has
been translated into several languages.
Kofi Natambu, editor of and contributor to Sound Projections, is a writer, poet, cultural critic, and political journalist whose poetry, essays, criticism, reviews, and journalism have appeared in many literary magazines, journals, newspapers, and anthologies. He has written extensively about music as a critic and historian for many publications, including the Black Scholar, Downbeat, Solid Ground: A New World Journal, Detroit Metro Times, KONCH, the Panopticon Review,Black Renaissance Noire, the Village Voice, the City Sun (NYC), the Poetry Project Newsletter (NYC), and the African American Review. He is the author of a biography Malcolm X: His Life & Work (Alpha Books) and two books of poetry: The Melody Never Stops (Past Tents Press) and Intervals (Post Aesthetic Press). He was the founder and editor of Solid Ground: A New World Journal, a national quarterly magazine of the arts, culture, and politics and the editor of a literary anthology Nostalgia for the Present (Post Aesthetic Press). Natambu has read his work throughout the country and given many lectures and workshops at academic and arts institutions. He has taught American literature, literary theory and criticism, cultural history and criticism, film studies, political science, creative writing, philosophy, critical theory, and music history and criticism (Jazz, Blues, R&B, Hip Hop) at many universities and colleges. He was also a curator in the Education Department of Detroit’s Museum of African American History. Born in Detroit, Michigan, Natambu currently lives in Berkeley, California with his wife Chuleenan.
CHARLES MINGUS, 1922-1979
