Charles Mingus

American jazz musician Charles Mingus (1922–1979) is regarded by many as one of the best double bass players of the genre. He became equally well known for his prowess as a composer, and he has received ever-growing recognition since his early death in 1979 at the age of 56. Mingus's volatile, at times violent, personality, led to numerous high-profile disagreements with fellow musicians and critics and a reputation as "jazz's angry man," but also fueled a music known for its passion and spiritual depth.

Mingus was born on April 22, 1922, in Nogales, Arizona, where his father, Sgt. Charles Mingus Sr., served on a U.S. army base. Soon after the birth of his son, Sgt. Mingus received an honorable discharge from the military in order to care for his ailing wife. The family relocated to the Watts section of Los Angeles, California, where Mingus's mother, Harriet Sophia Mingus, sought medical treatment for chronic myocarditis. She died, however, on October 3, 1922. The Mingus family remained in Los Angeles, and young Charles and his sisters, Grace and Vivian, were raised by Charles Sr. and his new wife, Mamie. The emotional call-and-response spirituals performed in the neighborhood Holiness Church served as one of Mingus's earliest musical influences. Although the Mingus children were only permitted to listen to devotional music under the elder Mingus's authoritarian house rules, Mingus secretly listened to pianist/composer Duke Ellington's "East St. Louis Toddle-Oo" on the earphones of a crystal set, sparking his interest in jazz.

Self-Taught Musician

Mingus, whose sisters trained on violin and piano, started out playing the trombone. When his instructor proved less than able, Mingus taught himself the basics of the instrument by ear. He grew frustrated, however, and soon switched to the cello, earning a spot in the Los Angeles Junior Philharmonic while still in elementary school. In high school he switched again, to the double bass, and joined future jazz greats Dexter Gordon, a saxophonist, and Chico Hamilton, a drummer, in an orchestra. He began studying his new instrument privately with jazz musicians Joe Comfort and Red Callender, as well as Herman Rheinschagen, a former bassist with the New York Philharmonic. Mingus also studied composition with Lloyd Reese and turned out two compositions, "What Love" (1939) and "Half-Mast Inhibitions" (1940), that he would record 20 years later.

Mingus began playing professionally with jazz outfits in Los Angeles and San Francisco while still in high school. In 1940 he replaced his former teacher, Callender, in a band headed by Lee Young, a drummer and brother of noted saxophonist Lester Young. The following year, Mingus joined trumpeter Louis Armstrong's group, where he remained until 1943 and, under the name "Baron Mingus," began leading outfits of his own. In the mid-1940s he began playing with vibraphonist Lionel Hampton and began to draw attention for his impossibly fast, highly charged solos. Critics would later note, as recounted by John Rockwell in a 1979 New York Times obituary, that Mingus's tendency to play slightly ahead of the beat lent his playing a "frenetic rhythmic tension." Mingus dropped music to take a job with the U.S. Postal Service for a period, and then returned to music in 1950, joining vibraphonist Red Norvo's trio. This ensemble has been credited with introducing West Coast "cool jazz" to a broad audience.

While playing on the West Coast, Mingus discovered the music of saxophonist Charlie "Bird" Parker, which influenced him tremendously. "I studied Bird's creative vein with the same passion and understanding with which I'd studied the scores of my favorite classical composers, because I found a purity in his music that until then I had only found in classical music," Mingus wrote in the notes to the 1959 album Mingus Dynasty (as reprinted in Gene Santoro's 2000 biography Myself When I Am Real). "Bird was the cause of my realization that jazz improvisation, as well as jazz composition, is the equal of classical music if the performer is a creative person. Bird brought melodic development to a new point in jazz…. But he also brought to music a primitive, mystic supra-mind communication that I'd only heard in the late Beethoven quartets, and even more, in Stravinsky." Mingus Dynasty featured the Parker tribute "Gunslinging Bird," the full title of which reveals the sly humor Mingus often employed when naming his own compositions: "If Charlie Parker Were a Gunslinger There'd Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats."

Moved East

Mingus relocated to New York City in 1951 and began working with many of the best known jazz musicians of the day, including Parker, trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, drummer Art Tatum, and pianist Bud Powell. He also joined Ellington's band. There, the violent temper that would come to partially define Mingus led to his being one of the few musicians Ellington ever fired; during an altercation with a bandmate, trombonist Juan Tizol, he brandished a fire ax. Tizol defended himself with a machete. Fueling Mingus's hot temper was long-simmering anger about the treatment of African Americans; Mingus once explained that the fight with Tizol was prompted by Tizol's use of a racial epithet. "Charles was a man who wanted peace and his best person was kindly and wise. But he wasn't always able to access that," observed tuba player and former Mingus bandmate Howard Johnson in a 2002 retrospective in Down Beat. "He was stung by racism a little harder than others. If you're black, every day on the street you encounter slights. Some people can toss them off as the behavior of racist idiots. But Charles couldn't let the slights roll off him. He accumulated them all."

Mingus's intolerance of racism and disdain for the record industry, which he strongly believed treated African-American jazz musicians unfairly, led to the 1952 formation of Debut Records, a collaboration with drummer Max Roach and Mingus's second wife, Celia. He returned to work at the post office that year as well. In 1953 Mingus began participating in the highly regarded Jazz Composers Workshop, but in 1955 he formed his own workshop with a rotating cadre of musicians. The new workshop enabled Mingus to exercise his own unique compositional style, which eschewed traditional notation and was characterized by saxophonist Yusef Lateef in Brian Priestley's Mingus: A Critical Biography: "For example, 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." Mingus also often dictated lines individually to each player. Several highly regarded albums grew out of these work shops, including 1956's Pithecanthropus Erectus, Blues and Roots, Mingus Dynasty, and Mingus Ah Um, all released in 1959. The latter includes the composition "Good Bye, Pork Pie Hat," a tribute to Lester Young, who died while the album was being recorded. Mingus employed politically charged commentary with the composition "Fables of Faubus," a reference to the governor of Arkansas who called in the National Guard to fight public school integration.

While his talent was highly regarded, Mingus also became known for his bitterness and volatility. He routinely chastised musicians on stage, damaged musical equipment (including once dropping and shattering his own $2,000 bass), and launched into at least one long, legendary harangue against his audiences. "If my band is loud in spots, ugly in spots, it's also beautiful in spots, soft in spots. There are even moments of silence. But the moments of beautiful silence are hidden by your clanking glasses and your too wonderful conversations," he declared from the stage of New York's Five Spot one night, as recounted by Priestley. "You haven't been told before that you're phonies. You're here because jazz has publicity, jazz is popular, the word jazz, and you like to associate yourself with this sort of thing, but it doesn't make you a connoisseur of the art because you follow it around. You're dilettantes of style." Other times, Mingus made his points more subtly. Another night at the Five Spot, he simply played a phonograph on stage while the band members played cards. When passed over by taxi drivers, presumably because of his race, he was known to set up a chair in the middle of the street and begin reading the newspaper.

Mingus began one of his most significant musical collaborations in 1959, when reed player Eric Dolphy first joined his ensemble. While all of Mingus's musicians were at times subjected to their bandleader's outbursts, Mingus demonstrated a particular respect for Dolphy. When Dolphy left the band in 1964 in order to spend time in Europe, Mingus developed a composition titled, alternately, "Farewell Eric Dolphy" or "So Long Eric." After the reed player died suddenly on June 29 of that year, Mingus named a son (with third wife, Judy) Eric Dolphy Mingus. A year earlier, Mingus had released his debut album on Impulse!, The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady. Always bucking tradition, Mingus had his psychoanalyst write the liner notes, telling him, according to Santoro, "I never pay you so at least this way you can make $200."

Overcame Obstacles

By the mid-1960s, increasingly plagued by psychological problems, Mingus was finding regular employment harder to secure. In 1966 he was forcibly evicted from his apartment for failure to pay rent. This sad event was captured by a documentary crew for the film Mingus. By 1970 Mingus elected to go into semi-retirement with financial assistance from his ex-wife Celia and her new husband, Saul Zaentz. Zaentz had purchased the Fantasy Record label, as well as the now-defunct Debut's back catalog. During this period, Mingus took comfort in his neighbors. "For about three years, I thought I was finished," he told Nat Hentoff in a 1972 New York Times interview. "In that neighborhood, they didn't know me from the man in the moon, but they took an interest in me. I'd go into 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."

Mingus began to re-emerge in the late 1960s, and in 1971 he once again drew widespread attention with the publication of his autobiography, Beneath the Underdog. That same year, he was awarded a prestigious Guggenheim fellowship in composition. He became a part-time instructor at the State University of New York in Buffalo and was commissioned to write film scores. Choreographer Alvin Ailey debuted a work with the Joffrey Ballet featuring new arrangements of Mingus's music. Mingus released the Columbia album Let My Children Hear Music in 1972. In 1975, the same year he released the albums Changes One and Changes Two, Mingus married longtime on-again, off-again partner Sue Graham Ungaro. Sadly, Mingus's second round in the spotlight was short-lived. In 1977 he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease. He continued to compose, dictating into a tape recorder when he could no longer work with his hands, and collaborated on a recasting of his compositions with folk singer Joni Mitchell for her album Mingus. He attended an all-star jazz concert at the White House in 1978, where he was honored with a standing ovation and a hug from President Jimmy Carter, which brought him to tears.

Mingus died in Cuernavaca, Mexico, where he had gone to seek alternative treatments for his illness, on January 5, 1979. In accordance with his wishes, Sue Mingus scattered his ashes in the River Ganges in India. Mingus's music lives on through two musical groups organized by Sue Mingus, Mingus Dynasty and the Mingus Big Band. Even before his untimely death, Mingus's many collaborators began reflecting on his influence. "Mingus is not little stuff," observed trumpeter John Handy, a veteran of Mingus's workshops. "He's big stuff musically. He is definitely, in the true sense, a giant and maybe even a genius. He has all the qualities." Mingus summed up the force behind his talent, in an open letter to Miles Davis published in Down Beat in 1989. "My music is alive and it's about the living and the dead, about good and evil. It's angry, yet it's real because it knows it's angry."

Books

Priestley, Brian, Mingus: A Critical Biography, Quartet Books Ltd., 1982.

Santoro, Gene, Myself When I Am Real, Oxford University Press, 2000.

Periodicals

Down Beat, December 7, 1978; September 1989; April 2002.

New York Times, January 30, 1972; January 9, 1979.

Online

"Charles Mingus," Biography Resource Center Online, Gale Group, 2006, http://galenet.galegroups.com/servlet/BioRC.

Mingus, Charles (1922–79) US jazz bass player, composer, and bandleader. His large-scale compositions and use of overdubbing inspired a generation of modern jazz musicians. The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady (1963) is his masterpiece.