Charles Mingus
'Making the simple complicated is commonplace. Making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity.' — Charles Mingus
At a glance 🔭💭
Some coordinates adapted from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) · Pleiades (CC BY 3.0)
Companions ⏳🌊
- FriendshipBuddy Collette
A high-school friend, he is said to have urged Mingus, then clinging to the cello, to take up the bass.
- TeacherRed Callender
In Los Angeles he taught the young Mingus the fundamentals of jazz bass.
- InfluenceDuke Ellington
His lifelong idol, who once dismissed him from the band, but with whom he reunited in 1962 on “Money Jungle.”
- InfluenceCharlie Parker
The player Mingus revered above all; they shared the Massey Hall concert, and Mingus released the recording on Debut Records.
- ColleagueEric Dolphy
With a horn sound that seemed to speak, he became the new voice of Mingus's music, but he died suddenly in 1964.
- FamilySue Graham Mingus
His last wife, who stood by him in his final years and, after his death, carried his music forward with the Mingus Big Band and the premiere of “Epitaph.”
I. The boy from Watts · 1922–1942 (age 0–20)
(Nogales) He was born in April 1922 in Nogales, Arizona. His father, Charles Mingus Sr., was a noncommissioned officer at the army post there, and his mother, Harriett, died in the autumn of the year her son was born. His father took his two daughters, Grace and Vivian, and the infant boy to Watts, south of Los Angeles, where they settled, and he soon remarried, to Mamie Carson. In his autobiography Mingus later recalled that his father was strict and unusually preoccupied with how light or dark a person's skin was. He said that Black, white and Chinese blood mingled in his family, and he remembered that, because his skin was light, he was never fully accepted by any group. (Church) At the Holiness church his stepmother took him to, he heard the congregation clap and shout and answer the preacher's words in song. This practice, in which one voice calls and many respond (call and response), would come back to life throughout his later music. He also recalled being deeply shaken as a child when he heard Duke Ellington's orchestra on the radio. (Bass) He learned trombone first, then cello. It is said that his high-school friend, the saxophonist Buddy Collette, told him a Black cellist would have a hard time getting into a symphony orchestra and urged him to take up the double bass, for which the school band had an opening. He studied jazz playing with the bassist Red Callender, classical technique for nearly five years with Herman Rheinshagen, who had played with the New York Philharmonic, and harmony and composition with Lloyd Reese. “Half-Mast Inhibition,” an orchestral piece he wrote at around seventeen, was not recorded until 1960, yet it shows that the boy was already imagining the sound of a large ensemble in his head.
II. A wandering bassist in the West · 1943–1951 (age 21–29)
(Armstrong) Around 1943 he toured with Louis Armstrong's band. He is said to have quit when the band was set to head into the strictly segregated South. Afterward he played in the band of the New Orleans trombonist Kid Ory and in the clubs along Central Avenue in Los Angeles, and he made his first recordings for small labels under the name 'Baron Mingus.' In 1944 he married for the first time. (Hampton) In 1947 he joined Lionel Hampton's band and recorded his own composition “Mingus Fingers.” The bass was usually the instrument that held up the bottom of the band, outlining the chords one note per beat as if walking (walking bass), but in this piece he made the bass the protagonist of the melody. His resolve not to remain a mere accompanist was audible in his music from early on. (Post office) Unable to support his family on music alone, he is said to have worked for a time at the post office. In 1950 the vibraphonist Red Norvo called him into a trio with the guitarist Tal Farlow. With no drums in the lineup, the bass had to carry the full weight of the rhythm alone and hold up under fast tempos, and the experience greatly refined his technique. The trio grew popular and made it all the way to New York. (Discrimination) But ahead of a television appearance in New York, Mingus was replaced by a white bassist on the grounds that he lacked a New York musicians' union card. He took this as racial discrimination, and in 1951 he left the trio and stayed on in New York. The insults and anger accumulated in the West would later find their way, undiluted, into his song titles and his remarks from the stage.
III. New York and Debut Records · 1951–1957 (age 29–35)
(Bebop) In New York he fell in with Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, Dizzy Gillespie and the rest of the generation that had rewritten jazz with fast tempos and complex harmony (bebop). He revered Parker above all, and he would publicly scold young players who merely imitated Parker's playing. In early 1953 he spent a brief stint in the orchestra of his childhood idol, Duke Ellington, but after a backstage clash with the trombonist Juan Tizol, Ellington is said to have dismissed him personally. (Debut) In 1952 he founded Debut Records with the drummer Max Roach and his then-wife, Celia. The idea was that musicians should own their own records. The recording of the May 1953 concert at Massey Hall in Toronto, Canada, with Parker, Gillespie, Powell and Roach came out on this label, and in 1955 it also released Miles Davis's “Blue Moods.” But lacking a head for distribution and accounting, the label had effectively closed its doors by around 1957. (Workshop) In a composers' experimental group he tried his hand at music bridging classical and jazz (third stream), and he soon began calling his own band the 'Jazz Workshop.' Rather than writing out every note, he played the melodies on the piano and had the players learn them by ear, in order to draw out a kind of playing in which the members improvise simultaneously, each in his own voice, weaving a texture together (collective improvisation). In 1956 the drummer Dannie Richmond joined, and he stayed with Mingus for some twenty years. (Evolution) “Pithecanthropus Erectus” (1956), a piece depicting human arrogance and downfall, was the first work in which his anger at discrimination took on a large form. In 1957 he recorded “Tijuana Moods,” drawing on memories of a trip to the Mexican border city of Tijuana.
Nearly the only record of the five masters of bebop sharing a single stage, it came out on Debut Records, the label Mingus founded. It is the most brilliant fruit of his dream that musicians should own their records.
- Because of contract issues, Charlie Parker was credited on the record under the pseudonym 'Charlie Chan,' and he played a plastic saxophone. Even so, the opening of his solo on “A Night in Tunisia,” the short passage in which he races on alone while the accompaniment briefly stops (the break), is counted among the high points of the concert.
- On “Salt Peanuts” you can hear Dizzy Gillespie shouting the title. It is worth listening for the tension as Max Roach's drums drive the soloists over the fast tempo.
- When the bass came through faintly on the live recording, Mingus later rerecorded the bass part in the studio and laid it over the original (overdubbing). It is a live album, but the bass alone was recorded afterward.
- In Bud Powell's piano, the right hand spins out long lines of melody like a horn, while the left hand props them up with short, punched chords. Here you can hear what the archetypal bebop piano sounds like.
His first major work, translating his anger at discrimination into a fable of human evolution and downfall. The Jazz Workshop method, teaching by ear instead of by score, took on a large form for the first time.
- Mingus described this piece of just over ten minutes as a story in four parts: evolution, superiority complex, decline and destruction. It rewards following the way the piece walks along calmly and then grows ever more chaotic, as if tracing the plot of a story.
- A bass that repeats the same short figure beneath everything (ostinato) builds the tension. When the music reaches the point where order collapses above it, the horns wail like screams.
- Jackie McLean's alto saxophone lays the anger bare with a sharp, rough tone. Far removed from any polished sound, this tone defines the character of the piece.
- On “A Foggy Day,” from the same album, the instruments imitate the sounds of the city, such as car horns and whistles. It offers a glimpse of Mingus's humor, in contrast to the weighty title track.
IV. Fury and prayer · 1958–1961 (age 36–39)
(Bellevue) In 1958 he checked himself into Bellevue Hospital in New York and stayed for a time in the psychiatric ward. In his autobiography he recalled bitterly how he had gone seeking help and then found it hard to get out. Afterward he continued long sessions with the psychiatrist Edmund Pollock, and this struggle to master his seething emotions became one of the pillars of his music. (Gospel) 1959 was his peak. He recorded “Blues & Roots” for Atlantic and “Mingus Ah Um” for Columbia. The shouts and handclaps of his childhood church came back to life in “Better Git It in Your Soul,” and when Lester Young died that March, Mingus wrote the elegy “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat,” titled after the flat-crowned hat that had been Young's trademark. The tenor saxophonist John Handy played that grief as if singing it. (Faubus) In 1957, when Governor Orval Faubus blocked Black students from entering school in Little Rock, Arkansas, Mingus wrote “Fables of Faubus” to mock him. Columbia dropped the lyrics and released it only as an instrumental, and in 1960, on the Candid label run by the critic Nat Hentoff, he recorded it again with the lyrics restored. Eric Dolphy, who played on that session, added a new, speaking voice to his music on saxophone and bass clarinet. (Money) That same year, protesting that the Newport Jazz Festival paid musicians stingy fees, he and Max Roach, among others, staged a rival festival nearby. At a 1960 concert in Antibes, France, Bud Powell, then living in Europe, came on stage and played alongside his old comrade.
His childhood church, the late Lester Young and the fury of Little Rock are gathered on a single record. It is the album on which the many strands of his life come together in their most orderly form.
- In “Better Git It in Your Soul,” handclaps and shouts erupt over a swaying meter that divides each bar into two groups of three beats (6/8 time). It is a piece that revives the fervor of the Holiness church services Mingus heard as a child.
- In “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat,” John Handy's tenor solo begins low and slow and gradually draws close to weeping. An elegy honoring Lester Young, the piece itself is built on the twelve-bar blues form.
- “Fables of Faubus” was released only as an instrumental because Columbia refused the lyrics. Even so, the staggering, comical theme alone conveys the mockery clearly enough. Listen for the passage midway through where the tempo suddenly changes.
- To fit everything on a single LP, the producer Teo Macero cut and spliced several tracks into shorter edits. The longer, pre-edit versions were later restored on reissues, so it is fun to listen to the two versions side by side.
Restoring the lyrics mocking Faubus that Columbia had cut, this record distills the essence of his brief journey with Eric Dolphy.
- Though it is a studio recording, Mingus wanted it to feel like a club date, so he opened with an introduction that seems to address an audience. He sets the mood with a half-joking request that, instead of applauding, listeners not clink their glasses.
- In “Original Faubus Fables,” Mingus and the drummer Dannie Richmond trade questions and answers (call and response) to mock segregationist politicians. The church's give-and-take form, in effect, becomes a weapon of satire.
- In “What Love,” Dolphy's bass clarinet and Mingus's bass converse as if two people were arguing. With pitch and inflection that sound like speech, this passage shows the rapport between the two men.
- It is a quartet with no piano, so there is no instrument laying down the harmony. As a result, each of the four instruments moves more freely, and the empty spaces between their sounds come through wide and open.
V. The black saint · 1962–1964 (age 40–42)
(Jungle) In September 1962 he recorded “Money Jungle” as a trio with Duke Ellington and Max Roach. It was a reunion with the idol who had dismissed him nine years earlier. Midway through the session, it is said, Mingus grew so unhappy with Roach's playing that he began to pack up, and Ellington coaxed him into staying. (Town Hall) That October, his concert at New York's Town Hall was badly underprepared. The show went on while copyists sat onstage writing out parts, and amid conflict with his record label he was deeply dispirited. Around that time, during a rehearsal, he struck trombonist Jimmy Knepper and broke a tooth; Knepper later recalled that for some time afterward he struggled to reach his upper register. It endured as an episode in which his rage wounded a close colleague. (Saint) In January 1963 he recorded “The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady” with an eleven-piece band. Written for ballet, the suite intertwines Ellington's orchestral colors, flamenco guitar and the cries of church music. The liner notes were written by his psychiatrist, Pollock. He made bold use of a technique of laying further sounds over recorded performances (overdubbing), shaping a single vast mass of sound. That same year he also recorded “Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus.” (Dolphy) In the spring of 1964 he toured Europe with Dolphy, pianist Jaki Byard, Richmond and others. When Dolphy said he would leave the band and stay in Europe, they played the farewell piece “So Long Eric”; that June, Dolphy died suddenly in Berlin of complications from diabetes. Mingus grieved the loss for a long time.
A reunion with Ellington, the idol who had dismissed him nine years earlier. You can hear a three-way conversation in which reverence and tension flow together.
- On the title track Mingus plucks and bends the bass strings hard, drawing out a buzzing, trembling sound. Ellington answers by striking the piano like a percussion instrument, stabbing out deliberately clashing chords.
- “Fleurette Africaine,” by contrast, is serene. Ellington's piano scatters clear notes, while bass and drums circle around the beat rather than marking it precisely.
- It is said that when Mingus tried to storm out mid-session, Ellington coaxed him into staying. Knowing this, you hear all the more vividly the tension as the three men test one another in their exchanges.
- Ellington was known as the leader of a glittering orchestra, but this trio reveals his raw, modern side as a pianist. What drew that side out was the youthful energy of Mingus and Roach.
Annotated by a psychiatrist, this suite translates inner turmoil into vast orchestral sound and marks the summit of his career as a composer.
- Written for ballet, its movements run on without a break. Think of it not as a single piece but as one long story, and listen from beginning to end.
- Charlie Mariano's alto saxophone has a plaintive, sobbing tone. Mingus recorded his playing several times and layered the takes (overdubbing), building up thick strata of sound. It was a rare and daring experiment in jazz recording at the time.
- Quentin Jackson, a trombonist from the Ellington orchestra, holds a mute shaped like a rubber suction cup (a plunger mute) to the bell and pulls it away, producing a sound like a human growl. It is a passage that carries on Ellington's palette of tone colors.
- Midway through, a flamenco guitar suddenly breaks in, adding a Spanish color. This weave, in which church music, Ellington and Spanish music all mingle, is a sound that belongs to Mingus alone.
VI. Years of silence · 1965–1970 (age 43–48)
(Mail order) Convinced that record companies were exploiting him, in the mid-1960s he took to pressing his own records and selling them by mail. The live recording from the 1964 Monterey Jazz Festival and the recording of a 1965 UCLA concert came out this way. It was a renewed push for the conviction of his Debut Records days that musicians should control the flow of money, but sales were negligible. (Eviction) In 1966, unable to pay the rent, he was evicted from his New York studio and home. The scene of his scores, instruments and belongings set out on the street was captured in director Thomas Reichman's documentary “Mingus.” In the film he speaks, weary and desolate, about his own circumstances and about American society. The sight of a man who had once been jazz's most ambitious composer hauling his things in the street also endures as a picture of the economic plight of jazz musicians at the time. (Silence) Thereafter, until around 1969, he scarcely appeared onstage. Those around him recalled that he had sunk into deep depression. Instead he kept working on the autobiography manuscript he had long been wrestling with. In it he poured out, rough and candid, the wounds of his childhood, his confusion over skin color and the humiliations he had suffered in the music world. His playing had stopped, but the memories and emotions that made up his music were being set in order in these pages. In 1969 he put together a small band and quietly returned to the club stage.
VII. The last song · 1971–1979 (age 49–57)
(Return) In 1971 his autobiography “Beneath the Underdog” was published after passing through the hands of editor Nel King, and that same year he received a Guggenheim Fellowship in composition. With the large-ensemble album “Let My Children Hear Music,” he also reclaimed his standing as a composer. He taught as well at the State University of New York at Buffalo. (Sue) In 1975 he married Sue Graham, who had been at his side since the 1960s. It was his fourth marriage, and he had children from several of them. Sue took charge of his schedule and contracts, steadying his life. He formed a new quintet with George Adams on tenor saxophone, Don Pullen on piano, Jack Walrath on trumpet, and Richmond, and in 1974 recorded the “Changes” sessions. Among them, “Sue's Changes” portrayed his wife's many faces, and alongside it was a piece dedicated to Ellington, who died that year. (ALS) In 1977 he was diagnosed with a disease in which the muscles gradually stiffen (ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease). When he soon could no longer hold the bass, he composed from his wheelchair by singing melodies into a tape recorder. The songs he worked on with singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell led to her album “Mingus.” In June 1978, when President Jimmy Carter paid tribute to him at the White House Jazz Festival, he wept. (Cuernavaca) He went to Cuernavaca, Mexico, in search of a cure, and died there on January 5, 1979, at the age of 56. His ashes were scattered on the Ganges in India. Sue went on to form the Mingus Big Band and other ensembles to bring his music to the stage, and in 1989 his unfinished magnum opus “Epitaph” was performed for the first time.
Recorded with a new quintet after he rose above his silence, this is the document of his last golden age. It includes a piece dedicated to his wife Sue and one honoring Ellington.
- “Sue's Changes” alternates slow lyricism with fierce, headlong passages, shifting tempo several times. Keep in mind that it sets out to portray one person's many faces, and the flow comes into focus.
- Don Pullen's piano solo features sounds made by pressing many keys at once, rolling the palm or the back of the hand across the keyboard (tone clusters). Even within these rough masses of sound, the beat never wavers.
- George Adams's tenor saxophone is thick and rough, close to a blues shout. On “Devil Blues,” from the same album, he even sings the blues himself.
- “Duke Ellington's Sound of Love,” honoring Ellington, who died that year, is the gentlest track on the album. It is Mingus's salute to the idol he first heard on the radio as a boy.
Lesser-known stories
The Massey Hall concert album is often presented as bebop captured raw and live, yet the bass on that recording is not the sound from the hall. Because the bass was nearly inaudible on the concert tape, Mingus later rerecorded his part in the studio and dubbed it in. The fact is documented in liner notes and discographies, but it is seldom mentioned, overshadowed by the image of a legendary night. His autobiography “Beneath the Underdog” began as a far vaster manuscript. The writing Mingus had gathered over many years was heavily cut in the hands of editor Nel King, and the published book took a shape in which sexual boasts and rough anecdotes stand out. Biographers have pointed out that much of his thinking on music theory and composition was left out. Hence the broad consensus among scholars that the book should be read less as a factual record than as a self-portrait of his own making. He also undertook an unexpected venture that revealed both his need to earn a living and his business sense. His biographies record that he wrote his own guide to training cats to use a human toilet and sold it by mail. It was a moment when his insistence that musicians should sell their own wares surfaced even outside music. The magnum opus “Epitaph” was a work he never managed to perform in full during his lifetime. After his death, musicologist Andrew Homzy, while sorting through his scores, found some 500 pages of music, and conductor Gunther Schuller reconstructed it and premiered it in 1989 at Lincoln Center in New York with a large ensemble of just over 30 players. The dream buried by the failure of the 1962 Town Hall concert had, in effect, found its voice 27 years later.
Terminology notes 📚🔎
Bebop
(Meaning) The word is said to come from the sounds made when imitating fast lines with the voice. Rather than a word with any particular meaning, it is a name that mimics the shape of the music in sound. (In jazz) The jazz created in the New York of the 1940s by young musicians such as Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. Unlike big-band music made for dancing, it has small bands unfurling improvisations over very fast tempos and complex harmonies, as if in a contest of skill. It is like jumping rope: at first you jump slowly, and then friends start competing to see who can jump faster, with harder tricks.
Walking bass
(Meaning) The English word walking means just that: to walk. The name comes from the way the bass picks out notes one at a time, as if walking forward step by step. (In jazz) A way of playing in which the bass marks one note per beat, evenly, moving up and down through the notes of the chords. It holds up the floor so the whole band never loses the beat. When you march in line in gym class, everyone stays in step if a friend at the front calls out one, two, one, two; in the same way, the walking bass keeps the band's footsteps in time.
Call and response
(Meaning) In English, it means a call and a response. (In jazz) A practice in which one person sings out a phrase and another person, or a group, answers it. Handed down from African music and the worship of Black American churches, in jazz it appears as an exchange between a solo instrument and the band, or between one instrument and another. Picture a teacher asking a question in class and the students answering in one voice. Mingus used this practice, which he had heard in church as a child, in his compositions all his life. (Elsewhere) Cheering in which a cheerleader shouts a chant and the crowd shouts it back works on the same principle.
Collective improvisation
(Meaning) The Korean word jeukheung (卽興, 'improvisation') means acting on the spot (卽) as the spirit moves you (興). Jipdan jeukheung ('collective improvisation') means many people creating music together on the spot. (In jazz) Usually in jazz players take solos one at a time, but in collective improvisation several instruments improvise their own lines simultaneously, weaving them together. Without close listening to one another it easily turns into noise, so the listening ear matters above all. It is like several friends doing an improvised role-play without a script: when one says a line, another picks it up and carries the story on. Mingus's refusal to write everything out, having players learn by ear instead, was also meant to draw out this kind of playing.
Third stream
(Meaning) In English, it means a third stream. The name, coined by composer Gunther Schuller, refers to a new current born where the first stream, classical music, met the second, jazz. (In jazz) A musical movement of the 1950s that sought to blend the compositional techniques and instrumentation of classical music with the improvisation and rhythms of jazz. Having studied classical bass and composition as a boy, Mingus took an early interest in such experiments. In culinary terms, it is like making pasta with Korean ingredients: an attempt to serve the strengths of different traditions on a single plate.
Overdubbing
(Meaning) In English, “over” means above, and “dub” means to lay sound onto something. The word describes laying a new sound over one that has already been recorded. (In jazz) A technique in which a musician listens to a previously recorded performance while separately recording another part to layer on top of it. Because jazz traditionally prized the immediacy of several players performing together in one room, the technique was seldom used to any great extent in the 1950s and '60s. Mingus re-recorded his own bass on the Massey Hall album, and on “The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady” he stacked the saxophones in multiple layers. It works on the same principle as making a video, where narration or background music is laid over footage that has already been shot. (Elsewhere) The dubbing of a film, in which foreign-language dialogue is replaced with voices in the audience's own language, comes from the same root.
Ostinato
(Meaning) In Italian the word means stubborn, persistent. The name comes from the way the same figure is stubbornly repeated. (In jazz) The continuous repetition of a short melody or rhythm, either throughout a piece or for the length of a section. When other instruments move freely over this repeating foundation, the listener feels tension steadily building. Mingus used this method on “Pithecanthropus Erectus” to build an uneasy tension. Picture singing a round, where one group keeps repeating the same phrase while another group sings over it.