Charles Mingus

Diese Musik in meiner Werbung 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."

BIOGRAPHY

He moved with his family to the Watts section of Los Angeles as a small child. Mingus’s first instruments were trombone and cello; he didn’t begin with the bass until he was in his mid-teens, when he studied with a former bassist of the New York Philharmonic.
Mingus learned piano and theory from Lloyd Reese, and he picked up ideas from young players experimenting on the Los Angeles scene, including Buddy Collette and Red Callender. Changing direction, Mingus played with Kid Ory in Barney Bigard’s band and then joined Louis Armstrong’s group for a tour. In Los Angeles again, he formed Strings and Keys, a trio, and got it recorded in 1945.

Lionel Hampton’s orchestra hired Mingus to tour in 1947–’48; he roomed with Fats Navarro. His next musical phase was in ’50–’51, when he toured and recorded with Red Norvo and Tal Farlow.

When Mingus settled in New York, in 1952, he was mindful of bebop, which had already revolutionized jazz. He soon accompanied Charlie Parker and Bud Powell and, while he idolized them, never became a bebopper. (Mingus always maintained that he had only one musical father: Duke Ellington.)

Mingus came forward by 1953 with his own record label (one of the first to be wholly owned and run by a musician) and with an evolving band concept, the Jazz Composers Workshop, which explored classically-derived principles. These were two lifelong aims, the need for artistic control and to create in a cooperative environment.

For a decade from 1955, Mingus presided over numerous ensembles, of shifting instrumentation, in which he composed during rehearsals—giving soloists direction by playing bass notes and shouting commands. (Through ’60, his approaches embraced ever more spontaneous kinds of composition.) He orchestrated traffic like a cop in no hurry to clear the intersection; the results, no matter how cacophonous, were often brilliantly realized composition. No bandleader but Miles Davis had a more creative time or produced such a varied body of original work.

First came experimental, live Jazz Workshop recordings, such as the wittily allusive "Jump Monk". Then, in 1956, Mingus recorded his first extended composition, the near-11-minute "Pithecanthropus Erectus", program music of man’s (or Mingus’s) constant need to evolve. In the next year came a suite of pieces, Tijuana Moods, based on a recent sojourn. At times raging, at times lyrical, the suite, recorded for RCA Victor, captured as many moods as Mingus seemed capable of—at least about Mexico. He said for years after that it was the best record that he had ever made.

More masterpieces followed, some exploratory works, others using pastiche; still others drew on the church, Ellington, or whatever Mingus observed around him. The personnel, even the record labels, kept changing—but Mingus stood, unmoved, in the middle of his own chaos and made astonishingly creative music. Within three months in 1959, two LP efforts with mid-size ensembles, for different labels, produced a half-dozen great pieces, including two short works that became central to Mingus’s (and jazz’s) canon: "Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting" (closely related to his "Better Git It in Your Soul") and "Goodbye, Porkpie Hat". In the next year another pinnacle was reached, when he produced with just a quartet (for yet another label) an album that pushed even further his aim of collective, spontaneous improvisation—the savagely dissonant yet cogent work, "Folk Forms No. 1".

While Mingus produced, in the second half of his decadis mirabiliis, some terrific concert albums, he had pushed as far into the avant garde as he ever would. In fact, he suffered a terrible disappointment when his most ambitious work, Epitaph, written for a near-thirty-piece orchestra, had a disastrous premiere-cum-rehearsal at Town Hall in 1962. A more successful suite, The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, was prepared for LP with an eleven-piece band in ’63, but its themes harked back as much as they looked forward.

Many great musicians passed through these bands—Jaki Byard, Eric Dolphy, Booker Ervin, Roland Kirk, Jimmy Knepper—with only drummer Dannie Richmond a constant. They all had to adapt to Mingus’s moods, and he in turn drew on their various strengths to refuel his music with new sounds.

There was a successful European tour in 1964, and then just a few more projects in the US. Mingus now saw that modal and free jazz, both of which he had pioneered, were jazz’s lingua franca. This somehow disenchanted him, and his music production stopped by ’67. He got a day job and worked on his autobiography (Beneath the Underdog, 1971).

By the end of the decade, though, Mingus had come out of retirement with an all-new quintet. He resumed his hortatory bandleading style and, by the early Seventies, new compositions were again forthcoming. He was nurturing new talent again; backed by the loyal Richmond, the band featured Jack Walrath, George Adams, and Don Pullen. They had great successes touring, where they played to big festival audiences and on record.

Mingus’s twilight was cut short when he was diagnosed, in late 1977, with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. There was a worldwide outpouring of acclaim, including a spontaneous embrace of a wheelchair-ridden Mingus by President Carter at the White House. While Mingus’s will stipulated that his remains be returned to Mexico, which he considered his ancestral home, his legacy lives on with Mingus Dynasty, a successful repertory band that has been playing regularly and touring for nearly two decades.