Charles Mingus
Occasionally I write for a British Music Blog, this was an entry from last year on the late, great Charles Mingus.
Charles Mingus once said that his music is evidence of his soul’s
will to live. That’s something only a true musical genius could say
without sounding ridiculously pretentious or just plain silly.
Charles Mingus was not either of those, Mingus was the real thing.
Mingus brought the goods every time, every single time.
Mingus was taught the double bass by Red Callender, and then by
the New York Philharmonic Orchestra’s Herman Reinshagen. His
immersion in classical music along with training in Jazz, Blues and
Gospel made his music distinctive. It bristled with energy, full of
tempo changes that had rarely been heard before he came along and he
trusted his musicians to assert themselves in a sort of collective
approach to improvisation.
Had he just been a player he’d have cemented his place in jazz.
As a composer he went to the upper echelon of jazz. Mingus was one of
the few bass players who thought to marry the time keeping aspect of
the bass to the bebop mentality of the 1940s. Harmonic sophistication
and sheer power rarely go hand in hand in jazz, with Mingus they did.
He was special. He was unique.
Very early on in his career he formed a Composers Workshop with
Jackie McLean, Eric Dolphy and Rahsaan Roland Kirk. He did so, I
suspect, as he saw so much potential in where his music could go. He
left an amazing discography. Very few jazz musician’s catalogs can
be mentioned in the same breath.
Mingus stared recording in the mid-40s, and some of his earliest
work features the complexity of Charles Mingus without perhaps the
art. By the mid-50s it was fairly obvious something special was
starting to happen in his music. Then, after a 1955 recording with my
all-time favorite jazz musician Max Roach, he was poised to release a
string of great albums, and a couple of out and out masterpieces.
“The Penguin Guide To Jazz”, a must have for hardcore jazz
fans, called
Pithecanthropus Erectus one of the great modern
jazz albums. “Absolutely crucial to the development of free
collective improvisation.” Mingus called the title song a
ten-minute tone poem depicting the rise and fall of man due to his
own greed in attempting to stand on false security. I knew I was
listening to something special when the horns starting bursting in
with short, then longer, sequels of anger at the thee minute mark.
And then, there is this pause around the nine minute mark, pure
silence, yet it’s part of the composition. Silence as music. And
then at the ten minute mark the chaos begins. And then winds down
into nothingness. I’d say it was here he stopped being a jazz
musician and started being something very special.
1957 saw an insane burst of creativity with five albums. There
were so many compositions from this year I could pick, but for me –
at least today – I’m enjoying
Scenes In The City
from
A Modern Jazz Symposium Of Music and Poetry. Mingus had
been playing with narration in his songs for a bit at this point.
Jean Shepherd’s narration to The Clown was amazing, but the music
wasn’t as good compared to other tunes. In Scenes In The City,
actor Melvin Stewart narrated the song, talking about why he loved
jazz, as written by Lonne Elder and Langston Hughes. The marriage of
spoken word and music works so well here. There is a section where
Stewart talks about his favorite musicians and the music moves along
with him describing each one. It’s wonderful, not hokey like it
could have easily been, but gratifying and beautiful.
Mingus Ah Um from 1959 is a brilliant album, and while I
don’t like throwing around the word it is a masterpiece and work of
genius. There are four or five compositions on this album that
probably make different people’s top ten Mingus songs, and
justifiably so. And as much as I love Goodbye Pork Pie Hat and Fables
of Faubus Id have to say
Boogie Stop Shuffle is my
favorite. It’s an exercise in bass playing. A twelve bar blues
piece with a boogie bass that passes back and forth between stop time
and shuffle. For non musicians, a boogie is a repetitive swing
rhythm. Stop time means interrupting or stopping in normal times and
punctuating the piece with attacks on the first beat of every
measure, often with just silence. It creates the allusion that tempo
has changed even though it hasn’t. To move back and forth between
that and swing with a bass taking the lead is just mind blowing
amazing to a guy who on his best days barely held his own in a bar
band doing Stones covers on his four string.
Gunslinging Bird from
Mingus Dynasty
sounds angry to me. Like a big city at night angry, full of so much
noise and grit you really don’t want to know about. It’s driving
and it draws you in, while being unnerving at the same time.
Originally titled “If Charlie Parker Were A Gunslinger, There’d
Be A Whole lot Of Dead Copycats.” It’s fantastic, and the kind of
jazz composition that makes pop fans run away in fear and say they
can’t stand jazz. That makes it even better.
I love 1962’s
Hog Callin’ Blues from the
Oh
Yeah album as much for the composition as it represents such a
unique little moment in Mingus’ career. On this album he switches
to piano and sings on half of the songs. Can you imagine a big name
jazz star today doing an album where he plays a completely different
instrument. Mingus wasn’t just a bass player, he was the greatest
musician of the twentieth century who chose the bass as his primary
instrument. In a way the album, and specifically this song, in which
he had Doug Watkins play bass for his compositions prove that.
I suppose I could cheat a little here and include the entire 1962
The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady as a song. It is a
single continuous composition, somewhat a ballet, divided into four
tracks and six movements.
Solo Dancer is my favorite
though. You can feel the sultry summer heat of New York in the piece
– it’s noir, The world needs to be black and white when you
listen to this, you need to be walking down a mean street, and you
need to be carrying a rod. Plus he had his therapist write some of
the liner notes. The album ranks with
Ah Um as one of his
two masterpieces.
II B.S. from
Mingus, Mingus, Mingus, Mingus,
Mingus is really a variation of Haitian Fight Song that he
recorded seven years before. But at five minutes instead of twelve
this “remake” seems more ferocious. The bass intro by Mingus is
just about power and the drive of the next four and a half minutes
supersedes anything in the original. A friend of mine whose is a huge
Les Claypool fan says he hears the seeds of Primus in this song and
thinks Mingus was the first punk rocker. I don’t know about that,
but this is an intense piece.
It’s been repeated enough that it is seemingly accepted as fact
that emotional and health issues made Mingus’ output in the
seventies pale in comparison to his work from the fifties and
sixties.
Adagio Ma Non Troppo from 1972’s
Let My
Children Hear Music is proof that isn’t even close to being
true. A song, actually an album, truly showcasing Mingus the
composer, the piece is played by a large jazz orchestra. Mingus
worked with several arrangers and conductors for the album. The
relationship he formed musically with Sy Johnson produced some
amazing works. Mingus described it at the time as the best album he
had ever made. It wasn’t, but the movement from Small Band Leader
and Composer to a Composer for an Orchestra was seamless and somehow
as it should have been.
Canon from 1973’s
Mingus Moves has a
warmth you usually don’t associate with Mingus. Probably due to the
addition of pianist Don Pullen and tenor sax man George Adams to
Mingus’ group on the album. It’s an odd one for me to like, as I
always loved Mingus’ angry driving work. This is more of a
spiritual meditation which I’ve heard compared to Coltrane. I’m
not sure about that but it is clearly a bit of a change-up in late
career.
Another late piece I really enjoy is
Cumbia & Jazz
Fusion from the album of the same name in 1977. The longest
composition on my list at over twenty eight minutes, it was written
for the Italian film Todo Modo but stands alone in its own right.
Much like Adagio Ma Non Troppo it is performed by a large group,
although not a full orchestra but a fifteen piece jazz group. Mingus
by this point was truly the composer he probably was meant to be. I
don’t for a minute mean to suggest that I’d want to forego all
those amazing small group albums from the fifties and sixties but the
man thought bigger than four or five instruments and five to ten
minute compositions
After his death, the piece known as Epitaph was found, although he
had recorded a small portion of it in 1962. The composition is 4,235
measures long and requires over two hours and a 30 piece orchestra to
perform. And while I have a live version of it, I would have loved to
have heard him lead the work when he was prepared to unveil it.
Charles Mingus, composer. Any other description short changes the
man’s legacy.
