The art of double bass player Charlie Mingus (1922) was rooted in the same general
rediscovery of blues and gospel music as hard bop, but Mingus stood out for
his highbrow studies on group improvisation and jazz composition.
His music was schizophrenic in that it both harked back to the New Orleans
roots of jazz and looked forward to progressive chamber jazz and "third stream"
jazz.
His compositions ranged wildly in mood and dynamics, from puntillistic
counterpoint to massive Wagner-ian explosions.
He rarely employed great soloists, preferring dedicated session-men to
stars with a strong personality, another way of emphasizing the compositional
versus the improvisational nature of his art.
Mingus was the first jazz musician since Ellington who could compete with
classical composers.
A proud intellectual, he publicly despised the decadent habits of many jazz
stars and even the barbaric attitude of the jazz audience (compared with
the audience of classical music).
A precursor of indie music, Mingus founded his own label (1952) to avoid
the commercial pressure of the major labels.
Raised in Los Angeles, he was also a rare specimen in a jazz world that was
increasingly centered around New York.
A child prodigy, he composed a challenging Half-Mast Inhibition (1941)
when he was just 19 years old.
He cut his teeth with Louis Armstrong (1942) and Lionel Hampton (1947-48),
but had little in common with the swing era. He first displayed his true persona
in a trio formed in 1950 by xylophonist Kenneth "Red Norvo" Norville with
guitarist Tal Farlow.
Moving to New York, he mixed with the bebop avantgarde, playing a famous date
with Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Bud Powell and Max Roach, immortalized
on Jazz at Nassey Hall (may 1953). He also appered on records by
Bud Powell (1953), Charlie Parker (1953) and Paul Bley (1953).
He established himself as one of jazz music's main visionaries with
Pithecanthropus Erectus (january 1956), recorded by a quintet that
featured Jackie McLean on alto sax, Mal Waldron on piano, a tenor saxophonist
and a drummer. The highlight of the album was the
ten-minute four-movement tone poem Pithecanthropus Erectus
(partially free-form), that influenced the birth of free jazz,
but the album also contained a 15-minute Love Chant, a moody and cryptic
suite that confirmed his narrative gift, and an eight-minute version of
Gershwin's A Foggy Day turned
into a mini-symphony of city noises (all simulated by the instruments).
The quintet session of The Clown (march 1957) debuted Dannie Richmond on
drums and Jimmy Knepper on trombone.
The twelve-minute Haitian Fight Song was another
tour de force of dynamics, albeit rooted in the polyphony of New Orleans'
street bands (also a bassist's tour de force), matched by
the closing The Clown, while Reincarnation of a Lovebird was an eight-minute tribute to bebop and to the tragedy of his greatest icon (Charlie Parker).
Tijuana Moods (june 1957), with even a vocalist and castanets, contained
two ten-minute compositions that overflowed with intricate sonic events, Ysabel's Table Dance and Los Mariachis.
And the list of extended experiments started growing rapidly:
the ten-minute West Coast Ghost for a sax-trumpet-trombone-piano sextet, off East Coasting (august 1957),
the eleven-minute Scenes In The City for jazz ensemble and narrating voice, off Scenes In The City (october 1957),
the twelve-minute Nostalgia in Times Square for alto-tenor-piano quintet, off Jazz Portraits (january 1959).
Blues and Roots (february 1959) was, instead, a post-modernist tribute to the sound of New Orleans, an exercise in disassembling the cliches of a genre and rebuilding it from an analytic perspective (best the gospel-y Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting and the bluesy Moanin').
None of the exuberance was lost, but the harmonic complexity was certainly not what the old New Orleans bands had in mind. Basically, it was an entire album of pieces similar to the previous Haitian Fight Song.
More tributes to his idols surfaced on another accessible set, Mingus Ah Um (may 1959), scored for septet. Better Get Hit in Yo' Soul was still in the gospel vein of its predecessor, while
Goodbye Pork Pie Hat was a moving elegy for Lester Young and other
pieces were dedicated to Charlie Parker, Jelly Roll Morton and Duke Ellington.
The longer
Fables of Faubus was one of his first forays into politics.
After Dynasty (november 1959), that recycled the same ideas,
Mingus formed a quartet with Richmond, trumpeter Ted Curson and saxophonist Eric Dolphy to record Presents Charles Mingus (october 1960).
Folk Forms No. 1 expanded his revisitation of New Orleans into a dreamy and sometimes nightmarish twelve-minute jam, while the 15-minute What Love adopted the anarchic stance of free jazz and a "conversational" approach to the double bass.
After all, Mingus' quartet was modeled after Ornette Coleman's quartet that had inaugurated free jazz.
Other experiments of these years were
the 20-minute MDM for an eleven-piece ensemble (featuring Dolphy and Paul Bley on piano), off Mingus (october 1960),
Peggy's Blue Skylight (november 1961),
and especially
Epitaph (1962), his most ambitious score, first documented on the Town Hall Concert (october 1962) but fully reconstructed (two hours long) only posthumously in 1989.
Oh Yeah (november 1961) explored a different facet of Mingus' persona:
the dadaist joker. Scored for a sextet with Knepper, Richmond, Mingus on piano, Doug Watkins on bass, Booker Ervin on tenor sax and Roland Kirk on flute and other instruments, mid-size pieces such as
Hog Callin' Blues, Devil Woman,
Oh Lord Don't Let Them Drop That Atomic Bomb On Me
and Ecclusiastics
took the postmodernist approach of Blues and Roots to an almost
parodistic and paroxysmal extreme,
while Passions Of A Man was again flirting with noise.
It was a deviant form of traditional jazz, that kept intact the envelope while
scientifically demolishing the interior.
The narrative dynamic typical of Mingus' extended works is the essence of
The Black Saint And The Sinner Lady (january 1963), ostensibly a six-movement ballet (divided into three "tracks" and three "modes") for big band
(the three modes were squeezed into a single 17-minute track on the vynil version), and one of the masterpieces of 20th century's music.
Scored for an orchestra of two trumpets, trombone, tuba, flute, baritone sax,
guitar, alto (Charlie Mariano), piano (Jaki Byard), bass and drums,
and painstakingly assembled by Mingus (even overdubbing several passages),
it was, by definition, an exercise in colors: Mingus juxtaposed groups of
instruments to maximize the contrast of tones, while using a shifting dynamic
to lure ever-changing textures out of that jarring counterpoint.
The resulting music was highly emotional, bordering on neurotic, merging the
ancestral frustration of black slaves with the modern alienation of the urban
middle class.
The sense of universal tragedy was increased by the facts that instruments
were clearly simulating human voices, whether the joyful singing of
Mariano's sax or the sorrowful murmur of trumpet and trombone or the ghostly
howls of tuba and baritone sax.
The story opens with the bleak Track A - Solo Dancer, slides into
the orchestral Track B - Duet Solo Dancers (reminiscent of Ellington)
and delves into the melodic fantasy of Track C - Group Dancers, with
piano and flute sculpting the leitmotiv.
The "modes",
Mode D - Trio And Group Dancers,
Mode E - Single Solos And Group Dance and
Mode F - Group And Solo Dance, wed hard bop, classical music and flamenco.
After a work of so much depth and class, Mingus paid tribute to himself on
Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus (september 1963), a revisitation of his
popular themes, and toyed with the piano on Mingus Plays Piano (june 1963).
The 1964 sextet with Eric Dolphy (also Clifford Jordan on tenor sax, Jaki Byard on piano, Johnny Coles on trumpet) yielded extended live jams such as
Parkeriana,
Orange Was The Color Of Her Dress Then Blue Silk
Meditations on Integration,
and
So Long Eric,
all of them included on
The Great Concert of Charles Mingus (april 1964).
Teo Macero helped Mingus assemble the orchestra for
Let My Children Hear Music (october 1971), his most daring attempt at fusing
two such antithetical forms of art as classical music and free jazz.
The program
(The Shoes Of The Fisherman's Wife Are Some Jive Ass Slippers,
the intricate (albeit improvised) Adagio Ma Non Troppo,
Don't Be Afraid The Clown's Afraid Too,
the breathtaking Hobo Ho,
The Chill Of Death with narrating voice,
The I Of Hurricane Sue)
was as frantic as a Charles Ives symphony and as massive as a Wagner opera.
His last major composition were:
Opus III (october 1973) for quintet (George Adams on tenor, Don Pullen on piano),
Sue's Changes (december 1974) for quintet (George Adams on tenor, Don Pullen on piano, Jack Walrath on trumpet),
Todo Modo (april 1976) for large ensemble,
Cumbia & Jazz Fusion (march 1977) for large ensemble.
As a bassist, Mingus had developed a style that turned the instrument into something like a piano, capable of playing both the bass rhythm and the countermelody. But his achievements as a virtuoso pale compared with his achievements as a composer.
A brain that was both an encyclopedia of jazz music and a laboratory of genetic synthesis had yielded the first great postmodernist artist of jazz.
Mingus died in january 1979.
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