bassist; composer
Personal Information
Born Charles Mingus, Jr., April 22, 1922, in Nogales, Arizona; died January 5, 1979, in Cuernavaca, Mexico; son of Charles Mingus, Sr. (U.S. army sergeant) and Harriet Phillips; married Canilla Jeanne Gross, January 3, 1944, had sons Charles III and Eugene; married Celia Nielson, April 2, 1950, had son Dorian; married Judy Starkey, had daughter Carolyn and son Eric; married Susan Graham Ungaro (actress).
Career
Performed in Barney Bigard's band, 1942; toured with Louis Armstrong, 1943; joined Lionel Hampton's band, 1947; worked at the U.S. post office 1948-50, 1952; performed in the Red Norvo Trio, 1950-51; worked with several different groups in New York City, 1951; founded Debut record label 1952-55; founded the Jazz Composers' Workshop, 1953; founded the Jazz Workshop, 1955; temporary retirement, 1965-69; resumed music career in 1969; toured and recorded until death, 1979.
Life's Work
An iconoclastic visionary, jazz bassist, composer, and pianist Charles Mingus established a movement within modern jazz that marked a departure from bebop and helped chart the course of avant-garde jazz. Inspired by the music of Duke Ellington, Mingus created jazz scores and compositions of textual color while retaining the dominant element of improvisation. He sought to create "spontaneous compositions," that offered musicians individual freedom and collective improvisation often through un-notated sections. Mingus's aggressive bass attack and harmonic sensibility--rooted in the earlier styles of such bassists as Jimmy Blanton--marked an effort to move away from the steady walking bass and to explore octave leaps and rhythmic subdivisions based upon various passing tones. Apart from his compositional and instrumental contributions, Mingus co-founded his own record label during the 1950s, and organized jazz workshops to further the study of jazz as a serious art form.
Charles Mingus, Jr., was born the son of U.S. army sergeant, Charles Mingus, Sr., on April 22, 1922, in Nogales, Arizona. Following the death of Mingus's mother shortly after his birth, his father took him to live in the Watts section of Los Angeles. Mingus's early exposure to African American religious music had a profound impact. "All the music I heard when I was a very young child was church music," recalled Mingus, in Nat Hentoff's work Jazz Is. "My father went to the Methodist church; my step mother [Mamie Carson] would take me to the Holiness church, which was too raw for my father." The music, singing, and hand clapping of the Holiness church left an indelible mark on Mingus's later music career, especially in compositions rooted in the evangelical gospel tradition.
In grade school Mingus played a trombone. Upon the advice of his friend and trombonist, Britt Woodman, he switched to cello and earned a seat in the Los Angeles Junior Philharmonic. Whether prompted by the advice of his friend Buddy Collette or a decision influenced by the requirements of joining the school band, Mingus took up the double bass, an instrument he obsessed to master. Though he listened to the operas of Richard Strauss and the impressionist compositions of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, he soon fell under the influence of jazz. After hearing Duke Ellington during a late night radio broadcast, Mingus found a mentor and lifelong idol. "When I first heard Ellington in person," stated Mingus in Jazz Is, "I almost jumped out of the balcony. One piece excited me so much that I almost screamed."
During high school Mingus studied music under Lloyd Reese, a former trumpeter with Les Hite. "Reese taught a system in which chord progressions were represented by a series of roman numerals," explained Ted Gioia in West Coast Jazz. "This not only facilitated understanding transposition but also the understanding of general harmonic rules underlying any set of chords." To pursue his study of harmony, Mingus made extensive use of the piano. "I never really understood the bass until I started working out harmonies and other things on the piano," explained Mingus as quoted in Mingus: A Critical Biography. "Then I came to regard the fingerboard of the bass like a piano fingerboard." Performing in Lloyd Reese's rehearsal band and a unit led by Al Adams, Mingus performed with other young aspiring jazz musicians such as saxophonist Dexter Gordon, trumpeter Ernie Royal, and drummer Chico Hamilton.
In 1942 Mingus joined the band of New Orleans clarinetist Barney Bigard, and a year later went on the road with the band of jazz legend Louis Armstrong. After his stint with Armstrong, he began a period of study under Herman Rheinshagen, a former member of the New York Philharmonic. Mingus eventually set out to compose his own works, much as Duke Ellington had done. Though he displayed an admirable attempt to master the school of Ellingtonian composition, Mingus's early music had yet to exhibit the individual genius of his later work. As Brian Priestley pointed out in his work, Mingus: A Critical Biography, "It must be safely assumed that he was starting to copy the simpler sounding charts from popular records to add to the stock arrangements [Buddy] Collette acquired, and was studying them to see how they worked and how they could be successfully amended."
In 1946 Mingus made his first recordings as a leader. Under the name "Baron Mingus and His Octet," he cut sides for the Excelsior label that revealed his musical indebtedness to Ellington. That same year, disillusioned over the failure to establish a career in the waning post war music scene, Mingus took a temporary job with the U.S. Postal Service while continuing to play free-lance jobs with various musicians.
Mingus's growing reputation as a bassist led to a stint with Lionel Hampton's band in 1947. In November of the same year, Hampton recorded the 25-year old bassist's number "Mingus Fingus." Noted "cool jazz" horn player and conductor Gunther Schuller expressed some criticism of the number's form in his work The Swing Era, but he also praised it as a "striking example of a new compositional voice struggling to be heard." Furthermore, Schuller pointed out, "Many of Mingus' later conceptual and ideological traits can be heard in this early effort: the caustic biting humor; the wild dense contrapuntal textures accumulated, so to speak, out of multiple spontaneous lines; the forays into atonality."
After his year-long stint with Hampton, Mingus worked at the post office until accepting an offer in 1950 to join vibraphonist Red Norvo's trio, which included guitarist Tal Farlow. Mingus's bass work with the new band explored a unique melodic role, often playing against the support of Farlow's bass guitar lines. In his work West Coast Jazz, Ted Gioia stressed that "The Norvo Trio was Mingus' last major involvement before leaving the West Coast. In later years, Mingus often remarked that all of his important musical education had taken place before he moved east. The surviving recordings do not discredit this claim. Both in composing and improvising, Mingus established many of the trademarks that would remain part of his music until the end."
Upon leaving Norvo's trio in 1951, Mingus and his second wife Celia moved to New York City. In September of the same year, he played with the band of saxophonist Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis at Birdland--a group that included famed trumpeter Miles Davis. "[Mingus] was a great bass player," expressed Davis in his memoir Miles. "But he was hard to get along with, especially about music, because he had his own definite ideas about what was good and what was bad, and he didn't mind telling anybody what he had on his mind. In that way, we were a lot alike. Our musical ideas were different sometimes. But I was glad to play with him again because he was always an inventive, hard driving, imaginative musician."
Throughout 1952 Mingus continued to take free-lance work with musicians such as Charlie Parker, Stan Getz, and Lennie Tristano. Unable to attain steady music employment, however, he returned to work at the post office in the winter of 1952. That same year, he established the Debut record label and, not long after, formed a partnership with drummer Max Roach that lasted until the label's demise in 1955. Apart from producing works under their own name, Mingus and Roach recorded nearly 170 tracks under 19 nominal leaders including saxophonist Teo Macero and trumpeter Thad Jones. In Art Taylor's book Notes and Tones, Roach revealed the "personal obstacles" surrounding the label's decline: "You know how tense we were at that time, trying to play and to learn how to play. In order to start a record company, you have to put in a lot of time to develop it. We just didn't have enough time, because we both spent twenty-four hours a day thinking about music."
On May 15, 1953 Mingus and Roach, along with Charlie Parker and pianist Bud Powell, appeared at Massey Hall in Toronto, Canada. Mingus recorded the performance from the bandstand and, after re-dubbing many of his bass parts, released it as the Debut album Jazz at Massey Hall. During the same year, Mingus and Roach organized a "Jazz Workshop" concert series at the Putman Central Club in Brooklyn, and two years later formed a quintet, the Charles Mingus Workshop. In an era when most jazz musicians sought to perform music rooted in the Parker- Gillespie bebop school, Mingus's interest in African American folk and religious music inspired unique musical concepts. As a modernist who respected earlier jazz and blues traditions, Mingus drew upon traditional music as a rich repository of inspiration, rather than a source to recreate in strict imitation. "When I was with [Mingus]," recounted Jazz Workshop pianist Mal Waldron in Hard Bop, "all the guys were playing very 'hip' blues, with all kinds of chords and passing tones. Mingus got rid of that, and made us play like the old, original blues, with only two or three chords, and got a basic feeling." The 1955 recording for Debut, Charles Mingus, captured his creative aspirations for the Jazz Workshop on a set of adventurous music that included the acclaimed duo with Max Roach "Percussion Discussion." Though Mingus's temperament and lack of steady work for his ensembles resulted in a constant shift of personnel, by 1956 he did find a vital and long-time sideman in drummer Dannie Richmond, a former saxophonist whose skills on the drum kit created a brilliant balance with Mingus's bass.
September of 1956 saw the release of Mingus's Atlantic album Pithecanthropus Erectus. Based upon a four-movement tone poem, the title composition traced the inevitable rise and fall of human evolution. Nat Hentoff wrote in the album's liner notes that Mingus "had taken a rather huge theme, on which he had been brooding extra- musically for a long time, and had not only transformed it into music but had also brought his colleagues into a sharing of his bold, grim vision." Mingus's subsequent recordings produced brilliant numbers such the 1957 blues-based composition "Haitian Fight Song." Sessions dating from July and August of the same year culled pieces dedicated to Mingus's visit to Mexico--material released as the 1960 album Tijuana Moods.
In 1959 Mingus brought together several large ensembles in the recording studio. One of his best known works of that year, Ah Um, yielded the numbers "Better Git It in Your Soul," a 6/4 number celebrating the music of the Holiness church, and "Good Bye Pork Pie Hat," composed in the 12-bar blues form and dedicated to saxophone great Lester Young. In February Mingus recorded the Atlantic album, Roots & Blues. This album contained another of Mingus's gospel- inspired 6/4 numbers, "Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting," described by Brian Priestley in Mingus: A Critical Biography as "the masterpiece of planned chaos." In November Mingus led yet another session that yielded the Columbia LP Mingus Dynasty.
With the addition of saxophonist and flutist Eric Dolphy in 1960, Mingus found a brilliant collaborator who helped inspire the bassist/bandleader to a new creative height. Mingus's 1960 album Pre- Bird--reissued as Mingus Revisited--featured a 22-piece orchestra under the direction of Gunther Schuller and is best remembered for a rendition of Mingus's haunting piece "Half Mast Inhibition." In the LP's liner notes, Leonard Feather commented that, "'Half Mast Inhibition' shows, perhaps, as clearly as any work [Mingus] has given us, the total genius of the man as leader, writer, and creator." That same year, Feather, in his work The Encyclopedia of Jazz, foresaw Mingus's role in the development of modern jazz: "Not for complacent ears, Mingus' music is the prototype of a new and vital jazz generation of the 1960s just as [Charlie] Parker and [Dizzy] Gillespie were of the 1940s."
On January 20, 1963, Mingus recorded his masterpiece recording of The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady. Backed by a ten-piece orchestra, Mingus created a composition greater in length than the jazz suites and extended works produced by Ellington. In Mingus: A Critical Biography, Priestly wrote, "The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady is not only the most monumental of Mingus' works but one which most nearly combines his various compositional approaches in a convincing whole. It is also at the same time his most Ellingtonian piece and his least Ellingtonian." Jazz Workshop pianist Jaki Byard, one of the creative forces behind the Black Saint, described his bandleader's method of compositional instruction in The Great Jazz Pianists: "Mingus' group was one of the few where you could play anything you knew how to play, if he was in the right mood. We didn't discuss really, just a few specifics. He'd teach us by singing the music, phrasing it the way he wanted us to play it. I'd write it down for my own documentation. After he sang, we'd just jam it out."
In 1964 Mingus invited Eric Dolphy to join his ensemble for a European tour, during which the ensemble recorded The Great Concert of Charles Mingus. By 1966 increasing emotional illness and the lack of work prompted Mingus to seek retirement from music. For the next three years, he lived on New York's lower east side, rarely leaving his apartment except to seek solace in corner bars. Nat Hentoff who encountered Mingus at this time later wrote in Jazz Is, "In the daytime I'd see him occasionally wandering around . . . uncommonly subdued, abstracted. The Mingus who had been able to sardonically berate an audience for its incivility and hurl into the flying center of his musical lightening storms had retreated to himself."
By 1970 Mingus began to appear at club and festival dates. That same year, Knopf published his autobiographical work, Beneath the Underdog. Written in a surreal prose style and paying little attention to chronology, the book, while it addressed the issue of race, overlooked many important discussions of music in favor of emphasizing the author's sexual exploits. As Mingus told Whitney Baillett in American Musicians II, "My book was written for black people to tell them how to get through life. I was trying to upset the white man in it"
After becoming a published author, Mingus signed a new recording contract with Columbia. His 1972 Columbia album, Let My Children Hear Music was produced by his former music associate and saxophonist Teo Macero. Supported by a talented line-up of musicians, the album represented a collection of earlier written pieces, including Mingus's childhood poem/composition "Chill of Death" and several new works arranged by Sy Johnson and Alan Ralph. Not long afterward, Mingus assembled a new band made of several fine sidemen such as drummer Dannie Richmond and pianist Don Pullen. This unit that proved to be one of the longest-lasting ensembles of his career. After nearly two years experience performing with Mingus, the ensemble backed him for the 1975 Atlantic albums Mingus Changes One and Changes Two. In the liner notes to Changes One, Nat Hentoff predicted that the music of these albums was "going to have a long life because it is so authoritatively, inventively together--the compositions, the solos, the forthright ease of empathy of which these musicians interweave. There is nothing tentative here, nothing in excess, no showboating. It's all classic Mingus."
In November of 1977, Mingus was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis--also known as Lou Gehrig's disease. Mingus spent his last years touring and directing his band from a wheelchair. Despite his illness, he continued to tour regularly. In 1978, he and his wife Susan Ungaro attended an all-star jazz concert held at the White House. In Talking Jazz: An Oral History, Dizzy Gillespie recalled how President Carter "walked all the way across the lawn to Mingus, and grabbed him and hugged him." Moved by the president's gesture, the wheelchair-ridden bassist broke into tears. A year later, Mingus and Susan went to Mexico in search of holistic medical treatment. As Susan recalled in Jazz Greats, "It was the best possible thing we could have done. We spent six months in Mexico with some kind of hope." Mingus died in Cuernavaca, Mexico, on January 5, 1979; his ashes were taken to India and spread over the River Ganges.
Impelled by the artistic credo of "self liberation," Mingus looked to music as a means of self-expression and redefinition--a means of overcoming inner antagonisms and the barriers of race. Complex in mood and intellectual temperament, Mingus condemned America for ignoring its artists and perpetuating racism. Despite the lack of mass audience for his avant-garde explorations, he nevertheless sought commercial success in the mainstream marketplace. While known for diatribes concerning race, he distanced himself from the militant voices African American protest by condemning black radical groups for "having nothing to sell." Called the "bull" by fellow artists, Mingus reveled in exerting his creative and physical prowess. At the same time, effects of psychological illness left him at odds with an inner- adversary too strong to overcome. As he stated, in Jazz Is: "We create our own slavery. But I'm going to keep getting through and finding out what kind of man I am through my music. That's the only place I can be free."
Awards
Guggenheim fellowship in composition, 1971.
Works
Selective Discography
- Minor Intrusions, Bethlehem, 1954.
- Charles Mingus, Prestige, 1955.
- Pithecanthropus Erectus, Atlantic, 1956.
- Passions of a Man, Atlantic, 1956.
- East Coasting, Bethlehem, 1957.
- The Clown, Atlantic, 1957.
- Tijuana Moods, RCA, 1957.
- Dynasty, Columbia, 1959.
- Ah Um, Columbia, 1959.
- Blues and Roots, Atlantic, 1960.
- Mingus Revisited, Polygram, 1960.
- Mingus, Mingus, Mingus, Mingus, MCA/Impulse!, 1963.
- The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, MCA/Impulse!, 1963.
- Mingus Plays Piano, MCA/Impulse!, 1963.
- Reincarnation of a Lovebird, Prestige.
- Let My Children Hear Music, Columbia, 1972.
- Changes One, Atlantic, 1974.
- Changes Two, Atlantic, 1975.
- Cumbia and Jazz Fusion, Atlantic, 1976.
- Three or Four Shades of Blue, Atlantic, 1977.
- With Others Red Norvo Trio, Savoy.
- Lionel Hampton and His Orchestra (1946-1947), Decca.
- Charlie Parker, Jazz Perennial, Verve.
- The Quintet: Jazz At Massey Hall, Debut, (with Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, and Max Roach).
- Duke Ellington Money Jungle, Blue Note.
- Thad Jones, Debut.
- Subject of the 1966 documentary film Mingus, by Tom Reichman.
Further Reading
Books
- Baillett, Whitney, American Musicians II: Seventy-One Portraits in Jazz, Oxford University Press, 1996.
- Davis, Miles with Quincy Troupe, Miles: The Autobiography, Simon & Schuster, 1990.
- Feather, Leonard, The Encyclopedia of Jazz, Horizon Press, 1960.
- Gioia, Ted, West Coast Jazz: Modern Jazz In California 1945-1960, Oxford University Press, 1992.
- Hentoff, Nat, Jazz Is, Limelight Editions, 1984.
- Lyons, Len, The Great Jazz Pianists: Speaking of Their Lives and Music, Da Capo, 1983.
- Perry, David, Jazz Greats, Phiadon Press Limited, 1996.
- Priestley, Brian, Mingus: A Critical Biography, Da Capo, 1982.
- Rosenthal, David H., Hard Bop: Jazz and Black Music 1955-1965, Oxford University Press, 1992.
- Schuller, Gunther, The Swing Era: The Developments of Jazz 1930-1945, Oxford University Press, 1989.
- Sidran, Ben, Talking Jazz: An Oral History, Da Capo, 1995.
- Taylor, Art, Notes and Tones: Musician to Musician Interviews, Perigee, 1982.
Other- Additional information for this profile was obtained from liner notes to the following albums: Mingus Revisited, Polygram, 1960, and Changes One, Atlantic, 1975.
— John Cohassey