Charles Mingus

• Born: 22 April 1922
• Birthplace: Nogales, Arizona
• Died: 5 January 1979
• Best Known As: Jazz bassist and composer who did Pithecanthropus Erectus

Charles Mingus was a 20th century jazz musician whose reputation as a great bassist is matched by his influence as a great composer of what has been called "orchestral jazz." He was musically trained in public schools and Christian churches in Los Angeles, where he went from trombone to cello to double-bass. Between 1941 and 1953 he played professionally with various bandleaders, including Louis Armstrong, Lionel Hampton and Red Norvo, helping to shape the West Coast sound of "cool jazz." In New York City he and Max Roach launched Debut Records (1953), and Mingus led the first of several Jazz Workshops (ensembles). During the 1950s he began realizing his ambitions as a composer and used his background in gospel and swing -- and his inclination for the jazz avant-garde -- to craft elaborately structured pieces for larger bands that still left room for improvisation. By the 1970s he was considered a living legend, though one of the "not amply rewarded" category. Extremely gifted, wildly eccentric and ultimately crippled by ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), Mingus ranks up there with Duke Ellington as one of jazz's greatest composers. His best-known records include Pithecanthropus Erectus (1956), Blues and Roots (1958), Money Jungle (1961), The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady (1964), Changes One (1973) and Changes Two (1974).

charlesmingus, mingas, minguess, mingess, myngis, mynguss, mingis, charlemingues, charlmingus, meengus, mengus, mengas

• Born: April 22, 1922, Nogales, AZ
• Died: January 05, 1979, Cuernavaca, Mexico
• Active: '40s, '50s, '60s, '70s
• Genres: Jazz
• Instrument: Bass, Piano, Leader
• Representative Albums: "Mingus Ah Um," "Mingus at Antibes," "Pithecanthropus Erectus"
• Representative Songs: "Fables of Faubus," "Wednesday Night Prayer Meetin," "Better Get Hit in Yo' Soul"

Biography

Irascible, demanding, bullying, and probably a genius, Charles Mingus cut himself a uniquely iconoclastic path through jazz in the middle of the 20th century, creating a legacy that became universally lauded only after he was no longer around to bug people. As a bassist, he knew few peers, blessed with a powerful tone and pulsating sense of rhythm, capable of elevating the instrument into the front line of a band. But had he been just a string player, few would know his name today. Rather, he was the greatest bass-playing leader/composer jazz has ever known, one who always kept his ears and fingers on the pulse, spirit, spontaneity, and ferocious expressive power of jazz.

Intensely ambitious yet often earthy in expression, simultaneously radical and deeply traditional, Mingus' music took elements from everything he had experienced -- from gospel and blues through New Orleans jazz, swing, bop, Latin music, modern classical music, even the jazz avant-garde. His touchstone was Duke Ellington, but Mingus took the sonic blend and harmonies of Ellingtonia much further, throwing in abrasive dissonances and abrupt changes in meter and tempo, introducing tremendously exhilarating accelerations that generated a momentum of their own. While his early works were written out in a classical fashion, by the mid-'50s, he had worked out a new way of getting his unconventional visions across, dictating the parts to his musicians while allowing plenty of room for the players' own musical personalities and ideas. He was also a formidable pianist, fully capable of taking that role in a group -- which he did in his 1961-62 bands, hiring another bassist to fill in for him.

Along the way, Mingus made a lot of enemies, causing sometimes violent confrontations on and off the bandstand. A big man physically, he used his bulk as a weapon of intimidation, and he was not above halting concerts to chew out inattentive audiences or errant sidemen, even cashiering a musician now and then on the spot. At one of his concerts in Philadelphia -- and a memorial to a dead colleague at that -- he broke up the show by slamming the piano lid down, nearly smashing his pianist's hands, and then punched trombonist Jimmy Knepper in the mouth. For a savage physical portrait of the emotions that seethed within him, check out the photo on the cover of Duke Ellington's Money Jungle; Mingus looks as if he is about to kill someone. But he could also be a gentle giant as his moods permitted, and that quality can be felt in some of his music.

Mingus felt the lash of racial prejudice very intensely -- which, combined with the frustrations of making it in the music business on his own terms, found its outlet in music. Indeed, some of his bizarre titles were political in nature, such as Fables of Faubus (referring to the Arkansas governor who tried to keep Little Rock schools segregated), "Oh Lord, Don't Let Them Drop That Atomic Bomb on Me" or "Remember Rockefeller at Attica." But he could also be wildly humorous, the most notorious example being "If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There'd Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats" (later shortened to "Gunslinging Bird").

Born in a Nogales Army camp, Mingus was shortly thereafter taken to the Watts district of Los Angeles, where he grew up. The first music he heard was that of the church -- the only music his stepmother allowed around the house -- but one day, despite the threat of punishment, he tuned in Duke Ellington's "East St. Louis Toodle-Oo" on his father's crystal set, his first exposure to jazz. He tried to learn the trombone at six and then the cello, but he became fed up with incompetent teachers and ended up on the double bass by the time he reached high school. His early teachers were Red Callender and an ex-New York Philharmonic bassist named Herman Rheinschagen, and he also studied composition with Lloyd Reese. A proto-third stream composition written by Mingus in 1940-41, "Half-Mast Inhibition" (recorded in 1960), reveals an extraordinary timbral imagination for a teenager.

As a bass prodigy, Mingus performed with Kid Ory in Barney Bigard's group in 1942 and went on the road with Louis Armstrong the following year. He would gravitate toward the R&B side of the road later in the '40s, working with the Lionel Hampton band in 1947-48, backing R&B and jazz performers, and leading ensembles in various idioms under the name Baron Von Mingus. He began to attract real national attention as a bassist for Red Norvo's trio with Tal Farlow in 1950-51, and after leaving that group, he moved to New York and began working with several stellar jazz performers, including Billy Taylor, Stan Getz and Art Tatum. He was the bassist in the famous 1953 Massey Hall concert in Toronto with Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell and Max Roach, and he briefly joined his idol Ellington, where he had the dubious distinction of being the only man Duke ever personally fired from his band.

Around this time, Mingus tried to make himself into a rallying point for the jazz community. He founded Debut Records in partnership with his then-wife Celia and Roach in 1952, seeing to it that the label recorded a wide variety of jazz from bebop to experimental music until its demise in 1957. Among Debut's most notable releases were the Massey Hall concert, an album by Miles Davis, and several Mingus sessions that traced the development of his ideas. He also contributed composed works to the Jazz Composers' Workshop from 1953 to 1955, and later in '55, he founded his own Jazz Workshop repertory group that found him moving away from strict notation toward his looser, dictated manner of composing.

By 1956, with the release of Pithecanthropus Erectus (Atlantic), Mingus had clearly found himself as a composer and leader, creating pulsating, ever-shifting compendiums of jazz's past and present, feeling his way into the free jazz of the future. For the next decade, he would pour forth an extraordinary body of work for several labels, including key albums like The Clown, New Tijuana Moods, Mingus Ah Um, Blues and Roots and Oh Yeah; standards like "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat," "Better Git It in Your Soul," "Haitian Fight Song" and "Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting," and extended works like Meditations on Integration and Epitaph. Through ensembles ranging in size from a quartet to an 11-piece big band, a procession of noted sidemen like Eric Dolphy, Jackie McLean, J.R. Monterose, Jimmy Knepper, Roland Kirk, Booker Ervin, and John Handy would pass, with Mingus' commanding bass and volatile personality pushing his musicians further than some of them might have liked to go. The groups with the great Dolphy (heard live on Mingus at Antibes) in the early '60s might have been his most dynamic, and The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady (1963), an extended ballet for big band that captures the anguished/joyful split Mingus personality in full, passionately wild cry -- may be his masterpiece.

However, Mingus' obsessive efforts to free himself from the economic hazards and larceny of the music business nearly undermined his sanity in the 1960s (indeed, some of the liner notes for The Black Saint album were written by his psychologist, Dr. Edmund Pollock). He tried to compete with the Newport festivals by organizing his own Jazz Artists Guild in 1960 that purported to give musicians more control over their work, but that collapsed with the by-now-routine rancor that accompanied so many Mingus ventures. A calamitous, self-presented New York Town Hall concert in 1962; another, shorter-lived recording venture, Charles Mingus Records, in 1964-65; the failure to find a publisher for his autobiography Beneath the Underdog, and other setbacks broke his bank account and ultimately his spirit. He quit music almost entirely from 1966 until 1969, resuming performances in June 1969 only because he desperately needed money.

Financial angels in the forms of a Guggenheim Fellowship in composition, the publication of Beneath the Underdog in 1971, and the purchase of his Debut masters by Fantasy boosted Mingus' spirits, and a new stimulating Columbia album Let My Children Hear Music thrust him back into public attention. By 1974, he had formed a new young quintet, anchored by his loyal drummer Dannie Richmond and featuring Jack Walrath, Don Pullen and George Adams, and more compositions came forth, including the massive, kaleidoscopic, Colombian-based "Cumbia and Jazz Fusion" that began its life as a film score.

Respect was growing, but time, alas, was running out, for in fall 1977, Mingus was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's disease), and by the following year, he was unable to play the bass. Though confined to a wheelchair, he nevertheless carried on, leading recording sessions, and receiving honors at a White House concert on June 18, 1978. His last project was a collaboration, Mingus with folk-rock singer Joni Mitchell, who wrote lyrics to Mingus' music and included samples of Mingus' voice on the record.

Since his death, Mingus' importance and fame increased remarkably, thanks in large part to the determined efforts of Sue Mingus, his widow. A posthumous repertory group, Mingus Dynasty, was formed almost immediately after his death, and that concept was expanded in 1991 into the exciting Mingus Big Band, which has resurrected many of Mingus' most challenging scores. Epitaph was finally reconstructed, performed and recorded in 1989 to general acclaim, and several box sets of portions of Mingus' output have been issued by Rhino/Atlantic, Mosaic and Fantasy. Beyond re-creations, the Mingus influence can be heard on Branford Marsalis' early Scenes in the City album, and especially in the big band writing of his brother Wynton. The Mingus blend of wildly colorful eclecticism solidly rooted in jazz history should serve his legacy well in a future increasingly populated by young conservatives who want to pay their respects to tradition and try something different. ~ Richard S. Ginell, All Music Guide

At UCLA 1965 Buy this CD	Individualist Buy this CD	Tijuana Moods [Expanded] Buy this CD	Backtracks Buy this CD	Jazz Icons: Charles Mingus Buy this CD
Immortal Concerts Buy this CD	Pithecanthropus Erectus [Giants of Jazz] Buy this CD	Plays It Cool Buy this CD	Tijuana Moods [Japan] Buy this CD	20th Century Masters - The Millennium Collection: The Best of Charles Mingus Buy this CD

Show More Albums Show Fewer Albums

(b Nogales, az, 22 April 1922; d Cuernavaca, Mexico, 5 Jan 1979). American jazz double bass player,pianist and composer. He first became known as a bass player with Louis Armstrong (c 1943) and Lionel Hampton (1947-8), achieving national fame with Red Norvo's trio (1950-51); he settled in New York, becoming famous as a virtuoso. He turned to composition in the mid-1950s. In 1955 he founded a workshop to specialize in playing his compositions, dictated to the players as a basis for improvisation. His Pithecanthropus erectus (1956) broke away from conventional structure and displayed unusual instrumental sonorities. A remarkable blend of sustained composition and improvisation was achieved in The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady (1963).

---

American jazz musician Charles Mingus (1922 - 1979) is regarded by many as one of the best double bass players of the genre. He became equally well known for his prowess as a composer, and he has received ever-growing recognition since his early death in 1979 at the age of 56. Mingus's volatile, at times violent, personality, led to numerous high-profile disagreements with fellow musicians and critics and a reputation as "jazz's angry man," but also fueled a music known for its passion and spiritual depth.

Mingus was born on April 22, 1922, in Nogales, Arizona, where his father, Sgt. Charles Mingus Sr., served on a U.S. army base. Soon after the birth of his son, Sgt. Mingus received an honorable discharge from the military in order to care for his ailing wife. The family relocated to the Watts section of Los Angeles, California, where Mingus's mother, Harriet Sophia Mingus, sought medical treatment for chronic myocarditis. She died, however, on October 3, 1922. The Mingus family remained in Los Angeles, and young Charles and his sisters, Grace and Vivian, were raised by Charles Sr. and his new wife, Mamie. The emotional call-and-response spirituals performed in the neighborhood Holiness Church served as one of Mingus's earliest musical influences. Although the Mingus children were only permitted to listen to devotional music under the elder Mingus's authoritarian house rules, Mingus secretly listened to pianist/composer Duke Ellington's "East St. Louis Toddle-Oo" on the earphones of a crystal set, sparking his interest in jazz.

Self-Taught Musician

Mingus, whose sisters trained on violin and piano, started out playing the trombone. When his instructor proved less than able, Mingus taught himself the basics of the instrument by ear. He grew frustrated, however, and soon switched to the cello, earning a spot in the Los Angeles Junior Philharmonic while still in elementary school. In high school he switched again, to the double bass, and joined future jazz greats Dexter Gordon, a saxophonist, and Chico Hamilton, a drummer, in an orchestra. He began studying his new instrument privately with jazz musicians Joe Comfort and Red Callender, as well as Herman Rheinschagen, a former bassist with the New York Philharmonic. Mingus also studied composition with Lloyd Reese and turned out two compositions, "What Love" (1939) and "Half-Mast Inhibitions" (1940), that he would record 20 years later.

Mingus began playing professionally with jazz outfits in Los Angeles and San Francisco while still in high school. In 1940 he replaced his former teacher, Callender, in a band headed by Lee Young, a drummer and brother of noted saxophonist Lester Young. The following year, Mingus joined trumpeter Louis Armstrong's group, where he remained until 1943 and, under the name "Baron Mingus," began leading outfits of his own. In the mid-1940s he began playing with vibraphonist Lionel Hampton and began to draw attention for his impossibly fast, highly charged solos. Critics would later note, as recounted by John Rockwell in a 1979 New York Times obituary, that Mingus's tendency to play slightly ahead of the beat lent his playing a "frenetic rhythmic tension." Mingus dropped music to take a job with the U.S. Postal Service for a period, and then returned to music in 1950, joining vibraphonist Red Norvo's trio. This ensemble has been credited with introducing West Coast "cool jazz" to a broad audience.

While playing on the West Coast, Mingus discovered the music of saxophonist Charlie "Bird" Parker, which influenced him tremendously. "I studied Bird's creative vein with the same passion and understanding with which I'd studied the scores of my favorite classical composers, because I found a purity in his music that until then I had only found in classical music," Mingus wrote in the notes to the 1959 album Mingus Dynasty (as reprinted in Gene Santoro's 2000 biography Myself When I Am Real). "Bird was the cause of my realization that jazz improvisation, as well as jazz composition, is the equal of classical music if the performer is a creative person. Bird brought melodic development to a new point in jazz…. But he also brought to music a primitive, mystic supra-mind communication that I'd only heard in the late Beethoven quartets, and even more, in Stravinsky." Mingus Dynasty featured the Parker tribute "Gunslinging Bird," the full title of which reveals the sly humor Mingus often employed when naming his own compositions: "If Charlie Parker Were a Gunslinger There'd Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats."

Moved East

Mingus relocated to New York City in 1951 and began working with many of the best known jazz musicians of the day, including Parker, trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, drummer Art Tatum, and pianist Bud Powell. He also joined Ellington's band. There, the violent temper that would come to partially define Mingus led to his being one of the few musicians Ellington ever fired; during an altercation with a bandmate, trombonist Juan Tizol, he brandished a fire ax. Tizol defended himself with a machete. Fueling Mingus's hot temper was long-simmering anger about the treatment of African Americans; Mingus once explained that the fight with Tizol was prompted by Tizol's use of a racial epithet. "Charles was a man who wanted peace and his best person was kindly and wise. But he wasn't always able to access that," observed tuba player and former Mingus bandmate Howard Johnson in a 2002 retrospective in Down Beat. "He was stung by racism a little harder than others. If you're black, every day on the street you encounter slights. Some people can toss them off as the behavior of racist idiots. But Charles couldn't let the slights roll off him. He accumulated them all."

Mingus's intolerance of racism and disdain for the record industry, which he strongly believed treated African-American jazz musicians unfairly, led to the 1952 formation of Debut Records, a collaboration with drummer Max Roach and Mingus's second wife, Celia. He returned to work at the post office that year as well. In 1953 Mingus began participating in the highly regarded Jazz Composers Workshop, but in 1955 he formed his own workshop with a rotating cadre of musicians. The new workshop enabled Mingus to exercise his own unique compositional style, which eschewed traditional notation and was characterized by saxophonist Yusef Lateef in Brian Priestley's Mingus: A Critical Biography: "For example, on one composition I had a solo and, as opposed to having chord symbols for me to improvise against, he had drawn a picture of a coffin, and that was the substance upon which I was to improvise." Mingus also often dictated lines individually to each player. Several highly regarded albums grew out of these work shops, including 1956's Pithecanthropus Erectus, Blues and Roots, Mingus Dynasty, and Mingus Ah Um, all released in 1959. The latter includes the composition "Good Bye, Pork Pie Hat," a tribute to Lester Young, who died while the album was being recorded. Mingus employed politically charged commentary with the composition "Fables of Faubus," a reference to the governor of Arkansas who called in the National Guard to fight public school integration.

While his talent was highly regarded, Mingus also became known for his bitterness and volatility. He routinely chastised musicians on stage, damaged musical equipment (including once dropping and shattering his own $2,000 bass), and launched into at least one long, legendary harangue against his audiences. "If my band is loud in spots, ugly in spots, it's also beautiful in spots, soft in spots. There are even moments of silence. But the moments of beautiful silence are hidden by your clanking glasses and your too wonderful conversations," he declared from the stage of New York's Five Spot one night, as recounted by Priestley. "You haven't been told before that you're phonies. You're here because jazz has publicity, jazz is popular, the word jazz, and you like to associate yourself with this sort of thing, but it doesn't make you a connoisseur of the art because you follow it around. You're dilettantes of style." Other times, Mingus made his points more subtly. Another night at the Five Spot, he simply played a phonograph on stage while the band members played cards. When passed over by taxi drivers, presumably because of his race, he was known to set up a chair in the middle of the street and begin reading the newspaper.

Mingus began one of his most significant musical collaborations in 1959, when reed player Eric Dolphy first joined his ensemble. While all of Mingus's musicians were at times subjected to their bandleader's outbursts, Mingus demonstrated a particular respect for Dolphy. When Dolphy left the band in 1964 in order to spend time in Europe, Mingus developed a composition titled, alternately, "Farewell Eric Dolphy" or "So Long Eric." After the reed player died suddenly on June 29 of that year, Mingus named a son (with third wife, Judy) Eric Dolphy Mingus. A year earlier, Mingus had released his debut album on Impulse!, The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady. Always bucking tradition, Mingus had his psychoanalyst write the liner notes, telling him, according to Santoro, "I never pay you so at least this way you can make $200."

Overcame Obstacles

By the mid-1960s, increasingly plagued by psychological problems, Mingus was finding regular employment harder to secure. In 1966 he was forcibly evicted from his apartment for failure to pay rent. This sad event was captured by a documentary crew for the film Mingus. By 1970 Mingus elected to go into semi-retirement with financial assistance from his ex-wife Celia and her new husband, Saul Zaentz. Zaentz had purchased the Fantasy Record label, as well as the now-defunct Debut's back catalog. During this period, Mingus took comfort in his neighbors. "For about three years, I thought I was finished," he told Nat Hentoff in a 1972 New York Times interview. "In that neighborhood, they didn't know me from the man in the moon, but they took an interest in me. I'd go into a bar, sit by myself, and I'd hear someone say, 'There's something wrong with this guy. He doesn't come out of his house for four or five days at a time.' And they'd invite me to join them. I got to know what friends are."

Mingus began to re-emerge in the late 1960s, and in 1971 he once again drew widespread attention with the publication of his autobiography, Beneath the Underdog. That same year, he was awarded a prestigious Guggenheim fellowship in composition. He became a part-time instructor at the State University of New York in Buffalo and was commissioned to write film scores. Choreographer Alvin Ailey debuted a work with the Joffrey Ballet featuring new arrangements of Mingus's music. Mingus released the Columbia album Let My Children Hear Music in 1972. In 1975, the same year he released the albums Changes One and Changes Two, Mingus married longtime on-again, off-again partner Sue Graham Ungaro. Sadly, Mingus's second round in the spotlight was short-lived. In 1977 he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease. He continued to compose, dictating into a tape recorder when he could no longer work with his hands, and collaborated on a recasting of his compositions with folk singer Joni Mitchell for her album Mingus. He attended an all-star jazz concert at the White House in 1978, where he was honored with a standing ovation and a hug from President Jimmy Carter, which brought him to tears.

Mingus died in Cuernavaca, Mexico, where he had gone to seek alternative treatments for his illness, on January 5, 1979. In accordance with his wishes, Sue Mingus scattered his ashes in the River Ganges in India. Mingus's music lives on through two musical groups organized by Sue Mingus, Mingus Dynasty and the Mingus Big Band. Even before his untimely death, Mingus's many collaborators began reflecting on his influence. "Mingus is not little stuff," observed trumpeter John Handy, a veteran of Mingus's workshops. "He's big stuff musically. He is definitely, in the true sense, a giant and maybe even a genius. He has all the qualities." Mingus summed up the force behind his talent, in an open letter to Miles Davis published in Down Beat in 1989. "My music is alive and it's about the living and the dead, about good and evil. It's angry, yet it's real because it knows it's angry."

Books

Priestley, Brian, Mingus: A Critical Biography, Quartet Books Ltd., 1982.

Santoro, Gene, Myself When I Am Real, Oxford University Press, 2000.

Periodicals

Down Beat, December 7, 1978; September 1989; April 2002.

New York Times, January 30, 1972; January 9, 1979.

Online

"Charles Mingus," Biography Resource Center Online, Gale Group, 2006, http://galenet.galegroups.com/servlet/BioRC.

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

For more information on Charles Mingus, visit Britannica.com.

Mingus, Charles (mĭng'gəs) , 1922–79, American jazz musician, b. Nogales, Ariz. Mingus was a bassist, pianist, bandleader, composer, and vocalist. He was one of the most important jazz composers of the 20th cent. and an influence on a broad spectrum of musicians. A charismatic, demanding, and sometimes violent risk-taker, Mingus created works with unconventional structures and innovative harmonies. In the 1950s and 60s he led groups noted for their collective improvisations, loose rhythms, and high energy. At various times in his career he played with Louis Armstrong, Lionel Hampton, Red Norvo, Charlie Parker, and Duke Ellington, to whom he dedicated his Open Letter to Duke. He organized his first group, a sextet, in 1945, and later (1955) formed the Charles Mingus Jazz Workshop, a group that brought him worldwide acclaim. His compositions include the ambitious Epitaph, first performed in 1989; Fables of Faubus; Better Git It in Your Soul; and Sue's Changes.

Bibliography

See his autobiography, Beneath the Underdog (1971); biographies by B. Priestly (1982) and G. Santoro (2000).

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)