An Argument With Instruments: On Charles Mingus
No one in jazz went deeper than Mingus in his exploration of black Americana, or protested racism more fervently. Yet his relationship to black identity was anything but relaxed: it gave his music its stormy weather. Born in 1922 in the Arizona border town of Nogales, he grew up in a middle-class family in Watts, an ethnically mixed section of Los Angeles then on its way to becoming a black ghetto. His father, a former noncommissioned officer in the Army who worked in the post office, was a light-skinned biracial man with blue eyes; he looked down on darker-skinned blacks and warned his son not to play with “them little black nigger yaps.” Mingus’s mother, the daughter of a black woman from the West Indies and a Chinese man from Hong Kong, died five months after he was born: Mingus, who was raised by his stepmother, was always aware of “the chill of death”—the name of a Straussian tone poem he wrote when he was 17.
He first learned that he was black—at least by American definitions—when a group of Mexican kids assaulted him, calling him “nigger.” Among his black peers, however, “he was a kind of mongrel…ot light enough to belong to the almost-white elite and not dark enough to belong with the beautiful elegant blacks,” he writes in his memoir. “There really was no skin color exactly like his.” (The book’s original title was Memoirs of a Half-Schitt-Colored Nigger.) His closest friends were “other mongrels”—Japanese, Mexicans, Jews, Greeks—and he sometimes passed as Latino. His first intellectual mentor was a beatnik painter named Farwell Taylor, whom he met on a trip to San Francisco in 1939. Taylor, a part–Native American refugee from Oklahoma, introduced him to modern art and Russian novels, Hinduism and Theosophy and The Interpretation of Dreams, which inspired his composition “Precognition.” (It was in San Francisco that Mingus had his first—and last—taste of heroin, which made him sick; he was one of the few jazz musicians of his generation who never got hooked.) Mingus would always be most at home in integrated settings like the interracial bohemia he helped pioneer in the East Village of the mid-1950s. Three of his four wives were strawberry blonds with college educations, WASPish families and the practical skills he lacked.
Mingus’s connection to blackness came mainly through music: first the gospel he heard as a boy in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and then—his single greatest influence—the Duke Ellington Orchestra. Yet his early ambition was to be a classical composer. He learned solfège and played cello in the Los Angeles Junior Philharmonic. Then his friend, the saxophonist Buddy Collette, told him that if he planned to make a living as a musician, “you gotta play a Negro instrument. You can’t slap a cello, so you gotta learn to slap that bass, Charlie!” Mingus approached the bass with his usual ferocious diligence: he took lessons with a former bassist from the New York Philharmonic, and taped his index and middle fingers together in order to increase the dexterity of his ring finger.
By his late teens, Mingus was a star on Central Avenue, a strip of nightclubs in Watts where the best jazz musicians from the East Coast came to play. He sat in with everyone from Art Tatum to Louis Armstrong and wrote his first pieces for big band, strongly influenced by Ellington. Duke was his hero; he even adopted the stage name Baron Mingus. Yet he continued to pursue his education in classical music. He studied composition and theory at LA City College, took private lessons with an African-American acquaintance of Arnold Schoenberg, and wrote his first orchestral compositions. He hadn’t given up on his dream of becoming a composer, and he never did. Mingus’s involvement with jazz was, in part, a long-running quarrel with the limitations of jazz.
Mingus’s confidence that he was cut out for something larger nearly caused him to miss out on the bebop revolution, led by self-assertive black musicians intent on establishing jazz as a high art form rather than nightclub entertainment. Bop was a rebellion against the swing Mingus loved: its thorny syncopation, challenging dissonances and chord substitutions were designed to make it difficult, if not impossible, to dance to. He was unimpressed by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie when they came to Central Avenue in 1945. His own ideas about harmony, as he saw it, were more intricate, his compositions more sophisticated. He resented the idea that if he didn’t become a bopper he’d soon be a has-been—but he also knew it was true. He resisted fate until he arrived in New York in 1951 and his employer, the white vibraphonist Red Norvo, told him he couldn’t appear with the band on television because he was black. After a brief stint in the Ellington Orchestra that came to an abrupt end when he got into a knife fight onstage with Ellington’s trombonist Juan Tizol (a fight that, for once, he didn’t provoke), Mingus joined Parker’s band. He came to love Parker’s music and became a brilliant, if still reluctant, bopper. With Max Roach, Dizzy Gillespie and Bud Powell, they made a classic record, Jazz at Massey Hall. Mingus and his second wife, Celia, produced it on Debut Records, the label they established with Roach after Bob Weinstock at Prestige offered to record Mingus for $10, a free lunch and a line of coke. Mingus wasn’t suited to run a business, but that never stopped him from trying—or from railing against men like Weinstock.
Mingus was second to no one in his admiration of Parker, who, as he wrote later, achieved “a primitive, mystic, supra-mind communication that I’d only heard in the late Beethoven quartets, and, even more, in Stravinsky.” But Mingus didn’t want to be a slave to bebop. He wanted to be known as a composer, not as a bass-slapping jazz man. In 1953, he set up the Jazz Composers Workshop, a revolving ensemble of musicians from both jazz and classical backgrounds who performed his early compositions, somewhat earnest jazz-meets-classical experiments that prefigured “Third Stream” music. But the results left him dissatisfied. Jazz musicians added their own inflections even when they played fully notated passages, while classical musicians couldn’t improvise or capture the blues feeling he wanted. “Tired modern paintings” was Miles Davis’s verdict on his new music. The insult stung.
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