An Argument With Instruments: On Charles Mingus
Mingus’s disappointment led him away from the Third Stream and back to the traditions of the blues and the church. He wanted to recapture the sounds of his childhood, especially the “dirty timbres” close to the human voice that had been concealed by the finesse of so much modern jazz. His music became increasingly complex, yet he ceased to be a “pencil composer”; he relied instead on “mental score paper.” His sidemen were expected to do the same: Mingus sat down at the piano and taught them his music note by note, without scores or charts, so that, as he explained, “it would be in their ears, rather than on paper, so they’d play the compositional parts with as much spontaneity and soul as they’d play a solo.” Mingus chose musicians who could not only play his compositions but complete them in the heat of performance: the composed parts should sound improvised, the improvised parts composed. The newly conceived Jazz Workshop—“Composers” was dropped from its title—would dramatize the struggle between structure and improvisation, between collective discipline and individual spontaneity. Mingus would be its director, like Orson Welles in the Mercury Theatre or John Cassavetes, whose film Shadows (1959) he later scored.
The Workshop’s breakthrough came in 1956, when it recorded Pithecanthropus Erectus, which launched Mingus’s career as Ellington’s heir. In the title track—a tone poem about the first man to stand upright, who brings about his own downfall when he refuses to free his slaves—the alto saxophonist Jackie McLean and the tenor saxophonist J.R. Monterose moaned, testified and shrieked together in the upper registers of their horns. The piece had civil rights echoes, but it was also a Hegelian allegory about the composer and his sidemen. By encouraging his musicians to forget about chord changes (“all notes are right,” he told McLean), Mingus extended new freedoms—or, more precisely, restored old ones. As Martin Williams wrote, Mingus had revived “the semi-improvised ensemble style, the thrilling collective spontaneity that has been missing in jazz since Dixieland.” He used that spontaneity, moreover, to achieve a variety of expressive effects, from the picturesque humor of “A Foggy Day (In San Francisco),” with its symphony of whistles and police sirens, to the intense yearning of “Love Chant,” a fourteen-minute modal work structured around a simple, hypnotic figure performed by the brooding pianist Mal Waldron.
Shortly after Pithecanthropus Erectus, Mingus met his “heartbeat”: Dannie Richmond, a gaunt, fastidiously dressed former tenor player whom Mingus taught to play drums with the elastic sense of time his music required. (“We find a beat that’s in the air, and just take it out of the air when we want it,” Richmond explained.) Richmond never left his side. Mingus took him to Tijuana to sample the mariachi bands, tequila and whores, a demimonde he attempted to re-create in Tijuana Moods, recorded for RCA Victor in 1957. It was the first in a string of classic records made over the next six years, including Blues & Roots, Mingus Ah Um, Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus and—his most fully realized work yet—The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, a grand, bustling, propulsive piece of “ethnic folk-dance music” for reeds, brass and flamenco guitar that looked back to the Ellington Orchestra and forward to the incendiary free-blowing of Coltrane’s Ascension.
Works of gut-bucket modernism, reverberating with earthy sophistication and wit, Mingus’s great records always were, as their titles often suggested, advertisements for himself. He was using music to establish his lineage, often by way of striking musical “portraits” like his slow, noir eulogy for Lester Young, “Goodbye Porkpie Hat.” He also used it to settle old scores. Mingus paid tribute to Charlie Parker in pieces like “Bird Calls,” but he also gave one of his most audacious projects, a recording of orchestral works he’d written in his teens, the title Pre-Bird, as if he were digging for treasures the beboppers had hidden away. Mingus, who was late to Parker’s table and felt that his imitators had condescended to the older styles he loved, continued to nurse a grudge against him. (“I should have come before [Parker] because I had this whole new thing that had the weight and had to do with waltzes and religious music,” he told Goodman. “But instead they completely ignored me and I had to go play Bird’s music.”)
As his fame grew, so did his urge to make himself heard: like Mailer, he wanted to impose his tumultuous, overbearing personality on the dramas of postwar American life. He was too shambolic, and too light-skinned, to become a symbol of militant negritude like Miles or Coltrane, but he made news by organizing the Newport Rebels’ counter-festival, a 1960 protest against the Newport Jazz Festival for underpaying black musicians. He wrote a “Prayer for Passive Resistance” in honor of the sit-ins down South; he wrote a blues ditty called “Oh Lord Don’t Let Them Drop That Atomic Bomb on Me” and sang it himself, doing his best Ray Charles impression. But his signal achievement as a political composer was “Meditations on Integration,” the centerpiece of the Mosaic boxed set, which includes three performances of the piece. A nearly half-hour suite in multiple sections, shifting between written and improvised passages, it powerfully fuses the confessional and epic dimensions of Mingus’s music.
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“Meditations” was premiered in April 1964 at a civil rights benefit at New York City’s Town Hall, by one of the finest bands Mingus ever assembled. Along with Richmond on drums, it featured the pianist Jaki Byard, a musician of wit, invention and unerring blues feeling, as well versed as Mingus in old-school styles like stride piano; and the horn section of tenor saxophonist Clifford Jordan, trumpeter Johnny Coles and multi-reedist Eric Dolphy, who grew up with Mingus in Los Angeles. Dolphy, who alternates between flute and bass clarinet on “Meditations,” died in Europe that summer of undiagnosed diabetes, at 36. Mingus retitled “Meditations” “Praying With Eric” when the Town Hall concert was first released by Charles Mingus Enterprises, a mail-order distribution company he set up in fall 1964 with his manager and future wife Sue Graham Ungaro, a writer he’d met at the Five Spot a few days after Dolphy died. In Mingus’s mind, “Meditations” belonged as much to Dolphy as it did to him. “Eric Dolphy explained to me that there was something similar to the concentration camps once in Germany now down South,” he said at Town Hall, “and the only difference between the electric barbed wire is that they don’t have gas chambers and hot stoves to cook us in yet. So I wrote a piece called ‘Meditations’ as to how to get some wire cutters before someone gets some guns to us.”
Nowhere is Mingus’s emotional range on such brilliant display as in “Meditations.” Integration had been his own struggle since his childhood in Watts. The destruction of segregation was unfinished business, and it was violent. The more extreme, cacophonous parts of his piece should sound like “organized chaos,” he told the Workshop. He asked them to reimagine the sounds that the slave ships must have made during the Middle Passage; he spoke to them as if they were actors. “You’re…like a minister in church or a Jewish rabbi,” he told the trumpeter Bobby Bryant in Monterey. “Everybody’s shouting at you. You have to chant to them and put them back in condition.” In the Town Hall performance, Mingus exploits almost every possible combination in his sextet. In the first ten minutes alone, the full sextet gives way to ruminative unaccompanied piano; then to a somber duet for piano and bowed bass; then back to unaccompanied piano; and finally to a sorrowful adagio passage for piano, bass and Dolphy’s flute, before the horn section erupts again with volcanic force.
