An Argument With Instruments: On Charles Mingus
When the Workshop set off for Holland after the Town Hall concert, Dolphy told Mingus that he planned to stay in Europe rather than return to the United States with the group. Mingus pleaded with him not to; he even wrote a tune called “So Long, Eric,” hoping that Dolphy might change his mind. In late June, Dolphy died. Mingus was crushed. “One thing that can still make Mingus cry is thinking about Eric,” the jazz historian Dan Morgenstern told Goodman. Mingus turned in some of his most relaxed, lyrical playing in the Workshop’s concerts in Monterey in 1964 and 1965 and in Minneapolis in May 1965 (the last three discs of the Mosaic set), and his new horn section, consisting of the alto saxophonist Charles McPherson and the trumpeter Lonnie Hillyer, was magnificent in the medleys of Ellington and Parker tunes. But without Dolphy, there is a slight falling off in urgency, and in the performance of “Meditations” in Monterey, he is conspicuous by his absence.
The bands on the Mosaic set never went into the studio. Mingus’s relationship with the major labels, always stormy at best, had never been worse. Months before the Workshop went on tour, Impulse! Records, for which he’d just made his majestic The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, reneged on its promise to increase his weekly retainer fee because of poor sales. Mingus refused to bend and burned his last bridge. Bob Thiele, his producer, arrived at work to find a knife stabbed into his chair, with a note: “Where the fuck is my money? Mingus.” (Thiele was lucky; Mingus once showed up at the accounting department of Columbia Records with a helmet and shotgun.) By the time Mingus began his European tour, he was so fed up with the industry that he instructed his audiences not to buy any of his records on Columbia, Atlantic and Impulse! (He made an exception for RCA Victor, “the only company for some reason that pays the royalties properly. I imagine it’s because they make enough money from the atomic bomb that they don’t have to worry about cheating jazz musicians.”) The 1964–65 concerts were released by Charles Mingus Enterprises, but not in their entirety: the company shut down in 1966, leaving a lot of great music to languish in the vaults for nearly four decades. It has been restored to glorious effect by Mosaic in cooperation with his widow Sue. The mike breaks are nearly as delicious as the music, with Mingus joking about how much he’s stolen from Ellington, or telling a woman in the audience that she’s dropped her pearls. For once, he seems at peace with himself.
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In fact, he was coming apart: Dolphy’s loss hit Mingus harder than even he understood, and after the show in Minneapolis his demons returned with a vengeance. Dannie Richmond stood by him, but Jaki Byard quit the Workshop after Mingus threatened him with an ax during a set at the Village Vanguard. For the next five years, Mingus was sunk in gloom. The young people who’d followed him at the Five Spot had moved on to the wilder shores of free jazz and rock, and he felt abandoned. He stopped recording and hardly touched his bass. He became a photographer, wandering around the Village on a bicycle with a dozen cameras strapped to his chest. The amphetamines and diet pills he relied on to keep his spirits up and his weight down didn’t seem to work anymore: he grew fatter and more depressed. He kept tear-gas bombs and shotguns in his studio, fired holes into the ceiling, and spoke of plots against him by the government and the mob. He pissed into juice bottles rather than the toilet, in case the authorities were investigating his urine for signs of drug use. The owner of his flat, which was an illegal sublet, tried to evict him. When Mingus withheld his rent in protest, the police came to kick him out. “I hope the Communists blow you people up,” he said as they took him away, his eyes welling with tears.
Mingus’s disintegration and eviction are depicted, in vivid and often depressing detail, in Thomas Reichman’s 1966 documentary Mingus. Reichman told Goodman that when they first met, Mingus suggested that they have lunch at a steakhouse. Three years ago, he’d ordered three lamb chops there but had only gotten two; now he wanted to return for the third. Reichman loved the idea and showed up at Mingus’s place with his crew. But Mingus led them instead to his lawyer’s office, where Sue had been writing up a contract designed to deprive Reichman of the rights to his own film. Reichman broke down crying. When he saw Mingus later that day, Mingus had shaved off all his hair and painted his head blue. “Man, I’m really sorry,” he said. “Let’s go have some Chinese food. I look like Buddha.” In Reichman’s film, Mingus played himself as a black musician persecuted by White America. “I pledge allegiance to the flag, the white flag,” he says, “not because I have to, but just for the hell of it…. I pledge allegiance so that one day they will look to their promises to the victims they call citizens. Not just the black ghettos but the white ghettos and the Japanese ghettos, the Chinese ghettos, all the ghettos of the world.” He winks at the camera, pipe in mouth. “Oh, I pledge allegiance all right, I could pledge a whole lot of allegiances.” It was a star turn, and it was nearly his last.
Mingus made a comeback in the early 1970s, when Goodman, then a writer for Playboy, began interviewing him and the people who knew him best, for a book that never came together until now. He’d been restored to something like health, in no small part thanks to Sue. As things turned out, Mingus had only a few more years left—he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis in 1977 and died two years later in Cuernavaca, where he drank iguana blood as part of an experimental treatment—but they were mostly good ones. Beneath the Underdog was finally published, and Mingus got his first Grammy nomination—for his liner notes, not his music. He finally moved in with Sue, who had kept a separate apartment after they married, and mellowed a bit, though the rages never quite subsided and he remained as irascible as ever. In her memoir Tonight at Noon (2002), Sue remembers being “mesmerized by his excesses,” but she also knew how to hold them in check and to keep him in line. He renewed his friendships with Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary and turned up at benefits for the Black Panthers, where he was received as an elder statesman of Village bohemia. He recorded a late masterpiece, Let My Children Hear Music (1972), an album of eloquent, sometimes ravishing orchestral compositions, and wrote a score for Elio Petri’s Todo Modo (1976). And Mingus’s children were finally hearing his music. The most original jazz composers of the 1970s—Henry Threadgill, Anthony Braxton, Julius Hemphill—were his heirs in their excavation of older jazz styles, and in their attempts to infuse advanced composition with blues and roots feeling. Mingus also had a growing following among adventurous pop artists like Tom Waits, Captain Beefheart and Joni Mitchell, who collaborated with him on an album of his tunes—his last session—and visited him in Mexico just before his death. He made more money than he ever had on tour and spent it on beautiful cars, Cuban cigars and cocaine.
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Yet he continued to feel underappreciated and unfulfilled. He complained at garrulous length to Goodman about the avant-garde, sore as ever about being overshadowed in the eyes of the critical establishment. He was still striving and struggling, even from the wheelchair to which he was confined in his last few years. “I still haven’t written the music I want to write,” he told Goodman; he had three, four symphonies in him. A part of him had always felt that jazz had been a detour, and an imposed one at that. Although he had done more than anyone other than Ellington and Monk to set jazz on an equal footing with European art music, jazz was the music that he’d been forced to play when the doors to the concert hall were shut: even the word reminded him of that original exclusion. Jazz, he told Goodman, “is just one little stupid language hanging out there as a sign of unfair employment. Jazz means ‘nigger.’”
“My identity is mixed together with Beethoven, Bach and Brahms,” he told Sue; it pained him somewhat to be described as a jazz musician. In Beneath the Underdog, he reprinted a touching letter he wrote from Bellevue mental hospital to Nat Hentoff in 1958. He’d been listening to the Juilliard String Quartet’s recording of Bartok, marveling at how they could “transform in a second a listener’s soul and make it throb with love and beauty—just by following the scratches of a pen on a scroll.” It reminded him of his “original goal,” he said, but “a thing called ‘jazz’” took him far off his path, and he didn’t know if he’d ever get back.
Selected Discography
Mingus at the Bohemia (Debut, 1955)
Pithecanthropus Erectus (Atlantic, 1956)
The Clown (Atlantic, 1957)
Mingus Ah Um (Columbia, 1959)
Mingus Dynasty (Columbia, 1959)
Blues & Roots (Atlantic, 1960)
Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus (Candid, 1960)
Pre-Bird (Mercury, 1960)
Oh Yeah (Atlantic, 1960)
Tijuana Moods (RCA Victor, 1962)
The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady (Impulse!, 1963)
Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus (Impulse!, 1963)
Mingus Plays Piano (Impulse!, 1963)
The Great Concert of Charles Mingus (America, 1964)
Let My Children Hear Music (Columbia, 1972)
Mingus at Antibes (Atlantic, 1976)
At UCLA 1965 (Sunny Side, 2006)
Cornell 1964 (Blue Note, 2007)
