.
the text where these edits occurred. In other chapters, I decided to let the reader see how Mingus’s mind worked, how one subject flowed into another without much prompting or direct questioning from me, how one association led to another. “Spontaneous composition” is what he called it in music.
There are only select references here to the Mingus literature and to unfamiliar names and events that might elude all but the most knowledgeable jazz person. My headnotes and comments are generally short; in a couple of instances, I’ve written more extended commentaries. The idea is to not distract the reader from Mingus, to amplify and explain only when necessary.4
Mingus allowed me to be his Boswell, I think, because we personally connected on a number of levels. He respected my background as a writer for some years on jazz and concert music, respected that I had been a “professor,” that I worked at the time as a writer for Playboy. That last affiliation appealed both to his sense of humor and, one might say, his prurient interest: “You’d go right down in the heart of Tijuana and we’d go to this restaurant where they had the finest dancers—I mean bad, baby, bad. Playboy’d have trouble with this club. In fact, one broad I could tell I could have her without the money, one of the dancers. They weren’t all whores.”
Playboy had once made Mingus an offer to reprint and distribute some of his music (see chapter 6), which he foolishly rejected. And the magazine in the early 1970s still had considerable mystique in the world of jazz, having sponsored numerous festivals, conducting a highly regarded jazz poll, and booking jazz into its clubs. Playboy was also a somewhat fading though still central rallying point in American culture for promoting sexual freedom and “the good life,” plus providing a forum for quality writing on racial issues and left-wing politics—all stuff that Mingus responded to.
In the interviews, we had conversations about the man’s appetites, his fights and frustrations with Sue, his “extrasensory perceptions,” as an early composition had it, the pains and the pleasures of living. Not to mention the music. The talk, the psychology, and the music were all of a piece with Charles. He was easily the most complex person I had ever met—and one of the most open. There weren’t too many filters operating when Mingus talked, and I’m proud that he trusted me.
NOTES
1. Mezz Mezzrow and Bernard Wolfe, Really the Blues (New York: Random House, 1946).
2. “Acts and Entertainments,” Playboy, May 1972, 24. I did other occasional reviews of Mingus music during my stint at Playboy. My signed obit for Mingus was published in the November 1979 issue, 60–62.
3. In Blow-Up and Other Stories (originally, End of the Game and Other Stories), trans. Paul Blackburn (New York: Pantheon, 1967), 182–247.
4. What Mingus said in these interviews was, of course, his own subjective truth, not always objective fact. Where I felt further explication was necessary, I’ve added chapter endnotes or in-text commentaries.
Introduction
“Don’t take me for no avant-garde, ready-born doctor.”
Many people have tried to explain Mingus to the world. Finally, it’s time for him to do the talking.
His music has been praised, anatomized, criticized, discographized. No longer jazz’s angry man, he has achieved prominence as one of the great jazz composers, largely through the efforts of his wife Sue, who has done so much since his death to keep three bands going and let the public hear his music. Mingus is in the composer pantheon with Duke Ellington and a very few others. Wynton Marsalis loves him; he’s part of the received jazz canon. Would he be proud of that? Dismissive? Both, probably.
For many critics and listeners, his music has been hard to fathom: is it traditional, free, or what? And yet, recent remarks of younger people in blogs, coming to his music for the first time, are revealing. (He always knew the kids would respond.) In The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, one person heard “images of creeping hobos, fawning sophisticates, domestic loneliness, and a mind on fire.” On YouTube, the audio track of “Solo Dancer” from Black Saint elicited this, among many comments: “So i’m 15 and this is the first time i heard this song AND IT’S FUCKING BRILLIANT. Can someone point me to a good place to start with Charles Mingus? Please?”1
His music is among the most personal of expressions in jazz. Filled with recurring recombinations of source material of all kinds (gospel, Dixieland, concert music, Spanish and Latin music, bebop, swing, New Orleans, R&B, free jazz, circus, and minstrel music), each piece is also a unique minibiography in sound. Not every one is fully realized, but each piece tells something about where Mingus has been. These are not generally Monkish or modernist-style compositions. They are personal statements.
For a man as verbal as Mingus was, a great frustration seemed to be his constant need to explain himself—in his music, to his audiences, in his book Beneath the Underdog, in his essays, and finally in his talk here. The rush of words, the abrupt shifts in subject (sometimes in mood) testify to this. I usually understood what he was talking about and shared much of his taste and affection for the music and its creators. We also came to share jokes, drinks, and the latest political outrage.
Still, talking with Mingus? It was sometimes intimidating and, depending on his mood, now and again fraught with dense pauses and occasional disconnects. After a time I learned not to try and fill the dead air. And it was just a great privilege to hear him light up on a topic—as you will hear too.
Mingus, I came to think, felt forever on the outside of a world he repudiated yet was very much part of. Outrage and joy were commonplace emotions with Charles; they enabled him to carry on, or to beat the devil. For all the critical analysis that has been directed at him, maybe the most plausible thing I can say is that while he put up with deprivation and scorn as a black man, he was clearly very privileged as an artist. Mingus understood how degrading the business of performing jazz often was, but he had no doubts about how good he was and what he had accomplished. That perceptual discord often made him angry: “If you’re going to be a physician or a finished artist in anything, like a surgeon, then you got to be able to retrace your steps and do it anytime you want to go forward, be more advanced. And if I’m a surgeon, am I going to cut you open ‘by heart,’ just free-form it, you know?”
The avant-garde pretenders made him crazy because they posed as “ready-born doctors.” Their pretensions put the lie to everything Mingus had worked and studied to do in music. A further dilemma was that he, by most critical accounts, was labeled an avant-gardist. Another thing to make you crazy. The audiences and critics sometimes made him crazy.
Mingus had other demons that pursued him. More than most jazz musicians, he was always critical of his output, always trying to discover how to get away from jazz and create some kind of ideal, eclectic music that could truly represent and fulfill him. His paranoia was legendary; his imaginary ramblings and distortions, especially at this period in his life, tested both his friends’ and an outsider’s credulity. Except for drugs (which he never got into), his life, like Bird’s, was in some way a testing of every limit of excess. It was all part of a spiritual quest that he couldn’t really identify.
I don’t want to defend or excuse the outrageous and hurtful things he did—and there were plenty of those. Jazz people have sometimes gotten off the hook for behaviors that would put the rest of us in jail. Bud Powell’s beating at the hands of Philadelphia cops is certainly the other side of that coin. But Mingus—because he was verbal, very smart, and loved the limelight—never hesitated to put forward that duality of race and art, outrage and joy, that made him such a unique voice in jazz.
As composer and bandleader, Mingus seemed to have two models—Duke Ellington, of course, as many have noted and, to a lesser extent, Jelly Roll Morton. He had Morton’s swagger and some of Duke’s charm, though surely not his urbanity. His music was often Ellingtonian in concept, if not in execution, and like Morton, he found a way to bring what he called “spontaneous composition” to jazz. As a performer, Mingus brought supreme execution and brilliance to, of all things, the bass. No one in jazz has ever played that instrument with his musicality and skill.
Like many people who met and spent time with Charles,