The History of Jazz (68 page)

As a jazz composer, Mingus is often lauded for his formalist tendencies, for the novel structures of his works. Yet, just as pointedly, these are pieces stuffed to the brim with content. Even the name Jazz Workshop, which Mingus favored for his bands, evokes this image. The impulses of the moment are primary. Compositional structures change and adapt to meet the dictates of the here and now. The rough-edged counterpoint that sometimes takes over Mingus’s most characteristic music, a surreal evocation of Dixieland, often makes his approach sound like a subversive type of anti-composition.

Fans had at least one guarantee: Mingus’s work never was boring. A visceral excitement radiated from the bandstand at his performances and lives on in his recordings. Pieces such as “Better Git It in Your Soul,” “Jelly Roll,” and “Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting” may recall the jazz tradition, but do so in a way that is tellingly alive, that could never be reduced to notes on a page—hence it comes as little surprise that Mingus delighted in teaching his pieces by ear. “Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting” bore an all-too-fitting title. Mingus’s music was an aural equivalent of the sanctified church, delighting in a loosely structured give-and-take, electrified with evangelical zeal. This was a musical speaking in tongues, accompanied by hand clapping, shouts, exhortations, improvised narrative, and other spontaneous outbursts. Yet these unpredictable elements of a Mingus performance also had their dark side: there were songs cut short in midflow, sidemen fired and rehired on the bandstand, denigrating asides and intemperate outbursts. With Mingus, whether onstage or off, even the moments of gentle introspection often merely marked a deceptive quiet before the storm.

Mingus was increasingly returning to the early roots of jazz music during this period. As with his idol Ellington, Mingus found the twelve-bar blues to be an especially fertile departure point. While most jazz musicians typically treat the blues form as a generic set of blowing changes, Mingus transformed the twelve-bar choruses into true compositions. Only a handful of jazz artists—Ellington, Morton, Monk—were his equal in this regard. Mingus’s “Haitian Fight Song” was an early indication of this approach, with “Pussy Cat Dues” and “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” from
Mingus Ah Um
standing out as especially brilliant examples, the latter following a twelve-bar form that evokes a minor blues while deviating far from the standard progressions. All in all, Mingus’s 1959 recordings for Columbia present some of the most fully realized works of his career. But once again, the label hid Mingus’s light under a bushel, holding onto much of this material and releasing it in piecemeal fashion over a period of many years.

The early 1960s found Mingus standing on the outside of the free jazz clique, staring at it with a mixture of curiosity, envy, and disdain. Mingus’s roots in the jazz tradition and his impulses as a composer prevented him from fully accepting atonality and open structures, yet his fondness for new sounds motivated him to find some common ground with the avant-garde movement. His group with Eric Dolphy from this period was one of the most daring of his career, and the band is in especially fine form on a live recording made at the 1960 Antibes Jazz Festival and on the release
Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus
. “What Love,” an early Mingus composition revived during this period—in part because Dolphy noted its similarity to Ornette Coleman’s work—exhibits the bassist engaging in intricate free-form dialogues with Dolphy’s bass clarinet. The piece is loosely based on “What Is This Thing Called Love?” but the deconstruction is so complete that even composer Cole Porter may have failed to recognize the linkage.

The traditional side of Mingus’s music resurfaced the following year when his band featured, for three months, multireed player Roland Kirk (later known as Rahsaan Roland Kirk). Kirk was an ideal sideman for Mingus. A stellar soloist, he could play with authenticity and forcefulness in any jazz style, from trad to free, and on a host of instruments—not just conventional saxes and clarinets but pawnshop oddities such as manzello, stritch, siren whistle, and nose flute. Kirk’s arsenal of effects was seemingly endless, ranging from circular breathing to playing three horns at once. This versatility came, in time, to be a curse. Had he focused on a single instrument, he would have been acknowledged as a master. Instead he was too often dismissed as little more than a jazz novelty act. While with Mingus, Kirk invigorated the 1961
Oh Yeah
release with a handful of penetrating solos, including an extraordinary “old-timey” outing on “Eat That Chicken.” A dozen years later, Kirk rejoined Mingus for a Carnegie Hall concert and stole the show with his sly maneuvering inside and outside the chord changes. The small body of recordings featuring these two jazz masters in tandem is a cause for much idle speculation as to what might have been had they collaborated more often.

Mingus’s recordings for the Impulse label in the early 1960s continued to find him in top form. His 1963
The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady
stands out as his strongest and most structured extended piece. Mingus apparently composed many of his works in snippets, with some of the bits and pieces (such as the bridge on his early “Eulogy for Rudy Williams”) showing up in several different efforts. With
The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady
, Mingus was able to fine-tune the composition after it was recorded, using splices and overdubs, to create a more unified artistic statement. Not all of Mingus’s efforts from this period held together so well. His 1962 Town Hall Concert is most often remembered as one of the great fiascos in the history of jazz. Scores were still uncompleted at curtain time, with two copyists continuing to work after the curtain was raised. Years later Gunther Schuller would struggle valiantly to realize Mingus’s original vision for the Town Hall concert, but despite his best efforts, the music remained a series of fragments, only loosely tied together.

This is no criticism of Mingus. Fragmentation was a recurring curse as well as a blessing of the twentieth century. After all, this was an age that began with physicists contending that continuity was merely a statistical illusion—a premise that artists of all sorts quickly embraced. “These fragments I have shored against my ruins,” Eliot proclaims toward the end of “The Waste Land.” “I cannot make it cohere,” announces Ezra Pound near the conclusion of his massive
Cantos
. These assertions, with their measured fatalism, could stand as mottos for the modernist agenda in jazz as well. In fact, Mingus was the closest jazz has come to having its own Ezra Pound. And as with Pound, Mingus’s life too often mimicked the dissolution of his art. Psychological troubles plagued him throughout his career. In 1958, Mingus even tried to refer himself to the Bellevue mental hospital. In naive fashion, he had knocked on the door. Looking only for counsel, he soon found himself confined.

This was the same man who enlisted his analyst to write liner notes and who named a song “All the Things You Could Be by Now if Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother.” The 1960s were tumultuous years for the bassist. Before the Town Hall concert, Mingus’s temper exploded during a meeting with trombonist Jimmy Knepper, who was working as a copyist. Mingus punched Knepper, who eventually took him to court on assault charges. The most memorable moment from the documentary
Mingus
, filmed in 1966, was not of music making, but of the movie’s subject being evicted from his apartment for nonpayment of rent. When the
Mingus at Monterey
recording was released a short while later, it included a personal note from the bassist, soliciting donations to compensate for “the misfortunes I have suffered.” But such was the instability in Mingus’s life that, by the time the record hit the stores, he could no longer be reached at the post office box listed in the liner notes. By the close of the 1960s, Mingus was barely visible in the jazz world, performing rarely, recording not at all.

It comes as little surprise that Mingus had such trouble summing up his chaotic life in a proposed autobiography. When a publisher contracted him to write his life story, Mingus intimated that he was putting together a fifteen-hundred-page manuscript. When
Beneath the Underdog
finally appeared in 1971, it was only a fraction of that length. And those looking for a point-by-point exposition of Mingus’s career as a musician were likely to be disappointed by the text. Musical activities play a subsidiary role in the proceedings. Instead, the work is a patchwork of braggadocio, real or fantasized sexual exploits, pop psychology, fanciful dialogue, and odd anecdotes. Mingus the man, like his alter ego the musician, appeared to be an accumulation of the most disparate fragments. All the same, the book makes for compelling reading, brimming with excesses even in its abbreviated state.

On the heels of this literary effort, Mingus saw his musical career rejuvenated. He signed with Columbia, and—in a telling irony—recorded “The Chill of Death,” a piece that same label had shelved back in 1947. Mingus’s 1970s band with saxophonist George Adams and pianist Don Pullen, joined by longtime Mingus drummer Dannie Richmond, was a powerful unit that could hold up under the inevitable comparisons with earlier Jazz Workshop ensembles. This was also one of the most energized bands Mingus had ever fronted: Pullen’s slashing piano style combined dissonant tone clusters, percussive chords, and biting single-note lines; Adams’s tenor offered a sheets-of-sound approach analogous to Coltrane’s. Both were capable of playing inside or outside of the structural foundations Mingus laid down on the bass. This band is well represented on a series of recordings for the Atlantic label, including
Mingus Moves
,
Cumbia & Jazz Fusion
, and the two volumes of
Changes
. Mingus’s compositional skills continued to shine in diverse works, ranging from the constantly shifting “Sue’s Changes” to the unabashedly traditional swing ballad “Duke Ellington’s Sound of Love.”
Three or Four Shades of Blue
from 1977 found Mingus joined by electric guitar and leaning, ever so coyly, in the direction of jazz-rock fusion. Mingus was reportedly upset at the label for pushing his music in a commercial direction but softened his criticism after the release turned out to be the biggest seller of his career.

Around this time, Mingus sought medical treatment for a recurring pain in his legs. When in public, he could be seen using a cane. Toward the end of 1977, the doctors diagnosed amyotrophic lateral sclerosis—known more commonly as Lou Gehrig’s disease—a humbling disorder marked by a gradual loss of coordination and mastery over one’s body. Mingus continued to compose, singing into a tape recorder when he no longer had control over his fingers. He initiated projects, including one with pop diva Joni Mitchell, that he did not live long enough to see through to completion. In his final days, Mingus was feted as became a jazz legend: his fifty-sixth birthday was celebrated with a performance of his
Revelations
by the New York Philharmonic; a few weeks later he appeared at the White House as part of an all-star gathering of jazz musicians during the Jimmy Carter administration. His last days were spent pursuing alternative medical therapies in Mexico, where he died in Cuernavaca on January 5, 1979. His music continued to flourish posthumously. The Joni Mitchell tribute recording,
Mingus
, came out a short while after his death, introducing the bassist’s music to legions of new fans. A tribute band featuring former sidemen performed under the name Mingus Dynasty, while a similar continuation of the bassist’s influence was seen in a combo led by George Adams and Don Pullen. And over a decade after his passing, Mingus’s unwieldy two-hour long
Epitaph
—drawn from the music of the 1962 Town Hall concert described above— was pieced together by Gunther Schuller and performed and recorded to much fanfare.

In these transition years for jazz, only Miles Davis challenged Mingus in continually redefining the modern jazz-combo vocabulary while still keeping a distance— often only a small distance—from the more extreme implications of free jazz. Davis, like Mingus, was able to borrow judiciously from Ornette Coleman, but with results that were never merely imitative. On such classic recordings as
E.S.P
.,
Miles Smiles
, and
Nefertiti
, Davis and Wayne Shorter succeeded brilliantly in creating a more tonally centered counterpart to Coleman and Cherry—much as Eric Dolphy had done with Mingus, or alongside Booker Little on the seminal Five Spot performances. Here one finds the same haunting vocal quality to the horns, the free-floating rhythms, the indirect manner of phrasing, lethargic and biting by turns. The sense of freedom is so pervasive that the robust harmonic structures underlying the music pass by almost unnoticed. Many listeners have, no doubt, heard these Davis performances and surmised that there were no set chord changes or patterns dictating the flow of the music.

In fact, this music was much more tightly structured than it sounds at first hearing. The compositions of Davis and Shorter, masterful exercises in subtlety, were a major factor in this achievement. But the essence of this music lay, ultimately, in its multilayered rhythmic motion—an enlivening and unconfined energy that was just as evident when the band was playing familiar standards as in the more attenuated compositions of the group’s members. In this regard, the interaction of pianist Herbie Hancock, bassist Ron Carter, and drummer Tony Williams was critical in defining the band’s sound. In time, this unit would demand respect as the premier rhythm section of its day and one of the finest that the jazz world has ever produced. It built on the Bill Evans–Scott LaFaro–Paul Motian trio work from the early 1960s, emulating the latter’s celebration of the internalized beat, but with more assertiveness, a harder edge, and a more overt sense of forward momentum.

Behind all this lay Davis’s foresight in selecting the three rhythm players, each of them relative newcomers to the New York scene at the time they joined his band. Herbie Hancock had spent his formative years in Chicago, where he was born in 1940. During his teens he served as a sideman with visiting jazz stars and performed with his own groups. After graduating from Grinnell College in 1960, Hancock came to New York as a member of trumpeter Donald Byrd’s band. In May 1962, just twelve months before joining Davis, Hancock made his first album as a leader,
Takin’ Off
for the Blue Note label. Although this release featured Hancock’s funk composition “Watermelon Man,” destined to become a crossover hit, the project gave only the barest hints of the flair and cogency the pianist would manifest with the Davis band, as well as on three superb later Blue Note recordings:
Maiden Voyage
,
Empyrean Isles
, and
Speak Like a Child
. Each of these releases broke new ground and showed a different side of this restless visionary at the keyboard. Indeed, few jazz artists would expand their musical horizons during the 1960s with more persistence than Hancock—a path of growth and development in which his stint with Miles was just one more stopping point—yet through it all certain trademark elements of his style stayed constant, notably his creative improv work, clarity of rhythmic expression, and taut compositional structures.