CDs of Charles Mingus

Mingus Ah Um (CD 1990)  / Pithecanthropus Erectus (1956,1990)  / The Black Saint & The Sinner Lady (1963, 1995)  

Blues and Roots (1959, 1990)  / Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus (1960, 2000)  /  Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus (1963, 1995)

Mingus Dynasty (1959, 1999)   /   Let My Children Hear Music (1971, 1992)   /   Epitaph (1990)   /  Cumbia & Jazz Fusion (1976, 1994)

The Clown (1957, 1999)  / Tijuana Moods (2001)

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Mingus Bio

Charles Mingus, Jr., born on 22 April 1922 on a military base in Nogales, Arizona, is one of the foremost figures in twentieth century American music as composer, bandleader, bassist, and pianist.

He grew up in Watts, California. He lived with his religious stepmother and thus his earliest musical influences came from the church--choir and group singing. Risking punishment at eight years old, he turned his father's radio onto Duke Ellington's "East St. Louis Toodle-Oo." This first exposure of jazz had a strong influence on him.

Mingus began the study of music at an early age. From six until about sixteen, he tried to learn the trombone; but dissatisfied with poor teachers, he took up the cello and by high school the double bass. He studied the double bass first with Red Callendar and then five years with Herman Rheinshagen, principal bassist of the New York Philharmonic; and studied also compositional techniques with the legendary Lloyd Reese. These years of study laid a foundation for his technique. The young Mingus also absorbed first hand the vernacular music from the great jazz masters.

Mingus began as a "serious" composer, as steeped in Stravinsky and Schoenberg as in Ellington. Although he wrote his first concert piece, "Half-Mast Inhibition," when he was seventeen years old, it was not recorded until twenty years later by a 22-piece orchestra with Gunther Schuller conducting. 

Early Professional Experience & Influences

In the 1940s, Mingus played with a number of well-known musicians. When he was 20 years old, Mingus had a professional stint with Kid Ory in Barney Bigard's group (1942). The following year he was touring with Louis Armstrong. During the mid-40s Mingus made a move toward rhythm and blues and in 1947 began work with Lionel Hampton's big band, where he made a name as a jazz musician, writing and playing. In his autobiography Hamp (1989), Lionel Hampton wrote, "For a while in 1948, for example, I had a band that included both Wes Montgomery on guitar and Charlie Mingus on bass. I brought Mingus from California when nobody wanted him to play. I brought him to New York." 

During the Hampton period, Mingus also led various ensembles under the stage name of Baron Von Mingus  In 1950 Mingus worked with vibist Red Norvo and guitarist Tal Farlow and recorded with Red Norvo. In New York (1951 or so), Mingus also played with Billy Taylor, Stan Getz, and Art Tatum. And settling in New York in 1953 Mingus played bass for the infamous Massey Hall concert with Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Max Roach, Miles Davis, and Duke Ellington..

Going His Own Way

By the mid-1950s Mingus struck a chord of independence. He formed his own label, Debut, to protect and document his enlarging repertoire of original music. He also formed the Jazz Composer's Workshop, a cooperative for musicians -- all as a way to avoid the commercialism of the music industry. The Workshop was a way to enable young musicians to have their compositions performed in concert and on recordings.

Rare for bassists, Mingus quickly developed as a leader of musicians. In addition, he was an accomplished pianist who could have made a career playing that instrument. Mingus was inspired by Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Thelonious  Monk, Negro gospel music, and Mexican folk music, as well as  traditional jazz and 20th-century concert music. The presentation at the 1955 Brandeis Festival of the Creative Arts of "Revelations," which combined jazz and classical idioms, established Mingus as one of the foremost jazz composers of his day. 

With his revolt against cool and hard bop, Mingus headed to the forefront of the avant-garde. Like the masters of hard bop, Art Blakey, Horace Silver, and Lee Morgan, Mingus attempted to get more "soul" into bebop with simple churchy minor-keyed melodies and rolling gospel piano chords Moments on the Columbia sides, Horace Parlan's piano sounds as if it were coming off a Ray Charles record. Throughout Mingus, there's an emphasis on blues and gospel. 

Mingus drew directly on the music of the sanctified church meetings : the call and response of the horns, the antiphonal textures, the collective improvisation all reflect the preaching, testifying, and speaking in tongues that he heard as a child. No jazz composer has been more insistent on getting a bluesy, "vocal" character from his players; one notes the speech-like free duets with drummer Dannie Richmond and, for a while, Eric Dolphy. Mingus's music moved to a whole other order, by 1959, a kind of chamber jazz.

Most of Mingus' best work was derived from close collaborations with improvising musicians such as  trumpeter Thad Jones, drummer Dannie Richmond, alto saxophonist  Jackie McLean, and woodwind-player Eric Dolphy. Trombonist Jimmy Knepper describes their relationship as a kind of dysfunctional romance from which he could find no escape. "Mingus just seemed to be unavoidable to me," reports Brian Priestly's in his Mingus biography.. "I used to get very depressed. Good God, I'd say to myself, I'm stuck with this guy for the rest of my life. His music was so difficult, with all those time changes and different sequences. . . . It seemed written to trip you up. I wanted to relax and play standards."   Though pared down structures for improvisation, Mingus's tunes are full of hummable melodies.

Mingus also wrote  for larger instrumentation's and composed several film scores. Pointing to a Mingus score, Marsalis said, "that's the kind of thing you find in an étude book under 'hard.' " Aside from being a great bandleader and bassist, Mingus, Gunther Schuller reiterated, could go toe to toe with the greats simply in a written-on-paper composing contest. Mingus was a "composer."  As a bassist, Mingus, with his volatile and beautiful music, was always more effective as a soloist than an accompanist of sidemen.

Mingus' Classic Recordings

His extraordinarily creative body of work  include Pithecanthropus Erectus, The Clown, Tijuana Moods, Mingus Dynasty , Mingus Ah Um , The Black Saint & The Sinner Lady, Cumbia & Jazz Fusion, Let My Children Hear Music. He recorded over a hundred albums and wrote over three hundred scores.  Most frequently  recorded by others is "Goodbye, Porkpie Hat," a tribute to Lester  Young, and his most frequently cited extended work is Pithecanthropus  Erectus, a musical interpretation of human evolution. For some some critics, the1959 Columbia  recordings Mingus Ah Um and Mingus Dynasty represent Mingus at his peak -- he wrote great material for great bands and played superbly himself. 

Mingus Ah Um includes great tunes. The album leads off with "Better Get It in Your Soul," an upbeat blues with a fetching melody. Next comes, "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat" (also known as "Theme for Lester Young"), a beautiful ballad. Minus also wrote tributes to Ellington ("Open Letter to Duke") and Jelly Roll Morton ("Jelly Roll"). Mingus also wrote the great political satire, "Fables of Faubus," in which he mocks the segregationist governor of Arkansas. Mingus' masterwork is "Epitaph," a composition which is more than 4000 measures long and which requires two hours to perform. It was discovered after his death during a cataloguing of his musical estate.

 With the help of a grant from the Ford Foundation, the score and instrumental parts were copied, and the piece itself was premiered by a 30-piece orchestra, conducted by Gunther Schuller, in a concert produced by Sue Mingus at Alice Tully Hall on June 3, 1989, ten years after Mingus' death.

Epitaph, The New Yorker wrote, represents the first advance in jazz composition since Duke Ellington's "Black, Brown, and Beige," which was written in 1943. The New York Times said it ranked with the "most memorable jazz events of the decade." Certain the composition would never be performed in his lifetime, Mingus called his work Epitaph; written for his "tombstone."

Accomplishments & Awards

Mingus believed his accomplishments as a bassist were the result of hard work but that his talent for composition came from God. In 1971 the State University of New York at Buffalo awarded Mingus the Slee Chair of Music and spent a semester teaching composition in its music department. That same year (1971) also saw the release of his autobiography, Beneath the Underdog, published by Knopf, which  appeared in 1972 as a Bantam paperback and was reissued after his death, in 1980, by Viking/Penguin and again by Pantheon Books, in 1991. 

In 1972 Mingus re-signed with Columbia Records. Alvin Ailey choreographed an hour program called "The Mingus Dances" during a 1972 collaboration with the Robert Joffrey Ballet Company. Mingus received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Smithsonian Institute, and the Guggenheim Foundation (two grants). It was rare for the Guggenheim  two award an artist two grants. Mingus also received an honorary degree from Brandeis and an award from Yale University. "For sheer melodic and rhythmic and structural originality," The New Yorker wrote, "his compositions may equal anything written in western music in the twentieth century."

A Life Cut Short & Remembrance

Mingus toured throughout Europe, Japan, Canada, South America and the United States until the end of 1977 when he was diagnosed as having a rare nerve disease, Amyotropic Lateral Sclerosis. Confined to a wheelchair no longer able to write music on paper or compose at the piano, Mingus sang his last works  into a tape recorder. He died 5 January 1979 in Cuernavaca, Mexico. His ashes were scattered in the Ganges River in India. From the 1960's until his death at age 56, Mingus remained in the forefront of American music.