|
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)
* *
* * *
Charles
Mingus
(1922-1979)
Composer, Bandleader, Bassist,
Pianist 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.
Both
New York City and Washington, D.C. honored him
posthumously with a "Charles Mingus Day." The
National Endowment for the Arts provided grants for a
Mingus foundation called "Let My Children Hear
Music," which catalogued all of Mingus' works. The
Library of Congress has acquired the entire collection
of Mingus musical scores and memorabilia, a first for
American jazz composition. The
microfilms of these works were then given to the Music
Division of the New York Public Library where they are
currently available for study and scholarship—a
first, for jazz.
A repertory
band called the Mingus Dynasty and the Mingus Big Band
continue to perform his music. Recent biographies of
Charles Mingus include Mingus by Brian Priestley
and Mingus/Mingus by Janet Coleman and Al Young. |
* *
* * *
mingus 5 tet in belgium /
Freedom
Charles Mingus—Triumph of the Underdog
Charles Mingus said of
himself "I am half black man, half yellow man, but I claim
to be a Negro. I am
Charles Mingus, the famed jazz musician—but not famed
enough to make a living in America."
"His statement summed
up the conflict that plagued this musical genius his entire
life: volatility, pain, prescience, and raw rage roiled
inside a complex man, composer, bass player, and trombonist
who transcended labels and refused to be pigeonholed into a
single musical style--and who did not achieve real fame
until late in his career.
The documentary is full
of well-preserved footage and contains interviews with many
Mingus followers like Wynton Marsalis as well as
performances by icons Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, and
Gerry Mulligan. The film traverses past the musical legend
with insight and information into Mingus's personal life,
his civil rights activism, and his final triumph in the
music world--just as his body began to deteriorate from Lou
Gehrig's disease--to his eventual death in 1979. Mingus left
a legacy composed of genius, vulnerability, brilliance,
anarchy, and, as one friend noted, "the entire range of
human emotion that is reflected in his music."—Paula
Nechak
* * *
* *
Charles Mingus:
Fable of Faubus
"Fables of Faubus"
is a song composed by jazz bassist and composer Charles
Mingus. One of Mingus' most explicitly political works, the
song was written as a direct protest against Arkansas
governor
Orval E. Faubus, who in 1957 sent out the National Guard
to prevent the integration of Little Rock Central High
School by
nine African American teenagers. The song was first
recorded for Mingus' 1959 album,
Mingus Ah Um. Columbia refused to allow the lyrics to
the song to be included, and so the song was recorded as an
instrumental on the album. It was not until October 20, 1960
that the song was recorded with lyrics, for the album
Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus, which was
released on the more independent
Candid label. Due to contractual issues with Columbia,
the song could not be released as "Fables of Faubus", and so
the Candid version was titled "Original Faubus Fables."
 |
The personnel for the
Candid recording were Charles Mingus (bass, vocals),
Dannie Richmond (drums, vocals),
Eric Dolphy (alto saxophone), and
Ted Curson (trumpet). The vocals featured a
call-and-response between Mingus and Richmond. Critic
Don Heckman commented on the unedited "Original Faubus
Fables" in a 1962 review that it was "a classic Negro
put-down in which satire becomes a deadly rapier-thrust.
Faubus emerges in a glare of ridicule as a mock villain whom
no-one really takes seriously. This kind of commentary,
brimful of feeling, bitingly direct and harshly satiric,
appears far too rarely in jazz." The song, either with or
without lyrics, was one of the compositions which Mingus
returned to most often, both on record and in concert.—Wikipedia
photo left:
As fifteen-year-old
Elizabeth Eckford tried to enter the school,
soldiers of the National Guard, under orders
from Arkansas Governor Faubus, would step in her
way to prevent her from entering. |
* *
* * *
|
Fable of Faubus
By Charles Mingus
Oh, Lord, don't let 'em
shoot us!
Oh, Lord, don't let 'em stab us!
Oh, Lord, don't let 'em tar and feather us!
Oh, Lord, no more swastikas!
Oh, Lord, no more Ku Klux Klan!
Name me someone who's
ridiculous, Dannie.
Governor Faubus!
Why is he so sick and ridiculous?
He won't permit integrated schools.
Then he's a fool! Boo! Nazi
Fascist supremists!
Boo! Ku Klux Klan (with your Jim Crow plan)
Name me a handful that's
ridiculous, Dannie Richmond.
Faubus, Rockefeller, Eisenhower
Why are they so sick and ridiculous?
Two, four, six, eight:
They brainwash and teach you hate.
H-E-L-L-O, Hello.
Orval E. Faubus was the governor of
Arkansas in 1957 and against desegregation. He
sent the National Guard to prevent black
children from attending high school in Little
Rock. |
* *
* * *
 |
Beneath the Underdog
By
Charles Mingus
"Mingus
was something else. A pure genius. I loved
him." Miles Davis; "The jazz world has seen
its fair share of compelling autobiographies
but none to rival the quality of
Beneath the Underdog. A shocking and
brilliant book. Five stars." Q; "There has
never been an autobiography like
Beneath the Underdog. A riveting
work of highly subjective reminiscences and
tortured self-analysis." Richard Williams;
"[Mingus'] autobiography teeters between
derangement and genius." Time Out; "An
outlandish, brilliant autobiography."—Newsweek
Mingus
by Mingus. From the shabby roadhouses to
fabulous estates, from the psychiatric ward
of Bellevue to worlds of mysticism and
solitude, these are the celebrated, demonic,
anguished and, above all, profoundly moving
memoirs of the great jazz bassist and
compose Charles Mingus. First published in
1971,
Beneath the Underdog is a
masterpiece of memoir, a riveting insight
into one of the giants of twentieth century
music.—Publisher, Canongate Books |
Mingus,
Sue Graham. 2002.
Tonight at Noon: A Love Story.
New York: Pantheon Books.
|
Greenback Planet: How the Dollar Conquered
the World and Threatened Civilization as We Know It
By H. W. Brands
In Greenback Planet, acclaimed historian H. W. Brands charts the dollar's astonishing rise to become the world's principal currency. Telling the story with the verve of a novelist, he recounts key episodes in U.S. monetary history, from the Civil War debate over fiat money (greenbacks) to the recent worldwide financial crisis. Brands explores the dollar's changing relations to gold and silver and to other currencies and cogently explains how America's economic might made the dollar the fundamental standard of value in world finance. He vividly describes the 1869 Black Friday attempt to corner the gold market, banker J. P. Morgan's bailout of the U.S. treasury, the creation of the Federal Reserve, and President Franklin Roosevelt's handling of the bank panic of 1933. Brands shows how lessons learned (and not learned) in the Great Depression have influenced subsequent U.S. monetary policy, and how the dollar's dominance helped transform economies in countries ranging from Germany and Japan after World War II to Russia and China today. He concludes with a sobering dissection of the 2008 world financial debacle, which exposed the power--and the enormous risks--of the dollar's worldwide reign. The Economy |
 |
* *
* * *
|
|
Sex at the Margins
Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry
By Laura María Agustín
This book explodes several myths: that selling sex is completely different from any other kind of work, that migrants who sell sex are passive victims and that the multitude of people out to save them are without self-interest. Laura Agustín makes a passionate case against these stereotypes, arguing that the label 'trafficked' does not accurately describe migrants' lives and that the 'rescue industry' serves to disempower them. Based on extensive research amongst both migrants who sell sex and social helpers, Sex at the Margins provides a radically different analysis. Frequently, says Agustin, migrants make rational choices to travel and work in the sex industry, and although they are treated like a marginalised group they form part of the dynamic global economy. Both powerful and controversial, this book is essential reading for all those who want to understand the increasingly important relationship between sex markets, migration and the desire for social justice. "Sex at the Margins rips apart distinctions between migrants, service work and sexual labour and reveals the utter complexity of the contemporary sex industry. This book is set to be a trailblazer in the study of sexuality."—Lisa Adkins, University of London |
* *
* * *
The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
* *
* * *
Ancient African Nations
* * * * *
If you like this page consider making a donation
* * * * *
Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
1950
1960
1965
1970
1975
1980
1985
1990
1995
2000
____ 2005
Enjoy!
* * * * *
The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery
* *
* * *
The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
* * * * *
* *
* * *
ChickenBones Store
(Books, DVDs, Music, and more)
update 24 April 2010
|
