Cliff Chandler ©  Cliff Chandler, Award Winning Author, http://theparagons.homestead.com/paragons2.html

Happy Birthday Charles Mingus

Charles Mingus, Jr. was born on April 22, 1922 in Nogales, Arizona on a military base and raised in Watts, California. Charles first became interested and exposed to music through the church and when he was eight he heard Duke Ellington on the radio for the first time. Mingus began learning music on trombone and later cello. Charles later studied bass formally with H Rheinshagen from the New York Philharmonic and studied composition with Lloyd Reese. By the time Mingus was in his teens he was already composing advanced pieces that would be considered in the "third stream" movement of Jazz. Charles later recorded these early compositions in 1960 with Gunther Schuller and called the album Pre-Bird.

Mingus quickly created a name for himself in Jazz and in the 1940s toured with Louis Armstrong, Russell Jacquet, Howard McGhee and Lionel Hampton. In the early 1950s Charles joined the New York scene and performed with Charlie Parker who was a major influence for Mingus. During this period Charles also played with Miles Davis, Bud Powell, Max Roach, Art Tatum and Duke Ellington. Also in the 50s Mingus formed his own publishing and recording company with Max Roach to document and protect his music. The most notable album on Debut Records from this period is the Massey Hall Concert with Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Bud Powell and Max Roach.

Mingus pursued one of his visions around this time called the "Jazz Workshop" which enabled musicians to come together and support each other in testing their limits and pushing ahead to new ground in Jazz. These groups led to Mingus developing the sound we know him for today and some of the musicians who played in the Jazz Workshop were Pepper Adams, Jaki Byard, Booker Ervin, John Handy, Jimmy Knepper, Charles McPherson and Horace Parlan. In the late-50s and into the 1960s Mingus began releasing albums as a leader at an incredible pace especially considering the originality in all of his music.

Charles began with Pithecanthropus Erectus  in 1956 with Mal Waldron, Jackie Mclean and J. R. Monterose followed by The Clown in 1957. In 1959 Mingus released three of his most legendary albums; Blues and Roots, Mingus Ah Um and Mingus Dynasty. In 1960 he recorded Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus with Eric Dolphy, Dannie Richmond and Ted Curson. Incredible music kept flowing from Mingus and he recorded The Black Saint & The Sinner Lady in 1963 which is considered a masterpiece and one of the greatest works of arranging and orchestration in Jazz history. Also in 63 Mingus showed us his skills on the piano with the album Mingus Plays Piano which features only Charles playing solo piano.

Charles was a warrior for civil rights and his music reflects his willingness to put himself out there for what he believed in. Mingus’ tune "Fables of Faubus" best demonstrates his willingness to call it as he sees it and if you search the song title on Jazz On The Tube you can hear the version of this song with words by Charles as well. In the late 1960s and early 70s Charles’ incredible pace slowed just a little bit but the music didn’t stop. In 1971 Mingus was awarded the Slee Chair of Music and spent a semester teaching at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Also in 71 his autobiography was published entitled Beneath the Underdog.

In 1974 he formed a band with Richmond, Don Pullen, Jack Walrath and George Adams and they recorded the albums ‘Changes One’ and ‘Changes Two’. During the mid 1970’s Mingus also toured Europe, Asia, South America and America until he developed a rare nerve disease in 1977. Even though Charles could no longer play after this, he still composed by singing tunes into a tape recorder, showing his love and determination to create. Charles Mingus passed away in 1979 and his ashes were scattered in the Ganges River in India. Both New York City and Washington D.C. honored him after his passing with a “Charles Mingus Day.”

Charles Mingus recorded over 100 albums and wrote over 300 scores in his life and leaves a legacy as one of greatest composers in American history and certainly in the history of Jazz. Some of the awards Mingus has received include being inducted into the Down Beat Hall of Fame, Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, his album ‘Mingus Dynasty’ was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, the U.S. Postal Service issued a stamp in his honor, and the National Endowment of the Arts provided grants for a nonprofit called “Let My Children Hear Music” in which they cataloged all of Mingus’ works and made them available at the New York Public Library. Charles Mingus was a genius, a Jazz master, a warrior for civil rights and in my humble opinion a true American hero.

“Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity.”

"In other words I am three. One man stands forever in the middle, unconcerned, unmoved, watching, waiting to be allowed to express what he sees to the other two. The second man is like a frightened animal that attacks for fear of being attacked.

"Then there's an over-loving gentle person who lets people into the uttermost sacred temple of his being and he'll take insults and be trusting and sign contracts without reading them and get talked down to working cheap or for nothing, and when he realizes what's been done to him he feels like killing and destroying everything around him including himself for being so stupid. But he can't—he goes back inside himself.

"Which one is real?

"They're all real."—Charles Mingus

Source: Jazz on the Tube

mingus 5 tet in belgium   / Freedom

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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 

"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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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)

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Ancient African Nations

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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 / George Jackson  / Hurricane Carter

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