That’s so generous and radical.” What a profound gesture of love. I remember hearing it when I was pretty young, thinking, “This is a grown man onstage in front of people he doesn’t know, offering a song of longing and grieving and farewell to another person that he loves. There is this song for the saxophonist Eric Dolphy called “So Long Eric.” It was his last gig with the band. He’s like, “Yo, I’m going to do this differently. I think that’s one of my favorite things, his independent business sense. He was pressing up his own stuff - and I love that, too. Like, “I’ll hand you the music, but you should probably play it how I’m singing it to you.” That’s one of my favorite things about Mingus, because it’s something that transcends the paper. And I think the other thing is in the way he arranged his music, and the way he taught it to people. However he felt it, he was going to write it. I think the most meaningful aspect is his naturalness, because we can look at it two different ways, right? His naturalness as far as the transparency of his emotions coming through his arrangements, and just him. Singer, songwriter, rapper and producer, 38 There was a recording date at Town Hall where we were reading music that was being copied while we were on the bandstand - and we were performing this music and some of the parts were still not quite written. It’s too pristine.” And if we weren’t as organized, then he would say, “Well, that’s too raggedy.” He would say, “I like organized chaos.” When we would play his music, if we were too clean, he would say: “I do not want it to sound processed. He had feelings, thoughts and opinions about the world, and he expressed all of that in his compositions.
I would use the term “Renaissance man.” I think of him as a world thinker. Mingus to me was a complicated person, and he had a lot of moving parts, which can translate into musical dimension. Saxophonist, 82 played in Mingus’s ensembles from 1960 to 1972 Each picked a pivotal track from his career and explained its powers. What follow are edited excerpts from conversations with a wide range of jazz musicians who are active today, including one who played with Mingus and many who carry his torch. Still, no single album sums up the live-wire brilliance of Mingus. This was him - the rage, the swing, the beauty and the confusion. He wanted to stray from the labels that siphoned Black music into prescribed boxes and sanitized it for the mainstream marketplace. (His infamous memoir, “Beneath the Underdog,” showcased this sometimes volatile passion.) Mingus’s legacy is best represented by the unruly beauty of his recordings, including “The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady,” a courageous 1963 album filled with the roots of Baptist gospel and the blues, the language of Blackness and the sound of togetherness. Highly sensitive, he had a short temper onstage and sometimes with his band he was called the “Angry Man of Jazz” in a time when the genre was hopped up on cool.
“The reason why it’s difficult - it’s not difficult to play the mechanics of it - it’s because I’m changing all the time.” “What I’m trying to play is very difficult, because I’m trying to play the truth of what I am,” Mingus said. In one of his most quoted interviews, with the producer Nesuhi Ertegun, Mingus explained that the smoldering, sizzling force of his music was a reflection of everything happening inside. And he kept his ensembles as loose as a group of friends joking around the card table.
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As a composer, he brought the blues erudition of Duke Ellington into every group he led, whether sextets or full orchestras. He stretched the instrument’s powers of melody and found new ways of making it into leadership material. His playing style was fierce, almost violent, as if the trauma of American racism was coming through it.īorn 100 years ago on Friday along the United States-Mexico border, in a body that confounded easy racial categorization (one of his most memorable ballads is “Self-Portrait in Three Colors”), Mingus lived, wrote and played bass in a state of agitated brilliance. In an era where the wrong opinions could get him killed or, at the very least, exiled from the music business, he expressed himself boldly, and exorcised strong emotions through the strings of his upright bass. Charles Mingus was everything all at once: jazz, folk, dance, theater, label owner, brave Black man.
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