On Charles Mingus

1/ As How to Listen to Jazz and now, The Language of Jazz, barely talk about Charles Mingus, I have to look other places for writings about his music.
This is a good article: https://www.thenation.com/article/argument-instruments-charles-mingus/

“For sheer range of expression, his work has few equals in postwar American music: furious and tender, joyous and melancholy, grave and mischievous, ecstatic and introspective. It moves from the rapture of the church to the euphoria of the ballroom, from accusation to seduction, from a whisper to a growl, often by way of startling jump cuts and sudden changes in tempo. Vocal metaphors are irresistible when discussing Mingus. As Whitney Balliett remarked, music for him was “another way of talking.””

This is why Mingus Ah Um is a good place to start—it is diverse and shows his different styles and different moods.

“That fire, that irrepressible energy, made Mingus somewhat unfashionable in an era of cool. So did his unabashed maximalism as a composer. The limpid impressionism of Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue (1959), the funky vamps of hard bop and soul jazz, and the honky-tonk expressiveness of Ornette Coleman had little in common, but all were attempts at achieving a simpler, more immediate style than bebop with its bewildering velocity and jarring dissonances.”

Is this why Charles Mingus seems to be overlooked? I like both the impressionism of Kind of Blue and Mingus’s “unabashed maximalism”. I love his raw, bold music, full of life, energy, and rage. 

“Ornette and his followers, Mingus complained to Goodman, were like surgeons who couldn’t retrace their steps: “if I’m a surgeon, am I going to cut you open ‘by heart,’ just free-form it, you know?… I’m not avant-garde, no. I don’t throw rocks and stones, I don’t throw my paint.” […]
Mingus wasn’t afraid of the new, but he didn’t see why it should come at the expense of the past, as the slogans of the avant-garde seemed to imply. He was a rebel in defense of tradition. […] In 1959, the year Coleman announced The Shape of Jazz to Come, Mingus called one of his records Blues & Roots: black music, as he saw it, was a continuum, a bottomless source of renewal; you couldn’t move into the future without a thorough knowledge of the past. “Those eras in the history of jazz, like Dixieland,” he told Goodman, “are the same and as important as classical music styles are.” Gospel and blues, the New Orleans polyphony of Jelly Roll Morton and the urbane sophistication of the Duke Ellington Orchestra, the stride piano of James P. Johnson and the dazzling harmonizations of Art Tatum: all went into the Mingus cauldron, seasoned with dashes of circus music, obscure pop tunes, B-movie scores, flamenco, scraps of Mozart and Richard Strauss. To listen to Mingus is to hear the black American musical tradition talking to itself.”

Blues & Roots was released in 1960 but recorded in 1959, before The Shape of Jazz to Come. It’s particularly interesting in context—after the period of cool jazz (itself a reaction to bebop) and modal jazz, some musicians were going back to their roots and incorporating blues and gospel music in jazz, with hard bop, whilst others were “going forward” with avant-garde jazz and free jazz around the same time.
I won’t quote more from the article, as it should be read in whole. Quite long but a good piece. Adam Shatz writes about the music as well as the man behind the music—early ambitions (classical music), influences, developments in his career, personality, racial identity, and all the things that shaped Mingus’s music. 

2/ Ted Gioia writes about Charles Mingus in his The History of Jazz—the chapter is published on the Jazz Profiles blog:
http://jazzprofiles.blogspot.com/2018/10/ted-gioia-on-charles-mingus-history-of.html

“Like many jazz bandleaders who came to prominence in the 1950s, Charles Mingus drew inspiration from the hard-bop style, albeit transforming it into his own image. He drew heavily on the same ingredients that had proven successful for Blakey and Silver: an appreciation for African American roots music such as gospel and blues; a zest for hard-swinging, often funky playing; a rigorous schooling in the bebop idiom; a renewed emphasis on formalism and the possibilities of jazz composition; and a determination to exploit the full expressive range of the traditional horns-plus-rhythm jazz combo. Despite these similarities, few critics of the period saw Mingus as part of the hard-bop school. Yet his mature musical explorations rarely ventured far afield from this ethos. Had Mingus recorded for Blue Note and drawn on the services of other musicians affiliated with that label, these links would have been more evident. As it stands, he is typically seen as a musician who defies category—more a gadfly, skilled at disrupting hegemonies rather than supporting the current trends in play. Mingus is remembered as a progressive who never really embraced the freedom principle and a traditionalist who constantly tinkered with and subverted the legacies of the past.”

I’m helpless when trying to write about music, so click the link and read Ted Gioia’s chapter.

3/ Here are my favourite albums:
Mingus Ah Um:


Oh Yeah:


The Clown:


The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady:


I’ve also listened to Blues & Roots and Tijuana Moods (did I check out Mingus Dynasty?)—The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady is different from everything else.
Go listen.