Young Writers Society

KABLOOZLEMAN

Music Appreciation- Jazz

HIS TEACHER

1/18/12

Charles Mingus:

The Man Who Changed the Lives of People He Punched (Among Others)

On April twenty-second 1922, Charles Mingus Jr. was born. On his mother’s side he had mixes of Chinese and English ancestry, while Charles Mingus Sr. was most likely a bastard child of an unnamed black farmhand and the granddaughter of his Swedish employer. In comparison to other well known jazz aficionados, with four wives and only one well-known eviction, Mingus Jr. lead a pretty stable life.

While Charles Mingus Jr. was born on an army base in Nogales Arizona, his family shortly moved to the watts area of Los Angeles, where they stayed for most of Charles’ childhood. Before high school, Mingus was part of the church choir and as such his life was dominated by church music.(Oxford) However, it is said he heard an Ellington song on the radio and he fell in love with jazz and swing.(MingusMingusMingus)

As he entered high school, Charles decided to pick up the trombone, however unsuccessfully. He then switched to the cello. Later, his friends who were participating in the school jazz band were pressuring him to join, so Mingus took up the double bass, which was his instrument of choice until his death. Toward the end of high school, Charles was writing advanced pieces of music by anybody’s standards, including part of his masterpiece Epitaph, The Chill of Death, and Half-Mast Inhibition.(Oxford)

Mingus’s professional career didn’t really start up until he got a job playing with a former Ellington clarinetist named Barney Bigard a few years after High School. In 1943 he briefly toured with Louis Armstrong. Two years later, Charlie returned to Los Angeles to record in a band led by Russel Jacquet. In the late forties he played with Lionel Hampton and his band followed by a two-year stint as part of the Red Norvo trio in 1950 and 51 which gave him some good reputation. Unfortunately, he was forced to leave the trio after some problems with nightclub and bar owners over Mingus’s mixed origins.

Charles Mingus then joined Duke Ellington’s band as a replacement bassist for Wendell Marshall, but was soon fired by Duke Ellington himself because of Mingus’s dangerous temper which earned him the nickname “The Angry Man of Jazz.” The group that Charles joined that really solidified his spot in jazz history and gave him recognition as a serious jazz artist was dubbed by some the “Quintet of the Year.” The musicians (including Mingus) in the quintet were Charlie Parker, Dizzie Gillespie, Max Roach, and Bud Powell.(Oxford)

In the second half of the fifties Charles regularly led a group called “Jazz Workshop. This group really had no constant members other than Mingus. Attendees were expected to remember the mood and feel of the music and how the compose intended the music to be heard while solo improvising. They were also expected to improvise collectively, a style not regularly seen since the New Orleans jazz era, and to learn by ear with no sheet music. This led to the realization of many jazz players including Jackie McLean, James Knepper, John Handy, Booker Ervin, Eric Dolphy, and Roland Kirk.(Oxford)

In the first half of the 1960’s Mingus enjoyed financial stability and relatively good work. However, work dwindled and Charles fell into clinical depression and suffered from a mental breakdown.1977 was the last year he recorded, because less than a year later Mingus was diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's Disease.)(Oxford)

Mingus oversaw the recording of many songs and groups in the years leading up to his death, and he tried to keep composing, but it was hard as he did most of his composing at a keyboard. In 1978 Mingus traveled to Cuernavaca, Mexico for convalescence and treatment.(Oxford) That is also where he died on January 5, 1979.(Haitian Fight Song) Ever since his death Sue Mingus, his wife, has been running the “Mingus Big Band” in his name, and his treasured bass hand-crafted by Ernst Roth is still used.(Ernst Heinrich Roth)

Charles Mingus had a jazz “symphony” that he had been working on for over a decade called, “Epitaph.” It is a a piece of work which is more than 4000 measures long and takes two hours to perform. It was discovered by people going through his work and cataloguing it after his death. The jazz masterpiece was copied, and was played by a 30-piece orchestra at Alice Tully Hall on June 3, 1989, ten years after Mingus' death. The New York Times said it sits with the "most memorable jazz events of the decade." Charles knew he wouldn’t live to see his decade’s toil performed as he envisioned it, so he called his work "Epitaph," saying he wrote it "for my tombstone." (MingusMingusMingus)

Works Cited

Fox, Brian. "Charles Mingus: Epitaph." Bass Player July 2009: 48. Print.

Pomeroy, Dave. "Charles Mingus's 1927 Ernst Heinrich Roth." Bass Player 1 Aug. 2006: 70-71. Print.

Priestly, Brian. "Thelonious Monk and Charles Mingus." The Oxford Companion to Jazz. Ed. Bill Kirchner. 2000: 418-29, 31. Print.

More than a Fake Book. Jazz Workshop. Charles Mingus: The Official Site. Jazz Workshop Inc., 2011. Web. 18 Jan. 2012. <http://www.mingusmingusmingus.com>.