Charles Mingus

Musician

• Born: April 22, 1922
• Birthplace: Nogales, Arizona
• Died: January 5, 1979
• Place of death: Cuernavaca, Mexico

Musician and entertainer

Charles Mingus was a multiracial virtuoso bass player, composer, and bandleader best known for his contribution to the bebop and avant-garde jazz movements of the 1950s and 1960s. One of the most prominent touring jazz artists of the 1960s, he played with many of the most famous jazz musicians of his era and placed significant emphasis on supporting unconventional musicians and composers.

Born: April 22, 1922; Nogales, Arizona

Died: January 5, 1979; Cuernavaca, Mexico

Full name: Charles Mingus Jr.

Areas of achievement: Music, entertainment

Early Life

Charles Mingus Jr. was born in 1922 on an army base in Nogales, Arizona. His father, Charles Mingus Sr., was an army sergeant of mixed African American and Caucasian heritage, while his mother, Harriet Sophia Mingus, was of mixed English and Chinese descent. Mingus’s mother died less than six months after his birth, having struggled for years with chronic myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart. After her death, Mingus and his father moved to the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, a predominantly African American and lower class part of the city.

Mingus’s father married Mamie Carson, a devoutly religious woman of African American and American Indian descent who only approved of classical and religious music in the house. Mingus’s stepmother took him and his siblings to Holiness Church, where they learned gospel music. In his childhood, Mingus learned to play classical and religious music on the cello, but he switched to playing bass in high school after developing an interest in jazz.

Mingus’s high school friend Buddy Collette, who later became a prominent jazz saxophonist and clarinetist, introduced him to bassist Red Callender in 1938, and Callender became one of Mingus’s first and most influential teachers. He also studied composition with Lloyd Reese, a jazz musician and composer who taught composition to many prominent jazz musicians, including saxophonists Eric Dolphy and Ben Webster and trumpeter Harry Carney. Mingus’s lessons with Reese were allegedly an important formative step in his development as a musician. In addition, Reese’s numerous connections in the jazz community helped Mingus to find opportunities early in his career.

Life’s Work

Mingus began playing jazz professionally as a teenager, becoming well known in the local jazz community. In 1942, Mingus landed his first high-profile job, playing alongside trombonist Kid Ory in a big band led by clarinetist Barney Bigard. The following year, Mingus was invited to tour with one of his heroes, trumpeter Louis Armstrong, and he spent a year touring with Armstrong’s big band. When he returned from touring with Armstrong, Mingus began recording with various bands in Los Angeles. In 1947, Mingus toured with vibraphonist Lionel Hampton, during which time material composed by Mingus was first recorded.

In 1950, Mingus joined vibraphonist Red Norvo’s trio that featured guitarist Tal Farlow. Mingus gained national fame through his recordings with Norvo; however, he began to long for a more innovative musical environment and experienced racial discrimination while with the group. When the Norvo trio was booked to appear on television in 1951, the producers of the show were reluctant to allow Mingus on television because of his race, and so Norvo decided to replace Mingus with a Caucasian bassist for the engagement. Mingus quit the band in response to the incident and relocated to New York, where he began working as a freelance player.

In 1953, Mingus began playing with the Duke Ellington orchestra. However, he and Ellington did not work well together, and the engagement lasted only a short time. In February of that year, Mingus had a heated argument with trombonist Juan Tizol. When Tizol threatened Mingus with a knife, Mingus retaliated with a fire axe. In the aftermath, Mingus became the only artist to be fired from Ellington’s big band.

Around this time, Mingus and his then-wife Celia Mingus joined with drummer Max Roach to form a new record label, Debut Records. Mingus’s intention was to create a label that would be open to the progressive sounds of modern jazz and would support innovative young artists. The label was short-lived but resulted in the release of a few high-profile recordings. Among these was the now-famous Jazz at Massey Hall (1953), a live album recorded in Toronto, Canada, that featured Mingus and Roach playing with saxophonist Charlie Parker, pianist Bud Powell, and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie.

In 1955, Mingus formed the Charles Mingus Jazz Workshop, where young musicians could gather and perform each other’s compositions, enabling up-and-coming composers to hear their work performed in an ensemble setting. Mingus used the workshop to experiment with many of his compositional ideas. He also used this setting to produce some of his first overtly political compositions, including the 1961 song “Don’t Let Them Drop That Atomic Bomb on Me.”

Throughout the 1960s, Mingus recorded dozens of albums, many of which are considered classics of avant-garde and modern jazz music. Among his most famous recorded albums are Pithecanthropus Erectus (1956), Tijuana Moods (1962), and The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady (1963). Mingus lived and worked in an environment that blended music with the counterculture of 1960s New York City society. In 1964, he met and began a relationship with Susan Graham, the woman with whom he would remain until his death. The couple were married in 1975 in a wedding officiated by counterculture icon Allen Ginsberg.

In 1971, Mingus was given the Slee Chair of Music at the State University of New York, which is one of the oldest endowed music-teaching positions in the nation. Mingus also traveled extensively, spending time in Europe, Asia, and the United States. In 1974, Mingus formed a new ensemble and recorded one of his most unusual albums, Cumbia and Jazz Fusion, which blended Western jazz and native Colombian music, initially written as a film score.

In the fall of 1977, Mingus was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (commonly known as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease), a degenerative nerve condition. As his symptoms progressed, Mingus was confined to a wheelchair and unable to play music. However, he continued to record by singing into a tape recorder. Mingus and his wife relocated to Cuernavaca, Mexico, where he received treatment and convalesced until his death in January 1979.

Significance

Mingus was one of the most important performers and composers of the bebop and post-bebop jazz eras, and he left a lasting legacy in jazz composition. Mingus played and recorded with many of the greatest talents in jazz history, and he maintained an active role in helping jazz to develop beyond the standard compositions of previous generations into a new wave of jazz marked by greater experimentation in compositional structure.

Many of Mingus’s recordings demonstrated his ability to combine musical genres and compositional styles without sacrificing the integrity of the composition. Mingus freely used elements common to gospel, popular music, and classical music in his compositions, and toward the end of his life, he frequently integrated ethnic and American folk music into his pieces.

Since his death, Mingus’s life and work have been the subjects of numerous analyses and critical reviews, reasserting his continued relevance in jazz history. The Charles Mingus Big Band, which began in 1991, has paid tribute to Mingus by continuing to perform the artist’s compositions for new generations of listeners.

Although Mingus never took an active role in politics, his work as a bandleader, as well as his forays into the recording industry and the development of the workshop format, was partially motivated by his experiences with prejudice and racism in the American music industry. Many of Mingus’s recordings were imbued with serious political messages, and he often used his music as a tool to communicate his frustrations and anger about the inequities of life and the political environment of his era.

Bibliography

Mingus, Sue Graham. Tonight at Noon: A Love Story.New York: Da Capo, 2003. Print. Offers a biography told from the perspective of Mingus’s widow, focusing on Mingus’s relationships and personality.

Priestly, Brian. Mingus: A Critical Biography. New York: Da Capo, 1982. Print. Presents a biographical account of Mingus’s life and offers an analysis of the effect of his career and music on twentieth- and twenty-first-century music.

Santoro, Gene. Myself When I Am Real: The Life and Music of Charles Mingus. New York: Oxford UP, 2000. Print. A biographical account focusing on the origins of Mingus’s unusual personality traits and their effects on his music and relationships.

Scott, Saul. Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t: Jazz and the Making of the 1960s. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2003. Print. A history detailing the evolution of jazz music in the sixties, also containing a brief biography of Mingus and an analysis of his work.