Artist: Charles Mingus Genre(s):
Jazz
Discography:
Plays It Cool Year: 2000
Tracks: 7
Pithecanthropus Erectus: 1955-1957 Year: 1999
Tracks: 9
Paris 1964 Vol.1 Year: 1999
Tracks: 4
Mingus Ah Um Year: 1999
Tracks: 12
Tonight at Noon Year: 1998
Tracks: 5
In a Soulful Mood Year: 1996
Tracks: 8
Paris 1964 Vol.2 Year: 1995
Tracks: 2
Town Hall Concert Year: 1991
Tracks: 2
Three or Four Shades of Blues Year: 1990
Tracks: 5
Epitaph CD2 Year: 1990
Tracks: 9
Epitaph CD1 Year: 1990
Tracks: 10
Cumbia and Jazz Fusion Year: 1978
Tracks: 4
Lionel Hampton Presents Charles Mingus Year: 1977
Tracks: 10
Changes Two Year: 1975
Tracks: 5
Changes One Year: 1975
Tracks: 4
Let My Children Hear Music Year: 1972
Tracks: 7
The Great Paris Concert (cd2) Year: 1964
Tracks: 3
The Great Paris Concert (cd1) Year: 1964
Tracks: 4
The Great Concert (Paris 1964) Year: 1964
Tracks: 7
Mingus in Europe, Vol. 2 Year: 1964
Tracks: 5
Meditation Year: 1964
Tracks: 4
The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady Year: 1963
Tracks: 4
Mingus Plays Piano Year: 1963
Tracks: 11
Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Year: 1963
Tracks: 8
The Complete Town Hall Concert Year: 1962
Tracks: 12
Oh Yeah: Remastered Year: 1961
Tracks: 10
Ken Burns Jazz Series: Charles Mingus Year:
Tracks: 9
Irascible, demanding, bullying, and probably a genius, Charles Mingus cut himself a uniquely iconoclastic itinerary through jazz in the middle of the 20th c, creating a legacy that became universally lauded but after he was no thirster around to hemipterous insect people. As a bassist, he knew few peers, blame with a powerful tone and pulsating sense of rhythm method of birth control, capable of elevating the instrument into the front demarcation of a band. But had he been barely a string player, few would know his list today. Rather, he was the superlative bass-playing leader/composer jazz has ever so known, one world Health Organization always kept his ears and fingers on the beat, spirit, spontaneity, and savage expressive ability of jazz.
Intensely ambitious yet much earthy in expression, simultaneously radical and deeply traditional, Mingus' music took elements from everything he had experient -- from gospel and blues through New Orleans jazz, swing, boP, Latin music, mod classical medicine, even the jazz van. His standard was Duke Ellington, merely Mingus took the sonic blend and harmonies of Ellingtonia often further, throwing in scratchy dissonances and sharp changes in m and tempo, introducing hugely exhilarating accelerations that generated a momentum of their have. While his early works were written prohibited in a authoritative fashion, by the mid-'50s, he had worked knocked out a new way of getting his unconventional visions crosswise, dictating the parts to his musicians spell allowing plentitude of room for the players' have musical personalities and ideas. He was besides a formidable piano player, full subject of pickings that role in a group -- which he did in his 1961-62 bands, hiring some other bassist to replete in for him.
Along the means, Mingus made a band of enemies, causation sometimes violent confrontations on and off the outdoor stage. A great man physically, he used his majority as a weapon of deterrence, and he was non to a higher place halting concerts to cud out neglectful audiences or errant sidemen, even cashiering a player now and and so on the daub. At one of his concerts in Philadelphia -- and a memorial to a dead co-worker at that -- he stony-broke up the demonstrate by slamming the piano lid down, closely shattering his pianist's hands, and then punched trombone player Jimmy Knepper in the backtalk. For a savage physical portraiture of the emotions that seethed within him, check out the photograph on the cover of Duke Ellington's
Money Jungle; Mingus looks as if he is about to vote out individual. But he could besides be a gentle giant as his moods permitted, and that quality tin can be felt in some of his music.
Mingus felt the lash of racial prepossess identical intensely -- which, combined with the frustrations of making it in the music business on his own damage, establish its release in music. Indeed, some of his flaky titles were political in nature, such as Fables of Faubus (referring to the Arkansas governor world Health Organization tried to preserve Little Rock schools segregated), "Oh Lord, Don't Let Them Drop That Atomic Bomb on Me" or "Remember Rockefeller at Attica." But he could besides be wildly humourous, the to the highest degree notorious model organism "If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There'd Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats" (by and by telescoped to "Gunslinging Bird").
Born in a Nogales Army camp, Mingus was shortly thenceforth taken to the Watts territory of Los Angeles, where he grew up. The first music he heard was that of the church service -- the only music his stepmother allowed about the household -- only one day, disdain the threat of penalisation, he tuned in Duke Ellington's "Orient St. Louis Toodle-Oo" on his father's crystal set, his first exposure to jazz. He time-tested to memorise the trombone at sextuplet and then the violoncello, just he became fed up with incompetent teachers and terminated up on the double bass by the time he reached high schooling. His early teachers were Red Callender and an ex-New York Philharmonic bassist named Herman Rheinschagen, and he as well studied composition with Lloyd Reese. A proto-third stream authorship written by Mingus in 1940-41, "Half-staff Inhibition" (recorded in 1960), reveals an extraordinary timbral resource for a adolescent.
As a sea bass prognostic, Mingus performed with Kid Ory in Barney Bigard's mathematical group in 1942 and went on the route with Louis Armstrong the next twelvemonth. He would gravitate toward the R&B side of the route later in the '40s, running with the Lionel Hampton band in 1947-48, support R&B and jazz performers, and leading ensembles in respective idioms under the bring up Baron Von Mingus. He began to attract real national attention as a bassist for Red Norvo's trio with Tal Farlow in 1950-51, and after going that mathematical group, he moved to New York and began working with several astral wind performers, including Billy Taylor, Stan Getz and Art Tatum. He was the bassist in the famed 1953 Massey Hall concert in Toronto with Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell and Max Roach, and he in short united his idol Ellington, where he had the dubious distinction of being the only man Duke ever so personally fired from his band.
Round this time, Mingus time-tested to cook himself into a rallying point for the jazz community. He founded Debut Records in partnership with his then-wife Celia and Roach in 1952, eyesight to it that the label recorded a wide-eyed variety of jazz from bop to experimental music until its demise in 1957. Among Debut's nigh notable releases were the Massey Hall concert, an record album by Miles Davis, and several Mingus sessions that traced the development of his ideas. He as well contributed composed whole works to the Jazz Composers' Workshop from 1953 to 1955, and later in '55, he founded his have Jazz Workshop repertory mathematical group that base him moving away from strict notation toward his looser, set mode of composing.
By 1956, with the liberation of
Genus Pithecanthropus Erectus (Atlantic Ocean), Mingus had intelligibly base himself as a composer and leader, creating pulsating, ever-shifting compendiums of jazz's past and give, spirit his way into the free jazz of the future. For the future decennary, he would stream away an extraordinary torso of work for several labels, including key albums like
The Clown,
New Tijuana Moods,
Mingus Ah Um,
Vapours and Roots and
Oh Yeah; standards like "Good-bye Pork Pie Hat," "Better Git It in Your Soul," "Haitian Fight Song" and "Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting," and extended works like
Meditations on Integration and
Epitaph. Through ensembles ranging in sizing from a quartette to an 11-piece big dance orchestra, a procession of celebrated sidemen like Eric Dolphy, Jackie McLean, J.R. Monterose, Jimmy Knepper, Roland Kirk, Booker Ervin, and John Handy would go past, with Mingus' dominating bass and volatile personality push his musicians farther than some of them might make liked to go. The groups with the great Dolphy (heard live on
Mingus at Antibes) in the early '60s might have been his to the highest degree dynamic, and
The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady (1963), an extended concert dance for heavy band that captures the anguished/joyful split Mingus personality in full, passionately wild cry out -- may be his masterpiece.
Even so, Mingus' obsessive efforts to release himself from the economic hazards and theft of the music business sector intimately undermined his sanity in the 1960s (so, some of the line drive notes for
The Black Saint album were written by his psychologist, Dr. Edmund Pollock). He tried to compete with the Newport festivals by organizing his have Jazz Artists Guild in 1960 that purported to give musicians more than control o'er their work, but that collapsed with the by-now-routine gall that accompanied so many Mingus ventures. A fatal, self-presented New York Town Hall concert in 1962; some other, shorter-lived recording venture, Charles Mingus Records, in 1964-65; the nonstarter to find a publishing house for his autobiography Beneath the Underdog, and other setbacks stone-broke his bank business relationship and at last his spirit. He quit music almost completely from 1966 until 1969, resuming performances in June 1969 only because he desperately needful money.
Fiscal angels in the forms of a Guggenheim Fellowship in typography, the publication of Beneath the Underdog in 1971, and the purchase of his Debut masters by Fantasy boosted Mingus' john Barleycorn, and a young stimulating Columbia album
Let My Children Hear Music pierce him back up into public attending. By 1974, he had formed a young thomas Young quintette, anchored by his loyal drummer Dannie Richmond and featuring Jack Walrath, Don Pullen and George Adams, and more compositions came away, including the massive, kaleidoscopical, Colombian-based "Cumbia and Jazz Fusion" that began its life as a film account.
Respect was growing, but sentence, regrettably, was running out, for in fall 1977, Mingus was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral induration (Lou Gehrig's disease), and by the following year, he was unable to play the basso. Though confined to a wheelchair, he all the same carried on, leading recording roger Sessions, and receiving honors at a White House concert on June 18, 1978. His last design was a quislingism, Mingus with folk-rock vocalizer Joni Mitchell, world Health Organization wrote lyrics to Mingus' music and included samples of Mingus' articulation on the record.
Since his demise, Mingus' importance and fame increased unco, thanks in large portion to the compulsive efforts of Sue Mingus, his widow. A posthumous repertory grouping, Mingus Dynasty, was formed nearly like a shot later his death, and that conception was expanded in 1991 into the exciting Mingus Big Band, which has resurrected many of Mingus' most challenging lashings.
Epitaph was finally reconstructed, performed and recorded in 1989 to general clap, and several box seat sets of portions of Mingus' yield feature been issued by Rhino/Atlantic, Mosaic and Fantasy. Beyond re-creations, the Mingus influence can be heard on Branford Marsalis' early
Scenes in the City album, and specially in the heavy band writing of his comrade Wynton. The Mingus blend of wildly colourful eclectic method solidly rooted in jazz history should serve his legacy well in a future more and more populated by edward Young conservatives world Health Organization want to pay their respects to custom and try something different.
