For folks who are like "who is that guy again?".... Mingus was one of the most important jazz bass players in 20th century and a key figure in both bebop and free jazz. And quite a character. This is but one of his legendary achievements!
I love how Mingus is so in tune with how his cat (Nightlife) thinks, sensing how to encourage him, how to avoid freaking him out, how to lead him along.
Some of Mingus's best known works (Mingus Ah Um, Black Saint and The Sinner Lady, etc.) are organized group improvisations, with multiple wind instruments playing improvised lines at once. It's different from big bands like Ellington's where you have featured soloists and everybody else playing charts (even if the rhythm section does some improvising), and it's difficult to achieve balance of the various elements under such circumstances. I get a sense from this article how Mingus manages to get inside the heads of his collaborators, to keep their trust, and lead them towards a shared vision.
I got into Charles Mingus through "Mingus Plays Piano", I particularly like piano jazz when working, but any bop oriented jazz is good. Newcomers should give "Myself When I Am Real" a listen, it's a lovely composition.
Charles Mingus was onstage with his band when he was told that Lester Young had died. He called a short minute break and while his band went and got themselves a drink, wrote and arranged (for an 8-piece band) "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat"[1] in tribute. They came back on stage and played it immediately.
Keith Jarrett wrote all the music for a tour of Japan on the plane there. That became the album "Personal Mountains"[2]. Apparently he literally had all the meal trays around him open with scores on them and was scribbling away the whole way.
Reminds me of a Charles Mingus anecdote I came across today:
> The reed player Yusef Lateef recalled his own experience learning Mingus music: “On one composition I had a solo and, as opposed to having chord symbols for me to improvise against, he had drawn a picture of a coffin. And that was the substance upon which I was to improvise.”
I saw the title and thought "you mean the Jazz musician, Charles Mingus?" And sure enough, it is, which kind of makes sense. A random person named Charles Mingus explaining cat toilet training isn't interesting; it's the esoteric intersection of a genius who helped shape an entire genre of music and the mundane things people do in everyday life.
Eric Dolphy, Charles Mingus, and Andrew Hill stand out(to me) in this way. Love the Funk picks, and I would throw in Sly Stone. Ishmael Butler, of Digable Planets and Shabazz Palaces, also has a knack for creating music with a futuristic yet timeless quality.
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