AMERICAN MUSIC:

An unavoidable issue that Mingus struggled with all his life, and a very timely concern in our hyper-political times, is the indignities and complexities of race and racism in America. Race is a fiction that nevertheless writes the script of too much of American life. Mingus did his best to flip it. The story of Mingus's actual ancestral roots tends to change depending on who you ask, but Mingus was evidently part Black, part Chinese, part white, and possibly any number of other things.   

Being mixed race was evidently one of the reasons why he often felt on the outside of whatever group that was around. If you watch the documentary Triumph of the Underdog, he remembers what the schoolyard bullies called him, and suffice to say that it's unprintable. He sometimes described himself as always being too Black to be white and too white to be Black. This anguished mental state was clearly not an easy space to inhabit, especially in the tightly normative world of midcentury America, but that mélange of experiences and intersecting narratives is exactly what makes Mingus as American as anyone. 

It may be apocryphal, but I tend to believe the story that young Mingus was getting picked on all the time at school for being different and fighting so much that he was eventually taken to the school psychologist. The results of an IQ test informed him that apparently he was a genius and so don't let the other kids get him down. If anything, I think the story illustrates the essential contradictions that fueled the vision: his immense skill contending with his volatility, deep vulnerability balancing roiling anger, and sarcastic wit wrapped in an iron pride.    

Life ain't easy for any musician (just ask, they'll tell you) but it's notoriously tough for jazz musicians. The often long, wordless, complex music doesn't have the easy absorption of your average three-minute singalong pop tune. Mingus certainly intended to rouse and captivate his audiences, but that became increasingly harder to do as rock and roll started to take over the airwaves in the '50s and '60s. Every performer wants to get people to listen. And it isn't always the easiest thing to do when playing a complex, intricate tune amid the bustle of a crowded, smoky nightclub with drinks clinking and talk circulating, made worse when the paying audience (which is, needless to say, tends to be predominantly white) is expecting to be entertained rather than challenged or confronted. 

Jazz's vital reliance on improvisation and teamwork makes it harder to phone it in, as plenty of successful pop bands tend to do whenever they want the easy money of a legacy tour. You've got to be totally present, utterly in the pocket, with all synapses firing fully and precisely to play good jazz, let alone court exquisitely orchestrated chaos with a mercurial Mingus as ringmaster night after night. This is probably why his musicians tended to stick with him despite all the macho bullshit: all that berating, the smashed stuff, the punchouts, and all the rest of it. Mingus played an already demanding music to its fullest extent, and this made the people around him better, upping their game by keeping them on edge. That's a test that only a few can pass; many are called but few are chosen   

Genius that he was, Mingus did the first crucial thing that all artists must do and mastered the forms that he inherited from his musical ancestors, especially Duke Ellington. Then he proceeded to take them apart with dissonance, free improvisation, poetry, and genre-bending. A natural if temperamental leader, the number of gifted musicians he collaborated with is remarkable. In true jazz style, their story cannot be told without his story, and his story is inseparable from theirs. Mingus often willfully confronted his audiences, demanding the tribute of fully paid attention, ("Isaac Stern doesn't have to put up with this s[***]") and, in return, he and his crew gave them everything they had, which was big helpings of everything. 

So now that we've had some time to let his legend grow and his reputation develop and we take his greatness for granted, let's give him the attention he deserves, shall we? Friends, newbies, fans, and the idly curious are all invited to pull up a chair, light something up and/or pour yourself a drink and lend the mighty Mingus your ears. Here follows a selection of some of my favorite Mingus tunes, with a few supplemental texts offered as guides to the perplexed.

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