{"id":22281,"date":"2013-09-26T09:09:18","date_gmt":"2013-09-26T14:09:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=22281"},"modified":"2013-09-26T09:15:24","modified_gmt":"2013-09-26T14:15:24","slug":"charles-mingus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/09\/26\/charles-mingus\/","title":{"rendered":"Charles Mingus"},"content":{"rendered":"

In The Nation<\/em>, Adam Shatz<\/a> looks back at the turbulent and creative career of Jazz giant Charles Mingus:<\/p>\n

Mingus rarely left his pieces alone when he took them on the road with his Jazz Workshop, as he began calling his bands in the mid-1950s. When the Workshop played \u201cFables of Faubus,\u201d a dart of sarcasm aimed at Arkansas\u2019s segregationist governor Orval Faubus, at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the jaunty eight-minute tune swelled into a half-hour suite, punctuated by tart allusions to \u201cWhen Johnny Comes Marching Home\u201d and \u201cGod Bless America\u201d and a bass clarinet solo of blistering intensity by Eric Dolphy. (The performance is one of five concerts included in The Jazz Workshop Concerts 1964\u201365<\/em>, a seven-disc boxed set on Mosaic Records.) In the studio, Mingus was always splicing, dicing and overdubbing, enriching the texture of his music, increasing its density. He tinkered with titles, giving old pieces new and sometimes cryptic names: the tender portrait of a woman he loved, \u201cNouroog,\u201d reappeared after their breakup as \u201cI X Love\u201d; \u201cBetter Get It in Your Soul,\u201d a foot-stomping gospel tune that\u2019s still played on jukeboxes, became \u201cBetter Get Hit in Yo\u2019 Soul,\u201d a message to junkies that they\u2019d be better off with a boost from the Lord than one from the needle.<\/p>\n

Mingus was always true to his ever-changing moods: he wanted to create music that, in his words, was \u201cas varied as my feelings are, or the world is.\u201d For sheer range of expression, his work has few equals in postwar American music: furious and tender, joyous and melancholy, grave and mischievous, ecstatic and introspective. It moves from the rapture of the church to the euphoria of the ballroom, from accusation to seduction, from a whisper to a growl, often by way of startling jump cuts and sudden changes in tempo. Vocal metaphors are irresistible when discussing Mingus. As Whitney Balliett remarked, music for him was \u201canother way of talking.\u201d<\/p>\n

Though he wrote only a few songs with lyrics, his compositions \u2014 and his own bass playing, which revealed new dimensions of the instrument and helped liberate it from its traditional time-keeping role \u2014 were supremely vocal. He collaborated with poets in East Village coffeehouses and never hesitated to call out to his sidemen when the spirit caught him, as if he was leading a gospel choir. Each instrument in a Mingus tune evoked the voice, invariably in conversation with other voices; and each voice was an extension of his famously tempestuous personality. (\u201cWe don\u2019t need a vocalist,\u201d he told the trombonist Britt Woodman. \u201cThis band can have an argument with instruments.\u201d) Philip Larkin was astonished by \u201chow every Mingus band sounds like a great rabble of players, like some trick of Shakespearian production.\u201d No matter how small the ensemble, he could create a sense of passionate, often combative dialogue: as one of his sidemen put it, Mingus \u201cliked the sound of a struggle.\u201d If his Workshop settled into a groove, he would suddenly change the time signature: he didn\u2019t want anyone to get too comfortable. Struggle \u2014 against complacency, against the confinements of race and genre, against the record industry and the American government \u2014 inspired him; he depended on it to create. Though he dreamed of finding refuge on some \u201ccolorless island,\u201d it wasn\u2019t clear how he\u2019d spend his time there. He needed something to fight against; his anger, in Geoff Dyer\u2019s words, was \u201ca form of energy, part of the fire sweeping through him.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In The Nation, Adam Shatz looks back at the turbulent and creative career of Jazz giant Charles Mingus: Mingus rarely left his pieces alone when he took them on the road with his Jazz Workshop, as he began calling his bands in the mid-1950s. When the Workshop played \u201cFables of Faubus,\u201d a dart of sarcasm […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,28,13],"tags":[311,349,200],"class_list":["post-22281","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-media","category-usa","tag-1960s","tag-jazz","tag-music"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-5Nn","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22281","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22281"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22281\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22282,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22281\/revisions\/22282"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22281"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22281"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22281"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}