![[Sharps and Flats]](sharps.gif)
RECENT REVIEWS:
4/21/97:
4/18/97:
4/17/97:
4/16/97:
4/15/97:
SEARCH MUSIC ARCHIVES BY:
|
the afterlife of charles mingus
_________________ BY KEITH MOERER the best music lives on after the death of its makers, but how satisfying a life depends on who's minding the legacy. The four albums recorded by Jimi Hendrix have been sliced, diced and repackaged two dozen times in the 30 years since his death. Forty-seven years after going to the grave, Hank Williams is still releasing albums -- last year, it was "Three Hanks," an album featuring the country legend, his son Hank Jr. and grandson Hank III. It was a miracle of up-to-the-second technology -- and old-as-sin grave robbing. Jazz musicians would seem to have it easier. Their work lends itself to repertory outfits carrying on the tradition, and often the name, of their masters. Still, it seems surprising that the music of Charles Mingus, who would have celebrated his 75th birthday today, has continued to thrive after his death. Unlike Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk, Mingus' music was rarely played by others during his lifetime. Part of the reason was Mingus himself. A troubled perfectionist, he was known for shouting at musicians and belittling audiences he deemed insufficiently attentive. "Charles was such an enormous presence, with such a huge personality, people didn't trespass the territory," is how his widow, Sue Mingus, explains it. "They didn't think about playing his music -- it was his domain. He was much too formidable." Since his death, however, Mingus has proven to be a generous patron. The first time Mingus died was Oct. 12, 1962, the night he debuted his two-hour-plus work, "Epitaph," at New York's Town Hall. As the first extended jazz composition since Ellington's "Black, Brown and Beige" in 1943, it should have been Mingus' greatest achievement. Instead, it was a disaster, ending in curtain-closing chaos and Mingus' third-degree assault conviction for taking a swipe at trombonist Jimmy Knepper. Mingus died a second time on Nov. 22, 1966, when he was evicted from his New York loft for failure to pay rent. Though he landed a few months later in a cheap, Lower East Side apartment, he spent the next three years in virtual retirement. Sick of the music industry -- "a jungle with money," as he called it -- he rarely left his bed, except for the few months he spent confined to the psychiatric ward at Bellevue Hospital. The third and final time Mingus died was Jan. 5, 1979, in Cuernevaca, Mexico. Crippled by Lou Gehrig's disease, he tried every kind of cure, from biofeedback to drinking iguana blood. By the end, he was too weak to play an instrument, so he sang his final few compositions into a tape recorder. A few weeks before his death, Sue Mingus asked her husband, a believer in reincarnation, what he planned to come back as. His answer -- "I'm not going to leave." And as he himself predicted, Mingus simply won't go for good. Every Thursday for the past six years, the 14-piece Mingus Big Band has taken the stage at New York's Time Cafe, playing his music as he only half imagined. Best known during his life as a bass virtuoso and bandleader, Mingus primarily thought of himself as a composer. Eighteen years after his death, the jazz world finally seems to agree. His 300-plus compositions -- ballads, blues, suites and other extended pieces -- are now regarded second only to Ellington's in terms of breadth and quality. By her own estimation, Sue Mingus is an unlikely leader of the Mingus Big Band. She doesn't play an instrument, and there were no detailed conversations with Charles before his death about carrying his music forward. A lively woman in her 50s (I caught up with her shortly after her return from a Colorado ski vacation), she first recognized the enormity of her husband's work in the mid-'80s, when she let a Canadian musicologist named Andrew Homzy sift through Mingus' scores, kept in cardboard boxes in her Manhattan apartment. Though many of the works Homzy catalogued were already well-known, some had been performed only a few times, or never played as intended. Such was the case with "Epitaph." "It was probably the central tragedy of his life," says Sue of his most ambitious work. "If he'd been able to show the world who he was, his life would have been very different." To show the world belatedly, Sue put together more than 30 musicians and staged "Epitaph" at Lincoln Center in 1989. Emboldened by its reception, Sue decided to tackle another oversight of Charles' life: Though he sometimes wrote music for big band, Mingus rarely had the resources to play with one. The idea of forming a Mingus Big Band was greeted with skepticism initially, even by the man who served as its first musical director, trombonist Knepper. "How can you have a Mingus Band without Mingus?" he asked Sue. "That was the attitude of a lot of people," remembers Sue. "But I took my cue from Charles, who always said he was first and foremost a composer. In fact, now it's irrelevant if we have people in the band who played with Mingus. It's great if they're there, and their contact can spill over to the others, but it's not essential." More than a set lineup, the Mingus Big Band is a rotating army of more than 100 jazz musicians, eager to play music they might have been afraid to interpret while Mingus was alive. As spiritual and organizational leader, Sue picks both the musical directors and the compositions performed. From there, it's up to the musicians, who are encouraged to improvise freely. "The idea is to play Mingus' music faithfully, but not with too much reverence," Sue explains. "Charles hated when musicians got in grooves. As a bass player, he never considered himself to be in a supportive role. He was always there, turning things on end and shifting tempos so musicians weren't just loping along." When I last heard the band a few weeks ago, alto saxophonist Steve Slagle called most of the tunes, but Sue, holding court with friends at the back of the Time Cafe, was clearly in charge. At one point, she directed composer Gunther Schuller to take the stage to conduct one of "Epitaph's" many movements. A onetime colleague of Mingus, Schuller introduced the piece by stressing its incredible complexity, and some of the musicians seemed vexed while playing it. Maybe it was the difficulty of what they were playing, but more likely it was the autocratic hand of Schuller that put the players on edge. The implication was that Mingus at his most ambitious was too complicated to be left in the hands of mortal musicians. The result was the only dead performance in a 90-minute set. The musicians seemed more free -- and Mingus seemed more alive -- when they explored the loose swing of "Nostalgia in Times Square" and the eloquent grace of "Carolyn 'Keiki' Mingus," a tribute to the bassist's only daughter. The latter composition is pure, distilled emotion, and you could hear the soloists channeling their own interpretations of love along the way. If "Carolyn" is Mingus at his most visceral, a song such as "Number 29" is technically demanding in a way that seems more organic than what I've heard of "Epitaph." Written in the early '70s, "Number 29" was originally a dare requiring a trumpeter to play virtually every note on the instrument. Shortly before his death, Charles sang a new three-horn arrangement into a tape recorder. But on the Mingus Big Band's recent CD, "Live in Time," Sy Johnson rearranged the piece again, this time for Slagle on alto sax, John Stubblefield on tenor sax and Randy Brecker on trumpet. Clearly, it's not the same as Mingus' original piece but the spirit remains true, and this mix of generosity and challenge is why Mingus still matters. "Charles left very structured music, but he left so much freedom
and space for musicians to come in and play themselves," says Sue. "That
shows a lot of trust and faith in his fellow musicians, in their ability to
preserve the feeling and spirit of his music without corrupting it. By
extending it, by adding to it, they make it more modern as years go by."
Life may not have been kind to Charles Mingus. But death, it seems, becomes him.
Keith Moerer is a regular contributor to Salon. |
