Charles Mingus: Triumph of the Underdog

 

Mingus, 1946

Mingus, Roy Haynes, Monk, and Charlie Parker, 1953

Eddie Bert and Snooky Young

Mingus with Charles McPherson

Bobby Jones

Sue Mingus with Gunther Schuller

Schuller conducting Epitaph

Sue Mingus

Director Don McGlynn

CHARLES MINGUS: TRIUMPH OF THE UNDERDOG             B-                                        USA  (78 mi)  1998  d: Don McGlynn

I am Charles Mingus. Half-black man. Yellow man. Half-yellow. Not even yellow, nor white enough to pass for nothing but black and not too light enough to be called white. I am Charles Mingus, a famed jazzman, but not famed enough to make a living in this society.          —Charles Mingus, early 60’s

A more traditional side of an uncompromising artist, made nearly twenty years after the death of incomparable jazz bassist Charles Mingus, with the documentary attempting to reframe his life in terms of his musical legacy, suggesting he’s one of the 20th century’s greatest composers.  Mingus is probably best known as one of the most outstanding bass players in history, performing with some of the most significant jazz musicians who ever lived, including Kid Ory, Louis Armstrong, Art Tatum, Fats Navarro, Duke Ellington, Lionel Hampton, Bud Powell, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Eric Dolphy, and Max Roach, a veritable who’s who in the pantheon of jazz greats.  Even though he’s been associated with various schools of jazz, such as bebop, swing, free jazz, or avant-garde, what made Mingus exceptional was his ability to incorporate all the jazz styles and meld them into his own, while at the same time infusing his compositions with his own social, political, and racial views, always known for pushing the boundaries, Charles Mingus - Shortnin' Bread YouTube (52 seconds), creating an alternative understanding of his music, yet he only really achieved recognition late in his career.  Early on we are introduced to Gunther Schuller, an American composer, conductor, music educator, and tireless advocate for bridging classical music and jazz, an originator of the Third Stream movement, who suggests that Mingus should be ranked among the most important American composers, jazz or otherwise, which becomes the primary focus of the film.  Like many great artists, their stature is never truly realized until after their death, as was the case of Mingus, as many of his written compositions were only discovered in storage by musicologist Andrew Homzy in the home of his widow Sue Mingus, consisting of 76 boxes with 15,000 items, including scores, sound recordings, correspondence, and photos, which are now housed in the Library of Congress, in what they described as “the most important acquisition of a manuscript collection relating to jazz in the Library’s history.”  Sue Mingus is one of the producers of the film, accepting a lifetime achievement Grammy on his behalf 18 years after his death, and appears on camera together with Celia Mingus Zaentz, an earlier wife, both white women who look surprisingly alike, each recalling their personal experiences with Mingus, describing him as strong, extremely honest, emotionally volatile, and uncompromising, with Mingus composing a song for each of them, Charles Mingus - Celia - YouTube (7:54) and Sue's Changes - YouTube (17:04).  The film follows a standard biographical timeline, offering photos with clips of musical material, including performances by icons Lionel Hampton, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, and Gerry Mulligan, identifying various musicians he worked with, many of them adding their own recollections, yet what’s perhaps most surprising is the prevalent use of archival material from Thomas Friedman’s groundbreaking work Mingus (1968), particularly Mingus speaking before the camera.  According to Sue Mingus, “Charles always knew what audiences wanted and how to entertain them—‘which [I] didn’t do,’ he said ... He could be something of a ham actor for his own enjoyment from time to time, but entertainment was not what he was after.  He wanted audiences to listen to his music and take it seriously.  He believed it belonged in concert halls, not noisy jazz clubs, but noisy clubs and ringing cash registers were the reality of his time.”

In something of a disappointing surprise, this film might only really be relevant to people who are already fans of Mingus, as it never really strays from the conventional documentary format, feeling more like a memorial tribute film, where every accolade is laudatory in nature.  Due to the volatile nature of his personality, and his explosive temperament onstage as a bandleader, you’d think they’d find somebody who was pissed off at working with him, but this is entirely a love fest.  Most of the musicians speaking before the camera are white, as is the director, which makes you wonder what’s missing, feeling very chopped up, told in brief spurts, never really attempting to get at the heart of the artist.  There’s a wonderful exchange with Mingus and his longtime drummer Danny Richmond, working together for 21-years and an invaluable friend, revealing the techniques of a musical conversation, First Drum lesson YouTube (1:46), an indispensable ingredient of the Mingus sound, creating an elastic sense of time, developing a flexible rhythmic platform for his soloists, often making abrupt transitions.  Celia describes meeting Mingus in the early 50’s and falling in love, recalling how Mingus laid his fingers on her and played her body like a bass fiddle, starting their own jazz label with drummer Max Roach, Debut Records (Debut Records - jazz album covers), frustrated by the diminished earnings of black artists from white-owned record companies, with Celia writing the liner notes and obtaining photographs, while Mingus shipped the records himself.  It was a short-lived company, producing only about two dozen records, one of which was Jazz at Massey Hall, an assembled bebop dream team in 1953, where each musician in the quintet was considered to be the principle innovator at their respective instrument within the bebop movement, including Charlie Parker on alto sax, Dizzy Gillespie on trumpet, Bud Powell on piano, Max Roach on drums, and Mingus on bass, heralded at the time as “the greatest jazz concert ever.”  However, trombonist Jimmy Knepper, one of the defining musicians working with Mingus in the late 50’s and early 60’s, at times the only white member of the ensemble, describes his relationship in Brian Priestley’s biography as a kind of dysfunctional romance from which he could find no escape.  “Mingus just seemed to be unavoidable to me.  I used to get very depressed.  Good God, I’d say to myself, I’m stuck with this guy for the rest of my life.  His music was so difficult, with all those time changes and different sequences…It seemed written to trip you up.  I wanted to relax and play standards.”  While working together in Mingus’s apartment, needing someone to help him copy out individual parts for a large group of musicians, as Knepper worked for years as his copyist, but when it grew to be too much, tempers flared and Mingus punched him in the mouth, breaking two caps off his teeth and severing their working relationship, but they reconciled their differences and worked together again nine years later.  Even after the death of Mingus, Knepper led the Mingus Dynasty Orchestra on tours in the Middle East and Europe.  The film title is a variation on his own 1971 free-form autobiography entitled Beneath the Underdog: His World as Composed by Mingus, which can be read in its entirety, Beneath the underdog : Mingus, Charles, 1922 - Internet Archive, and you can hear a 35-minute Studs Terkel radio interview with a somewhat reticent Mingus that same year discussing the book, Charles Mingus discusses his book "Beneath The Underdog", while jazz author and scholar Krin Gabbard recounts the many difficulties in publishing the book in his own 2016 biography, Excerpt from a 2016 biography of Charles Mingus.   

The director, Don McGlynn, made a series of music documentaries, developing an affinity for California’s west coast jazz musicians, where this film offers a window into Mingus’s musical compositions, Charles Mingus So Long Eric YouTube (2:35).  Perhaps the most convincing testimony comes from the musicians who worked with him, including trombonist Britt Woodman and trumpet player Snooky Young who tell the story of how Mingus was ceremoniously fired by Duke Ellington after a little mishap with trombonist Juan Tizol that involved a bolo knife and a fire ax, while tuba player Don Butterfield, who played with both Mingus and Italian classical conductor Arturo Toscanini, expounds on how Mingus kept challenging him by writing harder and harder parts, echoed by young trumpeter Wynton Marsalis who shows the sheet music for a very demanding piece, suggesting “That’s the kind of thing you find in an étude book under hard.”  They’re joined by biographer Brian Priestley, saxophonist John Handy, and trumpeter Randy Brecker, almost always speaking over Mingus compositions playing in the background, where his ability to fuse the music of the old New Orleans jazz parades, swing, and bop with the blues and gospel music was unmistakable and quite unique, citing Duke Ellington and the church as his primary influences.  He focused on collective improvisation, paying particular attention to how each member interacted with the group as a whole, recruiting talented yet often unrecognized artists who were challenged with radically unconventional instrumental configurations, creating music to exploit the musical personalities of his musicians.  Schuller expresses some degree of shocked amazement that Mingus, who grew up in Watts before the war, was aware as a young teenager of an avant-garde composer like Schoenberg, father of the 12-tone scale, who is widely influential today, yet few had heard of him at the time.  The movie centers around a 1989 concert performance of Epitaph, a large-scale Mingus composition that was never performed during his lifetime, where an ill-fated attempt to record some of it at the Town Hall Concert in October 1962 ended in disaster, as the musicians weren’t properly rehearsed for the sheer difficulty and unique strangeness of what was presented in front of them, with two men still copying the sheet music for the musicians, ranging from the swinging melodies of Duke Ellington to the tumultuous ferocity of Igor Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps.  Knowing this, Mingus assembled the musicians like an open rehearsal or a recording session, continually stopping for changes and corrections, something the audience was not prepared for, so most of them walked out, encouraged by Mingus to get their money back, described by Gene Santoro in The Village Voice, Town Hall Train Wreck, and led him to abandon the work, utterly devastated by the experience, considered the greatest failure in his lifetime, where the music was considered too difficult and inaccessible, but Andrew Homzy was able to reconstruct the piece after his death, where by that time all the hand-written charts were computerized.  It’s a colossal 2-hour symphony with 19-movements, scored for a 31-piece jazz orchestra, probably written over a three year period in the late 50’s according to Schuller, who conducted the first complete concert version at Lincoln Center in 1989, a decade after Mingus’s death, a victim of Lou Gehrig’s disease at the age of 56.  Sue Mingus was an indispensable force in continuing his legacy, and can be seen scattering his ashes into the Ganges River in India, according to his expressed wishes, using the royalties from his work to help finance a series of legacy groups dedicated to playing the music of Mingus, all of which have helped change the perception of his music, as people are now beginning to see him as a composer.  This film is dedicated to the memory of saxophonist George Adams.    

Charles Mingus Triumph of the Underdog - YouTube  film may be viewed in its entirety (1:17:53)