MINGUS B+ USA (58 mi) 1968 d: Thomas Reichman
What I’m trying to play is very difficult, because I’m trying to play the truth of what I am. The reason why it’s difficult — it’s not difficult to play the mechanics of it — it’s because I’m changing all the time. —Charles Mingus from an audio interview with Atlantic Records executive Nesuhi Ertegun who produced his music, 1961, Charlie Mingus Interviewed by Nesuhi Ertegun - YouTube (1:16:23)
A one-of-a-kind film, a free-style jazz documentary that accentuates the chaos and racial complexities of being a black jazz musician in America, where jazz, like the blues, has a hard-to-define history that defies easy categorization, but racial antagonism is front and center, as black artists were rarely given their due during their lifetimes, though celebrated afterwards, often manipulated out of money by unscrupulous white record promoters and club owners, routinely paid less than whites, often delaying royalties for years, with some labeled as “troublemakers” that got them blacklisted from future employment, where prior to the Civil Rights movement of the 60’s, just being black was historically viewed by the majority of the country as an inferior species, where blacks were allowed into the entertainment industry, but only on the edge, as they were not allowed entrance into the mainstream. What this did was force celebrated artists into leading underground and often unorthodox lives in order to survive, with many falling victim to drug or alcohol addiction, where the heavy toll manifested itself in different ways. As jazz documentaries go, you could do worse than Bert Stern’s Jazz On a Summer's Day (1959), but in terms of raw humanity, you’d be hard-pressed to do better than this one, revealing a shocking disconnect between our perception of greatness and the harrowing and often disturbing life jazz artist’s led. A ragged and soulful glimpse of the man amidst the chaos of his life, made by a young 23-year old documentary filmmaker, legendary jazz bass virtuoso Charles Mingus is seen tinkering around his loft apartment in the Noho neighborhood of lower Manhattan on the verge of getting evicted in 1966 for nonpayment of rent, though according to him, the woman he gave the rent money to split and hadn’t been seen since, with the apartment ransacked the day after moving in. While he may have been fleeced in the deal, he originally rented the large space with the intention of becoming a School of Arts, Music, and Gymnastics, as he had gym equipment in there as well as musical instruments, hoping to pass on the jazz legacy, where we see him at times playing the bass before moving to the piano. Ironically, this same apartment today advertises itself as a boutique co-op and can be rented for $15,500 per month, 5 Great Jones Street #2 in Noho, Manhattan | StreetEasy, while another unit was recently purchased for a mere $4,300,000, 5 Great Jones Street, Unit 3, Manhattan, NY 10012.
Mingus studied cello as a child in Watts, Los Angeles with dreams of becoming a classical composer, an exclusionary field that routinely denied access to black musicians, so his interest shifted to jazz, becoming one of the more radical figures in American music, and one of the most outspoken, where the traumas that he endured and the complexities of his personality would often explode in legendary outbursts on the bandstand. A composer, bandleader, and distinguished iconoclast, driven by an ambition to knock down barriers between jazz and classical music, controversy followed him everywhere, typically for making angry statements in the press about race, politics, and pretentious music critics, reputedly the only musician ever fired by Duke Ellington, who dismissed musicians on the spot in front of live audiences, interrupted his bands mid-performance if things weren’t to his liking, and even checked himself into Bellevue at one point in the late 50’s where he reportedly ran into chess master Bobby Fischer, (A chance meeting at the Bellevue Psychiatric Observation Ward), with this film finding him at his most contrarian, where there’s nothing about him that adheres to convention. While he’s clearly playing to the camera, engaged in an easy back and forth conversation with the filmmaker, calling him Tommy, a friend he obviously trusts, the son of a New York doctor who was a serious jazz fan, with Mingus performing at Reichman’s son’s funeral in 1964, yet the circumstances are real, captured in a cinéma vérité style with no set-up, no narration, and no explanation, just an hour or so in his world, seen with that everpresent pipe in his mouth, offering a window into his life. Mingus grudgingly becomes a subject of performance art, with the film documenting his outlook on society, women, music, his daughter, politics, and the country as a whole, as he rails against the historical injustices of America, becoming a time capsule immortalized by cinema, a place where art and reality intersect, voted into the National Film Registry (NFR List) in 2022 due to its historical significance.
Woven into the film is live footage of Mingus and his jazz combo performing at Lennie’s-on-the-Turnpike in Peabody, Massachusetts, advertising roast beef and cocktails out front, featuring Sun Ra tenor saxophonist John Gilmore, drummer Dannie Richmond, pianist Walter Bishop Jr, alto saxophonist Charles McPherson, and Lonnie Hillyer on trumpet, playing wildly free-form versions of All the Things You Are, Billy Strayhorn’s Take the ‘A’ Train, and Charles Mingus - "Secret Love" live 1966 - YouTube (1:16), while also including footage of his 1962 Town Hall Concert. Mingus may be known to cinema buffs as the music behind John Cassavetes’ Shadows (1959), recording three hours of material, Self Portrait in Three Colors - Charles Mingus - YouTube (3:35), though virtually all of his contributions were cut out of the film after a dramatic reworking of the material a year later, which really pissed off Mingus, the only one to walk out of a specially arranged preview. Nonetheless, the film is a watershed work that is widely considered the forerunner of the American independent film movement, manifesting from the improvisation theater workshops Cassavetes ran in the mid-50’s, where the streets of Manhattan mix with the free-form jazz improvisational style of Mingus, who conducted his own experimental jazz workshops accentuating a conversational style, a kind of university for jazz artists who were willing to stretch the boundaries of their music. Mingus was more of a stream-of-consciousness and emotional player than his contemporaries, where he always seemed to play spontaneously and in the moment. He was also a prodigious composer, yet anyone who had the pleasure of seeing him perform will remember the free and completely uninhibited abandon of energy that he played with, which his sidemen expressed as well. In something of a radical recitation, Mingus delivers an impromptu version of the pledge of allegiance.
I pledge allegiance to the flag—the white flag. I pledge allegiance to the flag of America. When they say “black” or “negro,” it means you’re not an American. I pledge allegiance to your flag. Not that I have to, but just for the hell of it I pledge allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. The white flag, with no stripes, no stars. It is a prestige badge worn by a profitable minority.
Mingus was evicted exactly three years to the day after the Kennedy assassination, an event that was clearly on his mind, and in the most memorable moment of the film he pulls out a long-barreled rifle with a scope and fires it into the ceiling, describing it as the same model that killed Kennedy, and then adds, “Or one of them. There must have been several,” Charles Mingus And Gun Scene YouTube (1:35). Incredulously, he says you could purchase a gun like that for only $7 dollars, before launching into his altered refrain of “My Country ‘Tis of Thee, sweet land of slavery” while wearing an oversized sombrero hat. He references an obscure jazz pianist Jutta Hipp, Blue Note’s first white female recording artist, who grew up during the German Weimar Republic when jazz was banned, witnessing the killing of innocent civilians on the street during the beginning of Hitler’s rise to power. There’s a wonderfully poetic interlude with Mingus walking through Central Park and Harlem for an anti-war demonstration with his future wife Sue Graham as he recites his own adaptation of a poem by German antifascist Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller (Martin Niemöller: "First they came for the Socialists...") entitled Don’t Let It Happen Here, From: "Mingus: Charlie Mingus 1968" YouTube (1:17):
One day they came and they took the Communists, and I said nothing because I was not a Communist. Then one day they came and took the people of the Jewish faith, and I said nothing because I had no faith left. One day they came and they took the unionists, and I said nothing because I was not a unionist. One day they burned the Catholic churches, and I said nothing as I was born a Protestant. Then one day they came and they took me, and I couldn’t say nothing because I was as guilty as they were, for not speaking out, and saying that all men have a right to freedom.
Despite the seriousness of the ordeal, Mingus appears to be in good spirits, where his jocular yet dark-sided sense of humor is captured on camera masking the chaos and confusion that ruled over his life, yet his speech is not always intelligible, blurting out words or phrases in a haphazard manner where you tend to understand only bits and pieces, as he’s a troubled musician who suffered from long bouts of clinical depression, seen moving about the cluttered mess of his scattered belongings already packed up in boxes as he gently mingles with his 5-year old daughter Caroline, playing Peggy’s Blue Skylight on the piano while humming the melody. She appears to adore spending time with him, as he speaks to her like an adult, not like a child, responding to what she actually says, while also inquiring into her thoughts on various matters. For instance, they used to be living well on Fifth Avenue, driving a Cadillac, where he claims it made no difference to him, but when asked, she expresses her feelings that she wishes she and her little brother Eric could go back to living there. The early 60’s produced some of his most complex musical creations, especially his work with Eric Dolphy, who died in Europe while on tour at the age of 36 after falling into an untreated diabetic coma, with the Berlin hospital treating him like a junkie, though he took no alcohol or drugs, where a simple blood test would have saved his life. The emotional toll this took on Mingus was devastating, as this was the beginning of a severe downward spiral, suffering from deep-seated psychological problems, rarely performing afterwards, as he essentially withdrew from public life from 1966 to 1969, leaving him in dire financial straits. Lack of work and the rapidly declining popularity of jazz were taking a toll on his financial and mental health. The eviction itself is starkly portrayed, accompanied by half a dozen police officers, surrounded by a throng of reporters with cameras and onlookers, placing all of his possession on the street, hauling it away in a van where it is taken to a police warehouse. With the discovery of pills and a hypodermic needle (for vitamin B injections), he is arrested on drug suspicion and hauled off in a police car (later released as he had licenses and prescriptions for all of it), though the shattered look on Sue’s face says it all, immediately cutting to the striking image of his unattended bass instrument still leaning against a wall on the street.
After his eviction, he didn’t release an album for another four years, and was rarely seen in public, as jazz was at a low point in American entertainment, with fewer and fewer clubs hiring jazz artists, and audiences recoiling from avant-garde jazz’s increasing militancy, while rock music replaced its popularity by bringing in more paying customers. A highly underrated American artist and composer who never received the proper respect and recognition for his writing and composing skills, he lived during a Jim Crow era when wrong opinions could get you killed, or at the very least exiled from the music business, yet Mingus expressed himself boldly, always finding himself at odds with the white jazz commercial establishment, where he wanted to break from labels that siphoned black music into prescribed boxes and sanitized it for American mainstream audiences. The film highlights how political and racial tensions personally affected people during the 60’s, where the volatility of his life is mirrored by the divisive racial turbulence in the country, with the eviction showing what can happen to even the most prominent of black jazz musicians at a time when Jim Crow laws had recently been rescinded, yet black citizens still felt they were not being treated equally. Throughout this film Mingus makes it clear that he believes that society is run for and by “white America” and goes on to say that if it were not for his standing as a recognizable jazz musician that his treatment by the police would not have been nearly so cordial, having had his own run-ins before with the police. With abrupt edits back to the post-bebop soundtrack cutting in and out with each sequence, the film is a haunting profile of one of the jazz cultural elite, where it’s always important to prioritize artists speaking in their own words, revealing the emotional turmoil he experiences in his life and how it affects his music. Gritty, revealing, and at times depressing, the anger in his life is the same passion that fuels both his creativity and his abrasiveness, with the film revealing how Mingus lived, wrote, and played bass, which some described as “agitated brilliance” (The Multifaceted Mingus - The New York Times). The finale shows Mingus once again walking through the park with Caroline and her little brother Eric, yet the sadder realization is that this moment may have spelled the end of his most productive years, while filmmaker Thomas Reichman, who was one of the cinematographers on MARJOE (1972), which won the Oscar for Best Documentary in 1972, tragically took his own life in 1975, the result of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Harlan Ellison on Jazz - YouTube for writer Harlan Ellison’s four-minute Mingus story cut directly to 12:52 (17:56)
Charlie Mingus 1968 - Documentary film directed ... - YouTube film may be viewed in its entirety (58:16)
