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)

Mingus

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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)