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)

Bolden

Buddy Bolden’s band, 1905, top (left to right): Jimmy Johnson, bass; Buddy Bolden, cornet; Willy Cornish, valve trombone; Willy Warner, clarinet; bottom: Brock Mumford, guitar; Frank Lewis, clarinet

BOLDEN                D-                   

USA  (108 mi)  2019 d:  Daniel Pritzger              Bolden the Movie Official Page

In the making for well over a decade, starting the shoot with Anthony Mackie in the lead role, but those initial plans were scrapped in an attempt to shoot a film in the same freewheeling manner as one plays jazz music, but the result is a disaster, as the end product is brutally amateurish, poorly written, edited, and directed, where no performances stand out, instead this is a muddled conglomeration bordering on a mess about one of America’s great original artists, New Orleans’ jazz pioneer Buddy Bolden, uniquely attributed as the originator of American jazz, “the most powerful trumpet player I’ve ever heard, or ever was known,” according to Jelly Roll Morton on an Alan Lomax Library of Congress recording, though very little is known about him, actually playing the cornet, remaining a mythological figure in history who spent the last 24 years of his life confined to a Louisiana State Mental Hospital with no visits from musicians or historical archivists.  His institutionalization occurred 10 years before the first jazz recording was made in 1917.  While jazz did not originate from a single individual, the early New Orleans pioneers that played with Bolden in the late 1890’s, King Oliver and Bunk Johnson, who later mentored Louis Armstrong, all attribute Bolden as the leading figure, with clarinetist Alphonse Picou proclaiming, “He was the loudest there ever was because you could hear Buddy’s cornet as loud as what Louis Armstrong played through the mike, ” while Bunk Johnson claimed Bolden was “a good-looking brown-skinned man, tall and slim and a terror with the ladies.”  Jelly Roll Morton often claimed he invented jazz, but he came “after” Bolden and would have been only ten-years old during Bolden’s era, though Morton was the first jazz composer, as he was the first to write down his jazz arrangements, with many of his compositions becoming jazz staples.  The best place to start may be the impressionistic stream-of-conscience novel Coming Through Slaughter by Michael Ondaatje, his first published work in 1976, which is not so much an accurate depiction of Bolden’s life, but a poetic rendering of his improvisational attitude, revealing there are no known recordings of his playing, but there is an audio recording of trumpet player Bunk Johnson whistling in the style of Bolden.  The definitive book on Bolden remains In Search of Buddy Bolden by Donald Marquis in 1978, the result of more than a decade of painstaking research, a landmark work of scholarship and a seminal work in jazz history.  This film pales in comparison, with little redeeming value.    

The problem here is not the story, but the director and storyteller, an overprivileged white man who inherited billions from his father who made his fortune founding the Hyatt hotel chain, where Pritzger, the director and co-writer, is among the top 400 richest Americans, hardly a man with insight into Buddy Bolden’s circumstances growing up black and poor around the turn of the century, throwing in $30 million dollars of his own money to make the picture.  This is precisely the problem in Hollywood, as the wrong people are assigned to the majority of the stories, basically preventing someone better qualified for the job, where the final product has no earthly connection to the source material, but is a non-linear, disjointed, and surreal mess that is largely incoherent, including blatantly sexist and sadistically demeaning racist material, something no black director would include but whites have no problem with, as they’re not really savvy about the racial implications of depicting so much white hatred onscreen, as it’s overly heavy handed, literally pummeling viewers, rubbing their faces in the stench, more of a figment of the director’s imagination, turning this into a white man’s fantasy, which isn’t remotely as interesting, bringing little original thought to the material, where most of the spoken material was recorded so poorly that it sounds garbled, losing any hope of connecting this story to a wider audience, where Buddy Bolden deserved better.  Making no attempt to connect Bolden’s music to the black church, where it was spawned, or to funerals, with second liners marching with the coffin in a spirited public musical procession, with parades incorporated into the musical history of New Orleans, instead Pritzger presents Bolden (played by Gary Carr) not as an innovator or an experimenter but as a finished product, as the baddest dude on the block who could outplay anyone else, standing down all opposition, like testosterone-filled freestyle battle rappers or poetry slammers, which may very well have been true, but this is presented with a 21st century mentality, as if Bolden was a god, worshipped in his neighborhood, where every dance step is fully choreographed, every woman a man’s dream, everybody in perfect sync and harmony, bearing no resemblance to gritty backstreet dance halls, where Bolden played in the black prostitution district known as Back o’ Town, getting down and dirty, as opposed to Storyville which was frequented by whites, yet this is clearly a white guy trying to imagine himself being black, with all the perfections and idealizations of the white world, which were nonexistent in Bolden’s segregated life where Jim Crow ruled supreme.  Nicknamed King Bolden, his band packed the halls on sweltering Saturday nights, as churches turned into dance halls after Sunday morning services, becoming so rank and funky that they had to push open the windows to let the foul air out.  There’s no hint of that in Pritzger’s film, filled instead with quick cuts and jagged edges, where even the music (played by Wynton Marsalis) comes in short bursts and is continually edited and interrupted, never establishing that free flow of spontaneity that his genius was all about. 

Granted, there is a single scene that shows creative thought, with Bolden as a young boy lying on the ground in the garment factory where his mother worked, where in his mind all the factory sounds are heard in rhythm, literally orchestrating music in his imagination.  But more importantly, much of this film seems to take place in the darkened corridors of the mental asylum where Bolden languished endlessly for years, most likely in a vegetative state due to the primitive conditions of the time, yet Pritzger’s film imagines what he might have been thinking, piecing together fragmented memories, mostly told in bizarre, abruptly occurring flashbacks that jump around in no apparent order, creating an emotional disconnect with deliriously violent overtones, using far too many Battle Royale boxing scenes, with white promoters using extraordinarily large black men for public spectacle, analogous to slave auctions, watching them beat each other to death, where black men getting pulverized in the ring is geared towards white entertainment, with these imaginings presented as if he was still capable of coherent thought.  Louis Armstrong made a radio appearance just 5 months before Bolden’s death, the first time a black musician spoke on the radio, where Pritzger gets the bright idea to have Bolden hear in the asylum what is essentially his own music, but played by someone else, as if this would revitalize the man from a catatonic state, making him see the light.  Instead he creates a mish mosh of splintered recollections, trying to piece together a story, where confusion and degradation is all that really comes across from the screen.  When they attempt to show his mental breakdown, everything is over-exaggerated, sentimentalized and melodramatic, reduced to pitiful suffering, losing his ability to play, unable to face the crowds, instead lying in bed all day and wallowing in a state of depression, growing paranoid that others would steal his music, which is one reason he refused to write it down (the other is he couldn’t read music), but inevitably they throw in the pathetic stereotypical evils of heroin and heavy narcotics (seemingly a requirement in Hollywood depictions of people of color), as if drugs rattled his already embattled mind (more likely it was cheap alcohol), having REQUIEM FOR A DREAM (2000) hallucinogenic nightmares, sending him into schizophrenic fits of delusions, losing all contact with reality, where his worst fears are realized, as others are playing his music in the same clubs he used to play, before the same audiences, yet no one attributes the music to him, and he’s not seeing a dime, languishing in anonymity where he no longer recognizes himself.  The film is not so much a celebration of his life as an impressionistic mosaic of his nightmarish demise, like a descent into hell, from which there is no return.  It’s a tragic downfall, considering the heights he achieved, believing he was making “church music better,” taking it to another level, mixing ragtime with the blues, adding soaring gospel riffs, where according to the director, “his use of syncopation (landing hard on the fourth beat), flatting the third note of the scale (common in blues music) shows he operated differently than other horn players of the time.”  The only known photo of him was taken with his band in 1905.