# The genius of Charles Mingus: activist, writer and jazz legend: Videos, Photos

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2022/05/09/the-genius-of-charles-mingus-activist-writer-and-jazz-legend-videos-photos/
- Published: 2022-05-09T14:29:36+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**Mingus biographer Dr Nichole Rustin-Paschal offers an academic perspective on 
the musical legacy of one of the most iconic figures in jazz history.**

“Charles Mingus, a musical mystic, died in Mexico, January 5, 1979, at the age of
56. He was cremated the next day. That same day, 56 sperm whales beached themselves
on the Mexican coastline, and were removed by fire. These are the coincidences that
thrill my imagination.

Sue, at his request – carried his ashes to India and finding a place at the source
of the Ganges River, where it ran turquoise and glinting with large gold carp, released
him, with flowers and prayers at the break of a new day.

**Joni Mitchell, from the liner notes to **_**Mingus**_** (1979)**

My favorite photo of Charles Mingus is of him sitting at his piano, wearing an animal
print, silk-dressing gown. He holds the phone in his left hand, elbow resting on
the piano.

As he talks, he smiles, and his right hand is slightly blurry, caught mid-motion.
Mingus looks here like a movie star, raven haired, mustached, and goateed. Lida 
Moser took the photos in 1965 in Mingus’s New York City apartment.

In another photo from that shoot, Mingus, still enrobed in his dressing gown, stands
bowing his bass. Moser’s use of a long exposure visualizes the ecstatic feeling 
Mingus often commented he felt while playing. The blurring of his bowing arm and
the over-exposure of light on the side of his face, itself slightly blurred, gives
the sense of his being enraptured.

My second favorite photo, perhaps taken by a family member around the same time 
as the Moser photos, finds him reclining in a black leather chair, barefoot, engrossed
in editing a draft of his manuscript for _Beneath The Underdog_.

He holds a few pages and pencil in hand. Beside the chair is a barstool piled with
the bulk of the manuscript. Mingus began _Beneath The Underdog_ in the mid-1960s,
around the time the Moser photos were taken.

On the other side of the chair is a bookcase overflowing with albums, books, papers,
and other things of life. His bass leans against the bookcase, its broad back facing
outward.

At the foot of the chair is a chessboard, game in mid-progress. In another photo
from this shoot, Mingus sits at the edge of the chair, looking with bemusement at
his toddler who smiles directly at the camera.

![Charles Mingus](https://vanilla.futurecdn.net/guitarworld/media/img/missing-image.
svg)

(Image credit: David Redfern/Redferns)

I love these photos of Mingus relaxed, in good humor, surrounded by family life,
music, and writing. Too often, when we seek stories of Mingus’s life, we are bombarded
with anecdotes about his volatile temper, threatening leadership, and demanding 
compositions.

Mingus was among a small number of jazz autobiographers whose approach to writing
about the jazz life focused less on the minutiae of life on the road, than they 
did on exploring the experience of race, gender, and music

And yet, as these photos suggest, Mingus also brimmed with humor, tapped into the
spiritual elements of music, and enjoyed quiet reflection as well as family life.

This side of Mingus is as important to our understanding of his life and music as
are the tales of his ferocity on and off stage. Understanding that fullness of his
humanity allows us to understand _Beneath The Underdog_ as the multifaceted record
of that life as he intended it to be.

Mingus was among a small number of jazz autobiographers whose approach to writing
about the jazz life focused less on the minutiae of life on the road, than they 
did on exploring the experience of race, gender, and music through complex and often
unreliable narration.

Louis Armstrong, Mezz Mezzrow, Billie Holiday, Hampton Hawes, Art Pepper, Lena Horne,
Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, Horace Tapscott, and Miles Davis are a few of those
whose stories come to mind.

Like these musicians, Mingus pushed boundaries when recounting his experience and
his understanding of how being a black man in the U.S., when fighting against segregation
and prohibitions on interracial intimacy, demanding the ability to freely exercise
civil rights, and negotiating the politics of the Cold War.

_Beneath The Underdog_, criticized at the time of publication as skirting the line
of pornography and saying little, if anything, about “the music”, remains a challenging
and rewarding document of Mingus’s thinking, including that of how he understood
jazz as inextricably tied to emotional expressivity, the struggle to be respected
as a black man and creative thinker, and the demands of providing for a family and
bandmembers.

Mingus frames this exploration of his psyche and life as a session with a psychologist.
His strategic confessions to the psychologist challenge our conceptions of black
male desire, spirituality, sexuality, relationships, and a relentless searching 
that found expression in his compositions.

_Black Saint And The Sinner Lady_ is one such composition. With liner notes written
by Mingus’s actual therapist, Edmund Pollock, the album was an antidote, Mingus 
claimed, to the social ills confronting the country. Pollock agreed, musing that
what he heard on the album was a plea “to unite in revolution against any society
that restricts freedom and human rights.”

Released in 1963, the album also documents Mingus’s evolving approach to arranging
and composition. He used the piano as “musical score paper” to communicate with 
the musicians the emotional ideas he wanted them to express.

He explained that this was so musicians would “learn the music so it would be in
their ears, rather than on paper, so they’d play the compositional parts with as
much spontaneity and soul as they’d play a solo.”

While he was generally pleased with their ability to do so, as he observed in his
own notes for the album, he thought Jaki Byard missed the mark on one of the sections,
and so he played the passage himself and it was later cut in during post-production.
There are few recordings of Mingus playing the piano, but his 1964 album, _Mingus
Plays The Piano_, is a standout, showing how skillful he was on the instrument.

During the 1950s and 1960s, Mingus was expanding his approach to composition. Though
he’d been performing and composing since he was a teenager, he began to feel the
need, he said, to come out from under the shadow of his idol, Duke Ellington.

After a disastrous first time touring with Ellington earlier in his career, Mingus
found redemption in _Money Jungle_, which he recorded with Ellington and Max Roach.
A flurry of_ _Impulse!, Candid, and Atlantic recordings showed the reach of Mingus’s
ideas about jazz, politics, and traditional forms of black religious and cultural
expression.

While he resisted the labeling of his music as jazz, reflecting his belief that 
black musicians and composers were pigeonholed because of racism, he nevertheless
insisted that what he composed was inextricably linked to black culture. As he said,“
Jazz is still an ethnic music, fundamentally… jazz is still our music.”

Mingus often challenged the racial politics of jazz culture and the music industry,
as well as critiquing the absurdity of segregation and segregationists like Governor
Orval Faubus. He understood himself as a black man in a white world.

He advocated for musicians to be well compensated and recognized for their music.
Mingus was a self-described “jazz political activist”.

Through efforts such as his Debut record label and the Jazz Composers Workshop, 
Mingus sought ways to take control of his music and to make space for other musicians
who deserved the chance to be heard, showing how much jazz is a collective and individual
effort.

Mingus was fiercely loyal to his musicians and collaborators, including Dannie Richmond,
Eric Dolphy, Bud Powell, Fats Navarro, and Charlie Parker. So much of what he understood
about what it means to be an artist, to be a friend, to be a caretaker, he learned
growing up in Watts and performing on Central Avenue.

He proudly continued playing the “simple West Coast colored no-name music” of his
youth. Lifelong friends like Buddy Collette understood how important it was to Mingus
to be in creative community, to have freedom of expression, to belong and be cared
for.

Mingus cultivated a worldview that favored emotional honesty, an ethic of care and
encouragement, and the provision of musical safe spaces, where experimentation, 
professionalism, discipline, and dreams were nurtured. Though he spent half of his
life living in New York, Mingus never abandoned that idealism about what the music
represented.

And now we get to celebrate the centenary of this incredibly complex and generous
musician and composer, who understood that through his music he would live eternally.

He has always invited us into his world, where we have the space to imagine freedom,
to contemplate love in all its mystery, to laugh and to cry. As Lida Moser and the
unknown family photographer captured the multiplicity of Mingus’s personality, let
us remember him. Let our children hear his music always.

![Charles Mingus](https://i0.wp.com/cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/RPiUTVysro8k7m2WVVkDsC-
320-80.jpg?resize=640%2C360&ssl=1)

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