It may be apocryphal, but I tend to believe the story that young Mingus was getting picked on all the time at school for being different and fighting so much that he was eventually taken to the school psychologist. This anguished mental state was clearly not an easy space to inhabit, especially in the tightly normative world of midcentury America, but that mélange of experiences and intersecting narratives is exactly what makes Mingus as American as anyone. He sometimes described himself as always being too Black to be white and too white to be Black. If you watch the documentary Triumph of the Underdog, he remembers what the schoolyard bullies called him, and suffice to say that it’s unprintable. The story of Mingus’s actual ancestral roots tends to change depending on who you ask, but Mingus was evidently part Black, part Chinese, part white, and possibly any number of other things.īeing mixed race was evidently one of the reasons why he often felt on the outside of whatever group that was around. Race is a fiction that nevertheless writes the script of too much of American life.
#She leaves a sparkle quotes crack#
It’s not just a case of compositional ADD or wild mood swings (though Mingus certainly had his share of both) it’s that Mingus seemed to take it as a point of pride to drive himself and whatever crack band he was working with hard, in order to climb ever higher and steeper aesthetic plateaus, only to behold fresh vistas of musical and social imagination.Īn unavoidable issue that Mingus struggled with all his life, and a very timely concern in our hyper-political times, is the complexities of race and racism in America. Mingus’s whole life was a perpetual metamorphosis fueled by a perpetual refusal to settle.
Just when he’d mastered a particular form or assembled a stellar lineup of heavy hitters, before he risked the possibility of getting comfortable he instantly demanded a radical change. The Norman Mailer of jazz, mercurial Mingus was always shape-shifting, never settling on one genre, tone, style, or mood for very long. A couple of excellent recent releases - a 1974 Carnegie Hall concert and a lost tape from a 1972 London show at the legendary club Ronnie Scott’s - demonstrate how much he culled from the roil within. This year would have been Mingus’s 100th birthday and even if he didn’t live that long he certainly gave us a century’s worth of music we’re still reeling from the astonishing amount of quality music in the archive, which is, especially considering the adverse circumstances of any jazz musician let alone one as idiosyncratic as Mingus, simply awe-inspiring in sheer depth and scope. Outsized in physique, talent, and ambition Mingus took on the whole of jazz tradition and kept winning until his cruelly paralyzing death from ALS in 1979, in his mid-50s. “The angry man of jazz” was always breaking out of whatever categories, musical or otherwise, that the world wanted to shove his iconoclastic genius into. Then again, it is hard to conceive of any of the usual terms applying to any part of Mingus’s life and work. Du Bois once talked about Black folks in America having a “ double consciousness” due to being inevitably seen through the eyes of others, so Mingus having a threefold consciousness is really saying something. That sounds more or less accurate, and even though I hate to disagree with such a great man, he might be giving himself both too much and too little credit. But he can’t-he goes back inside himself.”
Then there’s an ever-loving gentle person who lets people into the uttermost sacred temple of his being and he’ll take insults and be trusting and sign contracts without reading them and get talked down to working cheap or for nothing, and when he realizes what’s been done to him he feels like killing himself and destroying everything around him including himself for being so stupid. The second man is like a frightened animal that attacks for fear of being attacked. One man stands forever in the middle, unconcerned, unmoved, watching, waiting to be allowed to express what he sees to the other two. At the beginning of his unruly autobiography Beneath the Underdog, Charles Mingus explains himself to an unnamed psychiatrist:
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