Charles Mingus

One Sunday afternoon at New York’s Village Vanguard club, some of the crowd were absorbed in chat, completely ignoring the band. The bandleader, Charles Mingus, complained, but they didn’t hear. He compromised: “Okay. We’re not going to fight you anymore. We’ll play four bars, and then you’ll all talk four bars. Okay?”

Mingus did just that, leaving four bars of silence after each four bars of music. The talkers didn’t notice, though others in the audience were laughing.

Another time, he brought props to the Vanguard. When the audience ignored him, Mingus got out a newspaper and gave it to the pianist. He gave a chess set to the drummer and sax player. They started playing. Mingus got out a portable TV for himself, plugged it in, and started watching.

At a different club, when people didn’t listen, his band ordered food and sat and ate for half an hour on stage.

Charles Mingus was not always known for his sense of humour, though. He became the only musician to ever be fired by Duke Ellington, after starting a fight with another player on stage. At a tribute gig to a dead jazzman, “he broke up the show by slamming the piano lid down, nearly smashing his pianist's hands, and then punched trombonist Jimmy Knepper in the mouth”.

Knepper carried on working with Mingus until 1962, when the pair got into an argument at Mingus’s apartment, and Mingus punched him in the mouth, breaking one of his front teeth. This permanently damaged Knepper’s playing ability, reducing his upper range by an octave.

Knepper pressed charges, and Mingus was given a suspended sentence for third-degree assault. Mingus claimed in his defence that Knepper had called him a ‘nigger’, an argument the black judge didn’t find convincing.

Mingus could seem race obsessed at times; he would compare black musicians to sharecroppers, saying “musicians are as Jim-Crowed as any black motherfucker on the street.” He set up his own record label in 1952 to escape this, but it failed.

Once a white guy came to Mingus for music lessons:

“So, the white boy comes to steal the black man’s music and make a lot of money!”

“No, I just came to steal your music... I don’t care about the money!”

Mingus didn’t laugh.

His stream-of-consciousness autobiography, narrated by Mingus in the third person, suggests that his apparent race obsession was the result of racist bullying he suffered as a child. If nothing else, the book is worth reading for this phrase: “Losing his girl and becoming a nigger in one day was too much for him”.

He was describing one of his many boyhood romances. Aged nine, a white girl invited him to meet at her house after school. “He crept up to the back door and called her name”, and two boys, “not much older but far larger” came out, shouting:

“Get out of here nigger. Betty’s our girl and we don’t want any niggers hanging around.”

This was the first time he’d been called that. He was aware of the term, but thought he was too light-skinned for it to be relevant. He ran home near tears, but was stopped by three white men:

“Here boy, what you doing over this way”

“Going home from school”

“Let’s kill the little nigger. Sneaking over here where he don’t belong, trying to rape our sister.”

The men shoved him in a car, and took him to the canal, where they started knocking him about. Luckily, two tough black guys came along and beat the men up, scaring two off and knocking the other out.

Mingus’s autobiography is also notable for its long, explicit sex scenes, including one where he sleeps with 26 prostitutes in two and a half hours. He was a notorious womaniser, and once openly had two girlfriends at once.

Mingus was born on a military base in Arizona on April 22, 1922, and raised in California. He started playing trombone aged six, but then switched to cello. He later switched to bass, apparently because the school band needed a bassist. Other sources claim that he switched because a local musician told his father that ‘at least a black man can get employment with a bass’.

Either way, he became known as a bass prodigy, and moved to New York in 1951, where he got to play with stars like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis.

Mingus developed a reputation as a confusing character: “a warm, engaging man when at ease with his friends, he could quickly become bellicose and meanacing when he felt threatened”. Time wrote bluntly that “he broods, he gulps red wine by the gallon, he brawls in bars”.

Mingus used to see a psychotherapist regularly, and when the therapist cancelled two appointments in a row, Mingus checked himself into Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital. After spending six and a half hours persuading the gate guard to let him in, Mingus spent his whole brief stay trying to get out, partly because he was threatened with a lobotomy on the first day.

To lobotomise Charles Mingus would have been unforgivable. He was one of the most creative jazz musicians of all time, and a superb composer. Some of his albums are full of catchy, uplifting tunes, while others are concept pieces, experimenting with free jazz and eclectic influences. His finest work is The Black Saint and The Sinner Lady, a six-part ballet released in 1963.

Mingus was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease in 1977, and he quickly became unable to play bass, though he would still compose from his wheelchair, singing into a tape recorder. He died in 1979.

What to hear.... Mingus Ah Um, Blues and Roots, The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady

Why.... his take on jazz is quirky and brilliant. Listen out for his shouts of joy during good solos.