Description
TitleCharles Mingus oral history interview
Date Created1978
Note(b Nogales, AZ, 22 April 1922; d Cuernavaca, Mexico, 5 Jan 1979). American jazz double bass player, pianist, composer and bandleader. Mingus grew up in the Watts area of Los Angeles. He took up the double bass in high school, and studied with Red Callender and a former bass player with the New York PO, Herman Rheinschagen. He played with Kid Ory in Barney Bigard’s ensemble (1942) and toured as bass player in the big bands of Louis Armstrong (c1943) and Lionel Hampton (1947 - 8), then in 1950 - 51 gained national attention as a member of Red Norvo’s trio (with Tal Farlow). Thereafter he settled in New York, where in the early 1950s he worked with Billy Taylor, Duke Ellington, Stan Getz, Art Tatum and Bud Powell. Some of his performances during this period, including the famous concert at Massey Hall in Toronto with Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie (issued as the album Quintet of the Year, 1953), and several of his early Jazz Workshop sessions, are preserved on recordings issued by Mingus’s own company, Debut Records (1952 - 5). Mingus contributed written works to a Jazz Composers’ Workshop from 1953 to 1955. Realizing that musical notation was inadequate for his approach to composition, he founded a new workshop in 1955 in which he transmitted the details of his works by dictating lines to each player. The early 1960s saw the birth of Mingus’s most complex musical creations, his compositions The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady and Meditations on Integration, and his many performances with Eric Dolphy. But by 1964 he was in dire financial straits and suffering from deep-seated psychological problems. Rarely performing, he essentially withdrew from public life from 1966 to 1969; Thomas Reichman’s film Mingus (1968) documented his sad eviction from a New York apartment. Financial pressures forced Mingus to resume his career in June 1969; his enthusiasm was rekindled in 1971 by the granting of a Guggenheim fellowship in composition and the publication of his autobiography, Beneath the Underdog. During his remaining years he wrote big-band music and two suites for films and collaborated on an album with the pop singer Joni Mitchell. He travelled extensively with his workshop until 1977, when he fell seriously ill; he supervised his last recording session (January 1978) from a wheelchair. His music has continued to be played in the group Mingus Dynasty, and his unfinished orchestral jazz piece Epitaph was reconstructed, completed and performed in 1989 under the direction of Gunther Schuller. As a double bass player Mingus commanded an awesome technique and was thoroughly conversant with all styles of jazz extant during his lifetime. He developed a new “conversational” approach to his instrument in his dialogues with Dolphy (What Love, 1960, Cand.; Epitaph, on the album Town Hall Concert, 1962, UA), and also a “pianistic” approach that simultaneously combined the bass line, inner harmonies and improvised countermelodies,
NotePages 201 - 214 are duplicate transcript pages corresponding to parts of Tape 3 Side1 and Tape 3 Side 2; Pages 201 - 214 DUPLICATE ... pp. 100-153
Genreoral histories, interviews
Languageeng
CollectionJazz Oral History Project
Organization NameRutgers University. Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University. Institute of Jazz Studies
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