Charlie Mingus

(b. April 22, 1922, Nogales, Ariz., U.S.--d. Jan. 5, 1979, Cuernavaca, Mex.), American jazz composer, bassist, bandleader, and pianist whose work, integrating loosely composed passages with improvised solos, both shaped and transcended jazz trends of the 1950s, '60s, and '70s.

Mingus studied music as a child in Los Angeles and at 16 began playing bass. After stints with Louis Armstrong and Kid Ory in the early 1940s, Mingus wrote and played for the Lionel Hampton big band from 1947 to 1948 and recorded with Red Norvo. In the early 1950s he formed his own record label and the Jazz Composer's Workshop, a musicians' cooperative, in an attempt to circumvent the commercialism of the music industry. Although he wrote his first concert piece, "Half-Mast Inhibition," when he when was seventeen years old, it was not recorded until twenty years later by a 22-piece orchestra with Gunther Schullerconducting. It was the presentation of "Revelations" which combined jazz and classical idioms, at the 1955 Brandeis Festival of the Creative Arts, that established him as one of the foremost jazz composers of his day.

Mingus drew inspiration from Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Negro gospel music, and Mexican folk music, as well as traditional jazz and 20th-century concert music. Mingus also wrote for larger instrumentation's and composed several film scores. As a bassist, he was a powerhouse of technical command and invention; he was always more effective as a soloist than as an accompanist or sideman.

The Mingus composition most frequently recorded by others is "Goodbye, Porkpie Hat," a tribute to Lester Young, and his most frequently cited extended work is "Pithecanthropus Erectus," a musical interpretation of human evolution.

He toured extensively throughout Europe, Japan, Canada, South America and the United States until the end of 1977 when he was diagnosed as having a rare nerve disease, Amyotropic Lateral Sclerosis. He was confined to a wheelchair, and although he was no longer able to write music on paper or compose at the piano, his last works were sung into a tape recorder. From the 1960's until his death in 1979 at age 56, Mingus remained in the forefront of American music. When asked to comment on his accomplishments, Mingus said that his abilities as a bassist were the result of hard work but that his talent for composition came from God.

He died in Mexico on January 5, 1979, and his ashes were scattered in the Ganges River in India. Both New York City and Washington, D.C. honored him posthumously with a "Charles Mingus Day.

A repertory band called the Mingus Dynasty and the Mingus Big Band continue to perform his music.

The New Yorker wrote that "Epitaph" represents the first advance in jazz composition since Duke Ellington's "Black, Brown, and Beige," which was written in 1943. The New York Times said it ranked with the "most memorable jazz events of the decade." Convinced that it would never be performed in his lifetime, Mingus called his work "Epitaph;" declaring that he wrote it "for my tombstone."

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