Charles Mingus: When it All Feels Like Lies…

Charles Mingus got it right. In fact, he may be (hindsight being all that it's cut out to be and such) the only one to have ever gotten it really right. By the time he’d finished his staggering autobiography, Beneath the Underdog, Mingus had had enough of life lived by its rules and had apparently decided to turn the old auto-bio over onto itself by writing his own story, his own way. With nary a gleam of the certain reality that others would expect or hope for (two things that a cat like Mingus had no time for, expectations or hope), Mingus plowed through his life’s story with aplomb teetering damn near arrogance and the keen intensity that had become hallmark in most of his life’s - musical or otherwise - work.

Mingus refused to settle for the existence he’d been served - that life, the one that followed all of the approved presupposed alleyways, was undoubtedly destined to be a fairly shitty one, particularly for a dangerously intelligent black artist with a powder keg genius to him living smack dab in the middle of the messy racial evils of mid-twentieth century America. So old Ming just dropped pretense like a sack of so much dried horseshit and went about his autobiography by inventing, re-inventing, and then inventing himself some more again.

Or at least this version of himself, some version of himself, which was, apparently, the alternate state of him-ness that he’d felt far more in tune with (from the “as I see myself, not as I am” school). Such was the abhorrent asceticism of a black life in America during Mingus’ day. That and the fact that the man was not merely black, nor simply a musician, but also a flat out genius of such preternatural powers that he could probably only have been made up anyways. An American myth whose legend grows with the years; the Paul Bunyon of stand up jazz bass; autobiography be damned!

So Ming winged it a bit while spinning his own yarn. The cat took the fucking tale of him by the goddamn horns and spun it around a few times, tightened up the strings, and plucked out a lyrical as hell story that really told you everything you need to know about Mingus’ world - his mind, his music, his spirit. He wasn’t writing it for posterity, but rather he was writing it for the sound of things; the music of chance; the rhythms of life played out to the stomp of “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat”; a compliment to his own unrivaled zenith and jazz-defying edifice The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady. Beneath the Underdog, like the jazz that was, at the time, dissolving the age-old glues of music, struts on terms undefined and kicks the rules squarely in the balls. This is Mingus, take him or leave him; love him or hate him. This is Mingus as Mingus saw Mingus.

As he saw himself, not always as he was…

And ultimately, in this American life, it is the story of not only Mingus but it is the story of jazz itself…of rock and roll…of pop culture…of life. We are, after all, inventions of our own doings; first existing as a set of facts, and then as we wish to be, in the lives that we actually choose to lead - both within ourselves and outside of ourselves.

That Mingus chose to see his own life in such a grand way - in such bold, beautiful, and audacious strokes - is no surprise considering the circumstances of his time, and certainly of no wonder to anyone who has, for even a moment, graced their own life with the presence of his recorded musical genius. He was and still is jazz’s abidingly human Giant - warts and all. The truest of believers, one who fought viciously against the commercialization of his beloved musical art, one who believed in God, and believed that he was, in some ways, God himself. Which, when you come right down to it, isn’t such a crazy idea after all. Just listen to Black Saint once, or play your way through “Pithecanthropus Erectus” and try and tell me that you don’t feel the strength of higher power in what you hear.

Reading Mingus’ view of racism and slavery as writer Nat Hentoff spoke with him nearly twenty-five years ago you have to wonder mans preternatural prescience as he explains with the wisdom of thousands that: “It’s not only a question of color anymore. It’s getting deeper that that. I mean it’s getting more and more difficult for a man and a woman to just love. People are getting fragmented, and part of that is that fewer people are making an effort anymore to find out exactly who they are and to build on that knowledge. Most people are forced to do things they don’t want to most of the time, and so they get to the point where they feel they no longer have any choice about anything important, including who they are. We create our own slavery.” Mingus as prophet.

But that was Mingus. That is Mingus. He is the music, he is the words; he is a giant, he is a genius; he’s humble, he’s an asshole; he is human, yet he is immortal.

Anymore, when the usual rockwrite ‘who’s your favorite artist/band’ type of question comes up I usually say Mingus. Not ‘Charles’ Mingus, but rather just Mingus; a singular name of immeasurable largesse. The reaction I get tends to run from blank unknowing stares to smirks of assumed haughtiness. The former is understandable, as Mingus has never been as celebrated in so-called rockroll circles as has a John Coltrane, a Sonny Rollins, an Ornette Coleman, or even noise modernist John Zorn. But the latter - the assumption that my position is one of conceit rather than genuine reverence - is a bit more disconcerting because, aside from his obvious otherworldly genius, Mingus and his music were/are as unpretentious as any that the jazz form has birthed - or as any of us (as we like to see ourselves - maybe that’s Beneath the Underdog’s point - we all write our own autobiographies, every day). At its finest moments - Ah Um’s roots blues, Black Saint’s constructed jazz workshop approach - Mingus’ music is anti-art and all human spirituality. Mingus’ sounds were peerless in their approach to the humanity they were serving; Mingus aimed his work at life itself, not at transcending it. He wove his sounds into the fabric of what he hoped everyone could distinguish as everyday life - and in that approach, he expected that the average guy could relate to and savor his work.

It then comes as no surprise that Black Saint plays as an utterly accessible noir-ish motion picture soundtrack, something that anyone who’d ever sat in a darkened movie theatre could recognize. In fact the lead and close of “Track B - Duet Solo Dancers” is such a haunting and seemingly familiar musical drama that I have had many people for whom I’ve played it argue with me that it is a soundtrack. It must be, they’d heard it before - somewhere - and. they just weren’t able to place it with the appropriate film. Once again, Mingus succeeds.

Most admirable, however, is how Mingus defied categorization; how he kept a step ahead of tagging at all times, as though he were a stalked man. Death carried not a scythe for Mingus, but rather it came as a horrifying and claustrophobic box - a coffin of creative confinement that would say to him (and this is not at all unlike the messages of American society to a black man in his day, and perhaps of any day) that this is the way you will be, this is how you will do things, and this is who you are allowed to become. And Mingus resisted. He was, after all, a man. Not a black man, not a jazzman, not a ladies man, not a shaman, but a man. And very early on he’d decided that society’s rules, as he saw them and came to know them, were not going to stand as obstacles to his genius spirit. He was determined that he would always be his own man, on his own terms, to whatever conclusion those choices may bring.

If rock and roll was ever supposed to be any sort of great equalizer, if ever it was supposed to actually bridge the cultures of religiously fervent African-American joy and anguished, bitter black soul, to the energy of white American ingenuity and in the process erase the acrimonious lines bordering race, color, or creed, then not only was it an unmitigated and miserable failure, but it was a Machiavellian lie from the very start. Art cannot erase the turgid boundaries established by the hardened souls of men - and as it turns out, not even men can undo the damage that has been done. Time is the only friend change has, and time runs out on even the greatest of mortal men.

Charles Mingus raged against the injustices that were as common as the air we all breathe, but he did it in a way with his music that, despite words said or written, saw in us all a commonality. He was of the people and for the people; he never saw his skin as his fate. He knew that there were always others who shared his lot in life, and they were everywhere. But there were also always those who would opt to look down upon them. Mingus closed the liner notes of Black Saint with a paragraph that seems as, if not more, vital now than it probably did even back then, or maybe just more folks than ever can relate to such a thing nowadays:

“Last and least is me. Mingus. I wrote the music for dancing and listening. It is true music with much and many of my meanings. It is my living epitaph from birth til the day I first heard of Bird and Diz. Now it is me again. This music is only one little wave of styles and waves of little ideas my mind has encompassed through living in a society that calls itself sane, as long as you’re not behind iron bars where there at least one can’t be half as crazy as in most of the ventures our leaders take upon themselves to do and think for us, even to the day we should be blown up to preserve their idea of how life should be. Crazy? They’d never get out of the observation ward at Bellevue. I did. So, listen how. Play this record.”

He means you…and me. Don’t ever doubt that. Mingus was and is whoever he says he was. You must believe that. And this is how Mingus saw what he did - his work was, in all ways, uncommon art for the common man. Rock and roll? You bet.

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