Charles Mingus is a legend in this household. So much so that my daughter – not I, mark you – named the larger of our two cats Mingus. The jazz titan was a large character in every sense of the word. One commentator talks of having seen him live twice: 'He had an aura about him, like he was 50 feet tall, a force of nature.' There was something very apt, too, in the fact that, after starting off on the trombone and cello, he settled on the double bass. He also played another outsized instrument well enough to justify an entire solo album: Mingus Plays Piano.
A big man with big appetites, Mingus had a prickly personality to say the least. He had a fearsome temper: one of the most notorious of several incidents throughout his career was his response to heckling at the Five Spot club in New York by smashing his double bass, said to be worth around $20,000 – which makes Pete Townshend's guitar wrecks seem like child's play. In Thomas Reichman's 1968 documentary, he is seen firing a rifle at the ceiling of the apartment from which he is to be evicted. Perhaps most notoriously of all, in a fit of pique he punched his favourite trumpet player, Jimmy Knepper. He broke Knepper's tooth, which ruined the trombonist's embouchure. Like Miles Davis and Frank Zappa, though, two other 'difficult' personalities, Mingus inspired considerable loyalty. Significantly, Jimmy Knepper would go on to lead the tribute band, Mingus Dynasty, after the death of his former troubled leader.
Blessed or cursed with an ego commensurate with his temper, Mingus was also keenly aware of jazz history and his place in it. Some of his compositions referenced giants like Jelly Roll Morton, Fats Waller, Charlie Parker, Lester Young and Duke Ellington. Before moving from Los Angeles to New York as a young man to seek fame and reputation, he would sometimes call himself 'Baron' Mingus, more than a tacit nod to the duke who influenced him more than any other. He played briefly with Ellington and earned the distinction of being one of the few musicians fired by the Duke himself – for violent conduct. He would go on to make Money Jungle with his idol and frequently performed the Duke's virtual theme-song, 'Take the A-Train'. It's generally acknowledged that if Duke Ellington was the greatest jazz composer of them all, Mingus and Monk and possibly Wayne Shorter ran him close.
There's a lot of choice on YouTube, as befits someone so revered. Too much choice. In the end it boiled down to one between this version of 'Peggy's Blue Skylight' and an elongated version of the song for which Mingus is arguably best known, 'Goodbye Pork Pie Hat', his elegy to Lester Young originally recorded on what, for me, is still the finest of his top-notch albums, Mingus Ah Um. The former video features what Mingus' almost ever-present drummer, Dannie Richmond, dubbed the 'First Band In Jazz', while the latter features what was in his opinion 'something like the Second Band.' It's recorded at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1975, with the 'second' band of Mingus, Richmond, pianist Don Pullen, tenor saxophonist George Adams and trumpeter Jack Walrath. Responsible for the celebrated pair of Changes albums for Atlantic in 1974, the band here is augmented by baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan and, six years after sitting in with Les McCann and Eddie Harris at the same festival, trumpeter Benny Bailey.
The guest trumpeter actually gets two solos, the first un-muted and the second muted. Both seem to earn the admiration of the sometimes stern and even irascible Gerry Mulligan, whose expressions are a veritable picture. There's a nice restrained solo from pianist Don Pullen, who had a propensity for firing off wild atonal scurries across the keyboard in the manner of Cecil Taylor. And there's a splendid moment around the 10-minute mark when Adams and Walrath approach the microphone seemingly for the finale, only to step back again when the leader muscles in for a solo on the double bass. Back off fellas, it's my turn!
It's a strong contender. Nevertheless, there's something a little ragged about the proceedings, perhaps because of the presence of the two 'outsiders'. So I keep coming back to the 1964 performance of 'Peggy's Blue Skylight'. It's actually played by a quintet and not a sextet as labelled: trumpeter Johnny Coles, who accompanied the 'First Band in Jazz' on its extensive European tour that year, actually suffered a stomach rupture on stage just a couple of days previously as an after-effect of a recent operation. So he had to sit out the gig – at the American Hospital in Neuilly. A great shame for the trumpeter and rather a shame for us, the audience. As it is, it's almost perfect in every way: it's a tight, beautifully self-contained rendition that says all that it needs to say at just under six minutes. There's not a discernible bum note throughout and a pair of exceptional solos in Jaki Byard's on the piano and Eric Dolphy's on the alto sax.
There's a wonderful shot of Dolphy looking very thoughtful in his shades during Byard's solo. It's a poignant close-up, too, as Dolphy would die later that year while still in Europe at the age of just 36, as a result of uraemia and/or undiagnosed diabetes. His death would have a considerable impact on Mingus' ever-fragile state of mind. Personally, I much prefer Dolphy on flute or bass clarinet; I find his alto sax tone to be sharp and strident, harsher even than Jackie McLean's. While the warmth of Johnny Coles' trumpet is missed in the ensemble passages, his alto does however work nicely in tandem with Clifford Jordan's throaty tenor, and his solo is a thing of what Thelonious Monk might have called 'ugly beauty'. It's not smooth and elegant in the manner of Benny Carter or Johnny Hodges or Paul Desmond, perhaps, but – as one commentator puts it very astutely – it's 'like a message in mirror image from another world.'
The leader himself, the so-called 'Angry Man of Jazz', looks happy, relaxed and remarkably slender. Jaki Byard described Mingus as a 'foodaholic'. He was given to periodic dieting and he told an interviewer in 1964 (apparently while ordering a second steak) that he 'lost ninety pounds in weight through exercise and less eating.' His bass playing here is both nimble and suitably hefty.
This appears to be a live performance in some kind of recording studio. There are several albums that resulted from the European tour, and 'Peggy's Blue Skylight' appears on most of them. It was originally scheduled to be part of Atlantic's Oh Yeah, on which Mingus plays piano throughout, but that version was pulled from the album and had to wait for the expanded deluxe CD reissue. So although it was a staple of Mingus' live performances, the number's not as well known by the record-buying public as, say, 'Pork Pie Hat' or 'Moanin'' or 'Better Git It In Your Soul'.
There's an interesting if slightly shambolic version of the last named, by the way, recorded at the Antibes jazz festival in 1960, with Mingus on piano, Dannie Richmond in a natty light-coloured suit beating hell out of the drums, and a blank black screen for the first three minutes. From the same festival, there's a version of 'I'll Remember April' with some great footage of Bud Powell guesting on piano. He plays fluently if a little repetitively, but it's more about Powell than Mingus. There is, too, a fabulous performance of 'Flowers For A Lady' recorded at the Umbria Jazz Festival in 1974, with a blistering tenor solo by George Adams and Don Pullen doing his full-on Cecil Taylor bit, but sadly it looks as if the camera lens has a cataract.
Not quite five years later, not long after an abortive collaboration with Joni Mitchell on a musical version of T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets that would metamorphose into the singer's Mingus tribute album, and mere months after a standing ovation and a presidential embrace from Jimmy Carter at an all-star concert at the White House reduced him to tears, Mingus died in Mexico of Lou Gehrig's disease, an invalid in a wheelchair.
According to the writer Toby Litt, Mingus' controversial autobiography, Beneath The Underdog, was 'that of a profoundly troubled, often bitter man who never feels loved enough but constantly undermines those loves offered to him.' A creative genius, then, by any other description. Not something you could call our cat.
