Charles Mingus

Charles Mingus was a volcano – a virtuoso bassist, a major composer, and a man of enormous, sometimes terrifying passions. His music gathered up the entire jazz tradition, from New Orleans and gospel and the blues through Ellington and bebop and on toward free jazz, and fused it into something turbulent, emotional, and unmistakably his.

As a bassist he gave the instrument a new freedom and force, but it’s as a composer that he looms largest. He wrote sprawling, multi-sectioned pieces full of sudden tempo shifts, collective improvisation, and raw feeling, often teaching them to his band by ear rather than on paper so the players had to internalize them. The results sound alive in a way written-out charts rarely do.

He put his politics and his fury right into the titles and the notes – “Fables of Faubus” skewered a segregationist governor, and much of his work seethes with the anger and pride of the civil rights years. He could be impossible: he fired musicians mid-set, threw punches, raged at audiences. The intensity that made him hard to be around is the same intensity that powers the music.

Late in life, as ALS took away his ability to play, he kept composing, dictating music he could no longer perform. He left behind one of the richest bodies of work in American music, and an autobiography as wild and contradictory as the man.