Charles Mingus Birthday
DenmarkVZ
397 Posts
April 22, 1922 to January 5, 1979[/b]
Dude was the total package.
Massive in every sense.
A master instrumentalist, composer and arranger.
A deeply emotional soulful giant.
OG
Jazz at Massey Hall
Mingus at the Cafe Bohemia
Pithecanthropus Erectus
The Clown
Tonight at Noon
Tijuana Moods
East Coasting
Mingus Three
Weary Blues (Mingus with Langston Hughes)
Mingus in Wonderland
Blues and Roots
Mingus Ah Um
Mingus Dynasty
Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus
Mingus at Antibes
Mingus!
Oh Yeah
Money Jungle
The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady
Mingus Plays Piano
Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus
Town Hall Concert
The Great Concert of Charles Mingus
Mingus In Europe, Volume One
Mingus In Europe, Volume Two
Right Now
Mingus at Monterey
Music Written for Monterey, Not Heard, Played in its Entirety at UCLA
Let My Children Hear Music
Mingus Moves
Mingus at Carnegie Hall
Changes One
Changes Two
Cumbia and Jazz Fusion[/b]
and more...
AN OPEN LETTER TO MILES DAVIS
By Charles Mingus
November 30, 1955
Down Beat Magazine
Four editions of Down Beat come to my mind's eye-Bird's "Blindfold Test," mine, Miles', and Miles' recent "comeback story"-as I sit down and attempt to honestly write my thoughts in an open letter to Miles Davis. (I discarded numerous "mental" letters before this writing, but one final letter formed last night as I looked through some pictures of Bird that Bob Parent had taken at a Village session.) If a picture needs to go with this story, it should be this picture of Bird, standing and looking down at Monk with more love than I think we'll ever find in this jazz business!....
Bird's love, so warmly obvious in this picture, was again demonstrated in his "Blindfold Test." But dig Miles' "Test"! As a matter of fact, dig my own "Blindfold Test"! See what I mean? And more recently, dig Miles' comeback story. How is Miles going to act when he gets back and gets going again? Will it be like a gig in Brooklyn not too long ago with Max, Monk, and me when he kept telling Monk to "lay out" because his chords were all wrong? Or even at a more recent record date when he cursed, laid out, argued, and threatened Monk and asked Bob Weinstock why he hired such a nonmusician and would Monk lay out on his trumpet solos? What's happening to us disciples of Bird? Or would Miles think I'm presuming too much to include myself as one?
It seems so hard for some of us to grow up mentally just enough to realize there are other persons of flesh and bone, just like us, on this great, big earth. And if they don't ever stand still, move, or "swing," they are as right as we are, even if they are as wrong as hell by our standards. Yes, Miles, I am apologizing for my stupid "Blindfold Test." I can do it gladly because I'm learning a little something. No matter how much they try to say that Brubeck doesn't swing-or whatever else they're stewing or whoever else they're brewing-it's factually unimportant.
Not because Dave made Time magazine-and a dollar-but mainly because Dave honestly thinks he's swinging. He feels a certain pulse and plays a certain pulse which gives him pleasure and a sense of exaltation because he's sincerely doing something the way he, Dave Brubeck, feels like doing it. And as you said in your story, Miles, "if a guy makes you pat your foot, and if you feel it down your back, etc.," then Dave is the swingingest by your definition, Miles, because at Newport and elsewhere Dave had the whole house patting its feet and even clapping its hands....
Miles, don't you remember that "Mingus Fingers" was written in 1945 when I was a youngster, 22 years of age, who was studying and doing his damnedest to write in the Ellington tradition? Miles, that was 10 years ago when I weighed 185. Those clothes are worn and don't fit me anymore. I'm a man; I weigh 215; I think my own way. I don't think like you and my music isn't meant just for the patting of feet and going down backs. When and if I feel gay and carefree, I write or play that way-or when I'm happy, or depressed, even.
Just because I'm playing jazz I don't forget about me. I play or write me the way I feel through jazz, or whatever. Music is, or was, a language of the emotions. If someone has been escaping reality, I don't expect him to dig my music, and I would begin to worry about my writing if such a person began to really like it. My music is alive and it's about the living and the dead, about good and evil. It's angry yet it's real because it knows it's angry.
I know you're making a comeback, Miles, and I'm with you more than you know. You're playing the greatest Miles I've ever heard, and I'm sure you already know that you're one of America's truly great jazz stylists. You're often fresh in a creative sense and, if anything, you underevaluate yourself-on the outside-and so with other associates in the art. Truly, Miles, I love you and want you to know you're needed here, but you're too important a person in jazz to be less than extra careful about what you say about other musicians who are also trying to create....
Remember me, Miles? I'm Charles. Yeah, Mingus! You read third trumpet on my California record dates 11 years ago on the recommendation of Lucky Thompson. So easy, young man. Easy on those stepping stones....
If you should get around to answering this open letter, Miles, there is one thing I would like to know concerning what you said to Nat Hentoff about all the tunes you've recorded in the last two years. Why did you continue to record, session after session, when you now say you didn't like them except for two LPs? I wonder if you forgot the names of those tunes; also, how a true artist can allow all this music, which even he himself doesn't like, to be sold to the jazz public. Or even accept payment for a job which you yourself say wasn't well done.
Good luck on your comeback, Miles.
I got in an argument on the bus with Mingus one time. He says, 'You white people are always telling us how to talk.' I turned round and said, 'I'm darker than you are, Mingus.' Mingus is about my colour, I'm Sicilian and he had a lotta white blood in there more than I had. He was trying to prove he was a black man, and I took his negritude away. he came up behind me - I had Bebop glasses on - and he strangled me, one hand around by throat and one over my eyes.
Britt and Clark pulled him off. Britt wouldn't look at him after that, and Mingus said, 'Man, I must've stepped on my dick. My best friend won't look at me.' I was there when Mingus had that big to-do with Juan Tizol - it's in Beneath The Underdog. Juan with a machete, Mingus with a fire-axe. Duke had to fire him. Duke said to Mingus 'Look, Juan Tizol is an old problem. Why don't you resign? You're a new problem.'--Tony Scott
...although most people in the past did not understand the range I used to play (nowadays most all bass players use this range when they solo-the full scope of the bass),
because they didn't really listen, they thought I was just playing high to play high, rather than realizing that my composition began some place and developed to another. I have never struggled to be accepted as a great bassist-I imagine I could have been if I had seen my available musical goal there. If people really knew the qualification of a good bass player, they would flip-because I know thirty or forty bass players who have the technique that I have.*
--Mingus, From the notes to Let My Children Hear Music
*[Which, incidentally, brings to mind another thought; along with the jazz hump music and nigger contests, there has never been a contest to decide who is the King of the Trumpet in the Symphony. Or who is the Best Violin Soloist-Jascha Heifetz, Yehudi Menuhin, Isaac Stern, Salvatore Accardo? Or which is the Best String Quartet of the Year-Budapest or Juilliard?]
Let my children hear his music.
Dude was the total package.
Massive in every sense.
A master instrumentalist, composer and arranger.
A deeply emotional soulful giant.
OG
Jazz at Massey Hall
Mingus at the Cafe Bohemia
Pithecanthropus Erectus
The Clown
Tonight at Noon
Tijuana Moods
East Coasting
Mingus Three
Weary Blues (Mingus with Langston Hughes)
Mingus in Wonderland
Blues and Roots
Mingus Ah Um
Mingus Dynasty
Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus
Mingus at Antibes
Mingus!
Oh Yeah
Money Jungle
The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady
Mingus Plays Piano
Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus
Town Hall Concert
The Great Concert of Charles Mingus
Mingus In Europe, Volume One
Mingus In Europe, Volume Two
Right Now
Mingus at Monterey
Music Written for Monterey, Not Heard, Played in its Entirety at UCLA
Let My Children Hear Music
Mingus Moves
Mingus at Carnegie Hall
Changes One
Changes Two
Cumbia and Jazz Fusion[/b]
and more...
AN OPEN LETTER TO MILES DAVIS
By Charles Mingus
November 30, 1955
Down Beat Magazine
Four editions of Down Beat come to my mind's eye-Bird's "Blindfold Test," mine, Miles', and Miles' recent "comeback story"-as I sit down and attempt to honestly write my thoughts in an open letter to Miles Davis. (I discarded numerous "mental" letters before this writing, but one final letter formed last night as I looked through some pictures of Bird that Bob Parent had taken at a Village session.) If a picture needs to go with this story, it should be this picture of Bird, standing and looking down at Monk with more love than I think we'll ever find in this jazz business!....
Bird's love, so warmly obvious in this picture, was again demonstrated in his "Blindfold Test." But dig Miles' "Test"! As a matter of fact, dig my own "Blindfold Test"! See what I mean? And more recently, dig Miles' comeback story. How is Miles going to act when he gets back and gets going again? Will it be like a gig in Brooklyn not too long ago with Max, Monk, and me when he kept telling Monk to "lay out" because his chords were all wrong? Or even at a more recent record date when he cursed, laid out, argued, and threatened Monk and asked Bob Weinstock why he hired such a nonmusician and would Monk lay out on his trumpet solos? What's happening to us disciples of Bird? Or would Miles think I'm presuming too much to include myself as one?
It seems so hard for some of us to grow up mentally just enough to realize there are other persons of flesh and bone, just like us, on this great, big earth. And if they don't ever stand still, move, or "swing," they are as right as we are, even if they are as wrong as hell by our standards. Yes, Miles, I am apologizing for my stupid "Blindfold Test." I can do it gladly because I'm learning a little something. No matter how much they try to say that Brubeck doesn't swing-or whatever else they're stewing or whoever else they're brewing-it's factually unimportant.
Not because Dave made Time magazine-and a dollar-but mainly because Dave honestly thinks he's swinging. He feels a certain pulse and plays a certain pulse which gives him pleasure and a sense of exaltation because he's sincerely doing something the way he, Dave Brubeck, feels like doing it. And as you said in your story, Miles, "if a guy makes you pat your foot, and if you feel it down your back, etc.," then Dave is the swingingest by your definition, Miles, because at Newport and elsewhere Dave had the whole house patting its feet and even clapping its hands....
Miles, don't you remember that "Mingus Fingers" was written in 1945 when I was a youngster, 22 years of age, who was studying and doing his damnedest to write in the Ellington tradition? Miles, that was 10 years ago when I weighed 185. Those clothes are worn and don't fit me anymore. I'm a man; I weigh 215; I think my own way. I don't think like you and my music isn't meant just for the patting of feet and going down backs. When and if I feel gay and carefree, I write or play that way-or when I'm happy, or depressed, even.
Just because I'm playing jazz I don't forget about me. I play or write me the way I feel through jazz, or whatever. Music is, or was, a language of the emotions. If someone has been escaping reality, I don't expect him to dig my music, and I would begin to worry about my writing if such a person began to really like it. My music is alive and it's about the living and the dead, about good and evil. It's angry yet it's real because it knows it's angry.
I know you're making a comeback, Miles, and I'm with you more than you know. You're playing the greatest Miles I've ever heard, and I'm sure you already know that you're one of America's truly great jazz stylists. You're often fresh in a creative sense and, if anything, you underevaluate yourself-on the outside-and so with other associates in the art. Truly, Miles, I love you and want you to know you're needed here, but you're too important a person in jazz to be less than extra careful about what you say about other musicians who are also trying to create....
Remember me, Miles? I'm Charles. Yeah, Mingus! You read third trumpet on my California record dates 11 years ago on the recommendation of Lucky Thompson. So easy, young man. Easy on those stepping stones....
If you should get around to answering this open letter, Miles, there is one thing I would like to know concerning what you said to Nat Hentoff about all the tunes you've recorded in the last two years. Why did you continue to record, session after session, when you now say you didn't like them except for two LPs? I wonder if you forgot the names of those tunes; also, how a true artist can allow all this music, which even he himself doesn't like, to be sold to the jazz public. Or even accept payment for a job which you yourself say wasn't well done.
Good luck on your comeback, Miles.
I got in an argument on the bus with Mingus one time. He says, 'You white people are always telling us how to talk.' I turned round and said, 'I'm darker than you are, Mingus.' Mingus is about my colour, I'm Sicilian and he had a lotta white blood in there more than I had. He was trying to prove he was a black man, and I took his negritude away. he came up behind me - I had Bebop glasses on - and he strangled me, one hand around by throat and one over my eyes.
Britt and Clark pulled him off. Britt wouldn't look at him after that, and Mingus said, 'Man, I must've stepped on my dick. My best friend won't look at me.' I was there when Mingus had that big to-do with Juan Tizol - it's in Beneath The Underdog. Juan with a machete, Mingus with a fire-axe. Duke had to fire him. Duke said to Mingus 'Look, Juan Tizol is an old problem. Why don't you resign? You're a new problem.'--Tony Scott
...although most people in the past did not understand the range I used to play (nowadays most all bass players use this range when they solo-the full scope of the bass),
because they didn't really listen, they thought I was just playing high to play high, rather than realizing that my composition began some place and developed to another. I have never struggled to be accepted as a great bassist-I imagine I could have been if I had seen my available musical goal there. If people really knew the qualification of a good bass player, they would flip-because I know thirty or forty bass players who have the technique that I have.*
--Mingus, From the notes to Let My Children Hear Music
*[Which, incidentally, brings to mind another thought; along with the jazz hump music and nigger contests, there has never been a contest to decide who is the King of the Trumpet in the Symphony. Or who is the Best Violin Soloist-Jascha Heifetz, Yehudi Menuhin, Isaac Stern, Salvatore Accardo? Or which is the Best String Quartet of the Year-Budapest or Juilliard?]
Let my children hear his music.
Comments
cosign on Black Saint. I'm also a huge supporter of this one:
which was recorded at some of the same sessions. Maybe it doesn't get as much love as it should because it's mostly re-recordings of older compositions, but damn, it's just incredible. Despite its sample/TV commerical usage, "II BS" is still one my favorite Mingus tracks ever and a perfect example of what made him such a genius.