Charles Mingus, composer, bandleader, bassist
April 22, 1922-January 5, 1979
Better late than never for someone who, like Miles and Monk, Bach and Beethoven, I couldn’t live without.
Charles Mingus (bass) with Eric Dolphy (alto saxophone, bass clarinet, flute), Clifford Jordan (tenor saxophone), Johnny Coles (trumpet), Jaki Byard (piano), Dannie Richmond (drums), live, Belgium, Norway, and Sweden, 1964*
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
There’s something about listening to Eric Dolphy that makes you feel glad to be alive.
Belgium
00:00-00:45 Intro
00:46-05:33 So Long Eric
05:35-11:20 Peggy’s Blue Skylight
11:23-32:03 Meditations On Integration
Norway
32:30-54:46 So Long Eric
56:30-1:11:40 Orange Was The Color Of Her Dress, Then Blue Silk
1:13:53-1:16:20 Parkeriana
1:16:22-1:29:05 Take The “A” Train
Sweden
1:30:05-1:33:55 So Long Eric
1:34:02-1:52:35 Meditations On Integration
1:52:40- 1:59:50 So Long Eric
Charles Mingus, bassist, composer, bandleader
April 22, 1922-January 5, 1979
Charles Mingus Quintet (CM, bass; Eric Dolphy, alto saxophone; Booker Ervin, tenor saxophone; Ted Curson, trumpet; Dannie Richmond, drums) with guest Bud Powell (piano), “I’ll Remember April” (G. de Paul, P. Johnston, D. Raye), live, France (Antibes Jazz Festival), 1960
Charles Mingus Quintet,* “So Long Eric,” “Peggy’s Blue Skylight,” “Meditations On Integration” (all by Mingus), live (TV show), Belgium, 1964
Mingus’s music, it seems, has everything. Call it “simple” or “complex” and you’d be both right and wrong—it’s both. Compositional elegance is balanced, exquisitely, with improvisational unruliness. Rhythmic momentum is no less—and no more—important than melodic invention. Like Ellington and Monk, he will, I’m confident, still be listened to a hundred years from now.
(Excerpts from this program have been posted previously.)
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lagniappe
art beat: yesterday at the Art Institute of Chicago
Ludovico Carracci, The Vision of Saint Francis, c. 1602
Going to the Art Institute again, after being away for a while, I felt a bit like someone who doesn’t realize he’s starving until he finds himself at a feast.
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*CM, bass; Eric Dolphy, alto saxophone, flute, bass clarinet; Clifford Jordan, tenor saxophone; Jaki Byard, piano; Dannie Richmond, drums.
Tom Jones with Mark Knopfler (guitar), TV performance, 1996
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
I don’t think I ever recorded anyone who was better as a singer, writer, and player than Charlie Rich. It is all so effortless, the way he moves from rock to country to blues to jazz.
I thought that you were an anchor in the drift of the world;
but no: there isn’t an anchor anywhere.
There isn’t an anchor in the drift of the world. Oh no.
I thought you were. Oh no. The drift of the world.
—William Bronk,* “The World” (mp3 [Hudson Falls, NY, 1978], Selected Poems [1995])
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*Bronk, who died in 1999, was recently inducted, posthumously, into the ultra-exclusive MCOTD Hall of Fame, joining tenor saxophonist Von Freeman and poet Wislawa Szymborska.
• WKCR-FM (broadcasting from Columbia University)
—Lester Young/Charlie Parker birthday marathon
—John Coltrane birthday broadcast
—Bird Flight (Phil Schaap, jazz [Charlie Parker])
—Traditions in Swing (Phil Schaap, jazz)
—Eastern Standard Time (Carter Van Pelt, Jamaican music)
• WFMU-FM
—Mudd Up! (DJ/Rupture, “new bass and beats”)
—Sinner’s Crossroads(Kevin Nutt, gospel) —Airborne Event (Dan Bodah, “electronic noise to free jazz, drone rock to a capella African song”)
—Give the Drummer Some (Doug Schulkind, sui generis, web only)
—Transpacific Sound Paradise (Rob Weisberg, “popular and unpopular music from around the world”)
• WHPK-FM (broadcasting from University of Chicago)
—The Blues Excursion (Arkansas Red)
• WKCR-FM (broadcasting from Columbia University)
—Bird Flight (Phil Schaap, jazz [Charlie Parker])
—Traditions in Swing (Phil Schaap, jazz)
—Daybreak Express (Various, jazz) —Out to Lunch (Various, jazz)
—Jazz Profiles (Various, jazz)
—Jazz Alternatives (Various, jazz)
—Morning Classical (Various, classical)
—Afternoon New Music (Various, classical and hard-to-peg)
—Eastern Standard Time (Carter Van Pelt, Jamaican music)
• WFMU-FM
—Mudd Up! (DJ/Rupture, “new bass and beats”)
—Sinner’s Crossroads(Kevin Nutt, gospel)
—Give The Drummer Some (Doug Schulkind, sui generis)
—Downtown Soulville with Mr. Fine Wine (soul)
On July 29, 1946, Charlie Parker was arrested in Los Angeles, after starting a fire in his hotel room. Earlier that day, unable to score heroin, scratchy, drunk on whiskey, he recorded this track, which, depending on your point of view, is either one of the worst records he ever made (Parker’s view) or, despite (because of?) its raggedyness, among the greatest (Charles Mingus’s opinion). After his arrest he was confined, for six months, at Camarillo State Mental Hospital.
Charlie Parker, “Lover Man” (CP, alto saxophone; Howard McGhee, trumpet; Jimmy Bunn, piano; Bob Kesterson, bass; Roy Porter, drums), rec. 7/29/46
The cafeteria in the hospital’s basement was the saddest place in the world, with its grim neon lights and gray tabletops and the diffuse forboding of those who had stepped away from suffering children to have a grilled cheese sandwich.
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The next day, I set up an iPod dock and played music, not only in the willfully delusional belief that music would be good for a painful, recovering brain but also to counter the soul-crushing hospital noise: the beeping of monitors, the wheezing of respirators, the indifferent chatter of nurses in the hallway, the alarm that went off whenever a patient’s condition abruptly worsened.
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One early morning, driving to the hospital, I saw a number of able-bodied, energetic runners progressing along Fullerton Avenue toward the sunny lakefront, and I had a strong physical sensation of being in an aquarium: I could see out, the people outside could see me (if they chose to pay attention), but we were living and breathing in entirely different environments.
Take Me To The Water:
Immersion Baptism in Vintage Music and Photography 1890-1950
(Dust-to-Digital 2009)
Vodpod videos no longer available.
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lagniappe
reading table
Three Lilies
“Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in
the morning.” Psalm 30
Before dawn, under a thin moon disappearing
east, the planet Mercury, the messenger
and healer, came up vanishingly
into the blue beyond the garden where
three lilies at the bottom of the yard
arrayed white trumpets on iron stalks
under a slow, slow lightning from the sun.
I stood on a rotten step myself,
and smelled them from a hundred feet away.