And another one, an older coverage of the epochal 1964 Monterrey Jazz Festival...
Jazz: Beneath the Underdog
Charlie Mingus is a short, hulking, brooding man who for years has been recognized as the greatest jazz virtuoso ever to thump a bass fiddle. At the Monterey Jazz Festival last week, his Meditations for a Pair of Wire Cutters demonstrated that he must be ranked among the greatest of jazz composers.When the curtains parted, the composer was crouched over his fiddle, eyes hooded in dark glasses, sweat beading his forehead, his orientally sinister mustache drooping. He leaned over his big bass and began to bow. The mournful, dolorous, lyrical introduction swelled into the horns' full statement of the theme. A flute skittered in. Suddenly a roaring, vibrant alto sax soared over the full horns. Mingus dropped his bow, began to thump. He danced out in front of his bass, bouncing up and down, swarming over the instrument, crashing together swift blocks of strident chords. Drums pounded accents like a Mingus rage coming on. Suddenly, the music was thunder; it was Dante's hell opened up, and Mingus was dancing, exhorting, shouting, roaring laughter, like a man before a hurricane he had conjured up himself. Then with an angry bang, it was over.
Too Scared. For a moment, the audience was stunned. Then 5,000 jazz cats rose in a thunderous ovation that they had not accorded Ellington or Dizzy Gillespie, or even Thelonious Monk. Face dripping rivulets of sweat and all but in tears, Mingus embraced his men one by one. But as the applause thundered on, he just prowled back and forth across the stage. Never once did he look at the cheering crowd. "I couldn't, man, I was scared," he said later.
It is a wonder Mingus ever became a jazz musician at all. His stepmother, a member of the Holiness Church in Los Angeles, permitted only church music in the home, so Mingus was eight before he even knew jazz existed. One night he secretly turned on his father's radio and heard Ellington. He took to playing first the trombone, then the cello, till Veteran Bassist Red Callender got him to start on the bass.
Mingus put all his massive energy into the bass. "I'd practice the hardest things incessantly. The third finger is seldom used, so I used it all the time. I concentrated on speed and technique, almost as ends in themselves. I aimed at scaring all the other bass players. One night, around 1940, all the pieces suddenly fit into place. It was suddenly me. It wasn't the bass any more."
He drifted from band to band-Lionel Hampton, Billy Taylor, Duke Ellington, Red Norvo. "Mingus wouldn't knuckle under to anyone—he had to be a leader," explains his ex-wife No. 2. So he started up his own band and played the jazz clubs. His big break came in 1957, when Brandeis University commissioned him to compose a jazz piece. He wrote Revelations, and critics promptly awarded him a place among the greats of avant-garde jazz.
Back of the Bus. Mingus is an angry man, sensitive about his color, and the fact that his skin is "high yellow" only makes him more intense about being a Negro. He broods, he gulps red wine by the gallon, he brawls in bars. He has been twice divorced, three times married, has fathered six children. His present wife, Judy Starkey, is white. Perpetually bitter, usually unkempt, he rants against racial discrimination and society in general. "Don't call me a jazz musician. The word jazz means nigger, discrimination, second-class citizenship, the back-of-the-bus bit!" he shouts.
He has written out his frustrations in a 1,500-page manuscript. Beneath the Underdog, as the book is tentatively titled, deals with racial discrimination, God, yoga, the jazz life, government subsidies, gangsters, sex, Charlie Parker, extrasensory perception, personal hardships and crises when, as Mingus puts it, "everything turns white for me." A former mental patient at Manhattan's Bellevue Hospital, Mingus tells anyone willing to listen: "They say I'm crazy, and I really am."
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