Myself When I am Real: The Life and Music of Charles Mingus

479 Pages·2000·27.3 MB·English

by  Gene Santoro

Myself When lAmReal
Myself
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OXPORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
Th
x
The Lift and Music of
Charles Mingus
Gene Santoro
OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
Oxford New York
Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogota Buenos Aires
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Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai
Nairobi Paris Sao Paulo Shanghai Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw
and associated companies in
Berlin Ibadan
Copyright © 2000 by Gene Santoro
First published by Oxford University Press, Inc., 2000
198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016
First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 2001
Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Santoro, Gene.
Myself when I am real: the life and music of Charles Mingus / Gene Santoro.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-19-509733-5 (Cloth); ISBN 0-19-514711-1 (Pbk.)
I. Mingus, Charles, 1922-79. Jazz musicians—United States—Biography. I. Title.
M I .418.M45 526 200
781.65 '092—dc2I
[B] 99-046734
Boot design composition by Mark McGuny
Set in the Scala family of types
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 21
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
Contents
Preface vii
Introduction 3
Prologue: Better Get It in Your Soul 9
1 Growing Up Absurd 13
2 Black Like Me 25
3 Making the Scene 33
4 Life During Wartime 47
5 Portrait of the Artist 65
6 The Big Apple, or On the Road 87
7 Pithecanthropus Erectus 121
8 Mingus Dynasty 149
9 Camelot 177
10 The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady 209
11 One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest 243
12 Beneath the Underdog 277
13 Let My Children Hear Music 297
14 Changes 325
15 Don't Be Afraid, the Clown's Afraid, Too 353
Notes 385
Bibliography 391
Discography 401
Acknowledgments 425
Index 429
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Prefacxe
CHARLES MINGUS, jazz's legendary Angry Man, lured me into writing this
book, relentlessly, seductively, finally, just as he'd gotten what he needed from
so many others while he was still alive.
I was a fan of his music; that was why I wanted to do the book at all. I admit
I didn't realize right away how lucky or right I was to choose Mingus as my bi-
ographical subject. The famed, even notorious composer-musician turned out
to be more fascinating and complicated than I'd guessed or hoped. His messy,
sprawling life, his endless quests, his acute self-awareness and persistent in-
volvement in so many facets of his time gave me a huge and ambitious canvas
to work on—the best of my life, as I soon began to find out.
The music drew me in, but the people and places hooked me. Once I was
into the couple of hundred interviews that help buttress this book, talking with
Mingus's families and friends and peers and colleagues and sidemen and be-
hind-the-scenes and in-the-know types, poking around the Mingus Archives at
the Library of Congress and the Institute for Jazz Studies at Rutgers Univer-
sity, digging up background material on this and that, it hit me like a sap
swung by a Raymond Chandler cop. The stories I knew, the tales widely retold
around the jazz world about this Gargantuan character were often myths.
Sometimes they distorted facts; sometimes they were just made up. Even the
true tales, I saw, offered only glimpses of the man's apparently hydra-headed
personality. And there were, I was finding, a lot of other tales not in the dossier.
Here's Charles Mingus, standard-issue thumbnail sketch. A fat, bristling,
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PREFACE
light-skinned black guy who busted people on the bandstand, who stopped his
shows midstream if a cash register rang or a fan or musician said or did some-
thing that set him off. If he was set off enough, he yelled at or lectured or
swung on or pulled a blade on the offender like he was the 240-pound wrath of
Zeus. Sometimes he connected. Sometimes he got backed down by somebody
with a gun or a knife. In a rage, he once tossed a $2,200 bass, one of his prized
instruments, onto a nightclub floor to shatter at a groupie's feet. In a similar
rage, he once yanked the tight-wound, wire-sharp strings out of a club piano
with his bare hands, and then shoved the piano down the stairs. He made a
movie of himself being thrown out of his downtown loft and carted off by the
New York Police Department. His mouth was always running off about racism,
about some kind of mistreatment or misunderstanding or persecution or lack
of recognition. He had a lot of fans who dug his shows. Important and influen-
tial critics and record company heads dug his music. He was rich. He died
broke. He'd erupt in volcanic passions for dim (if any) reasons. Erratic. Unpre-
dictable. Mood swings. Evil. His ego was a blimp, like the rest of him. He ate
like a pig. He loved fine wines and aged steaks and exotic cuisines. He chased
women constantly. Women, especially white women, adored him. He acted like
a pimp. He brooded. He didn't hang out. He talked nonstop. Everyone was
scared of him. He hated white guys. He was mean and hard and cheated people
and put his name on music he had others write. He was an endless self-pro-
moter. He always bragged he was one of jazz's greatest composers, the succes-
sor to Duke Ellington. He wrote some amazing stuff, he couldn't write a
standard pop tune, he couldn't read music or keep time, he was a bass virtuoso
but he was lazy. He always had an edge to him. He said a lot of things that
needed saying when nobody else was saying them. Maybe he was a genius and
maybe he wasn't. Nobody could play his music right. He made a big impact.
People liked him or hated him, avoided him or played with him. Sometimes—
a lot of times—they hated him and played with him. He was Jazz's Angry Man.
But, a lot of the people who actually knew him were saying, what about
Mingus? What about his devastating grin, his crackling electricity, the voice
that leaped yelping intervals, the charm, intelligence, humor, vulnerability, ver-
bal dexterity, flashes of insight, volatility, childishness, and sheer charismatic
pull we all felt and saw and loved in the complicated Mingus we knew? And the
stories would follow.
Meanwhile, I'd gone back to listen to Mingus music. I let its panoramic
sweep wash over me instead of going for my favorite fishing holes. And in the
process a nagging problem that wouldn't go away became the wellspring for
this book.
Here's the problem. Mingus music is overwhelming in its torrent of musi-
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PRE FACE
cal styles and psychological switchbacks and emotional punch, its tumble of
raucous gospel swing, luminous melodies, European classical threads, bebop
tributes, Mexican and Colombian and Indian music and sounds from any-
where and everywhere. He had incredibly sharp and open-minded ears, for a
violent, self-obsessed asshole who may have been a genius.
Genius. How else to explain all this huge sonic crazy quilt that is Charles
Mingus's art, and why it could, and still does, touch a lot of listeners?
So then, if all this stuff—these ridiculously diverse sounds full of majesty
and humor, buoyant joie de vivre and tidal waves of pain, lyrical yearning and
satiric edge all powered by a scary willingness to tackle any emotion head-on—
if all this stuff didn't come out of Charles Mingus, standard issue, where did it
come from?
As it turns out, for me that problem was irresistible. You're holding my so-
lutions, what made me write this book this way.
An old saw says biography is detective work. Out of stacks of witness testi-
mony and historical records and research, cross-referenced and cross-linked
and I hope not too crossed up, a historical narrative started to cohere around
this hero with more sides than a polyhedron. The plots and subplots of Charles
Mingus's life's drama unfold from before his birth on April 22, 1922, till just
after his death of Lou Gehrig's disease on January 5, 1979. Like him, like his
3OO-odd compositions and dozens of albums, they take in a lot of ground.
Creativity isn't necessarily straightforward in its dealings with the world. To
put it another way, no one has ever convinced me that the geniuses who have
the lasting human touch we call art are either monsters or role models, or even
that they should be. Shamans don't have to be horrible or nice. They just have
to work effectively in their surroundings, account for some of the planef s mys-
teries in ways the people they live among can understand.
What counts about artists is that they perceive reality differently. In any
clinical sense, they're not schizophrenics (although historically some of them
have been that too) because they produce something coherent in its own terms
that is valued by their communities—their art, their strikingly individual con-
tributions to human culture. Artists don't simply reflect their lives and times
like mirrors, but if they're worth anything they light some way we haven't seen
from quite that angle before. That takes a genius; otherwise everybody would
be doing it.
Mingus's strange and wonderful gift let him take his all-too-human self, his
tangle of desire and hope and need and strength, and translate it all into a spe-
cial place that others, too, can enter, in the magical way of art, when they listen
to his music. If s not a paradox to say that Mingus was most fully himself in his
music. It was his lamp unto the world.
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