Charles Mingus, the incomparable forty-nine-year-old bassist, composer, bandleader, autobiographer, and iconoclast, has spent much of his life attempting to rearrange the world according to an almost Johnsonian set of principles that abhor, among other things, cant, racism, inhibition, managerial greed, sloppy music, Uncle Tomism, and conformity. His ingenious methods have ranged from penny-dreadful broadsides to matter-of-fact punches on the nose. The results have been mixed. They have also been costly, and have landed Mingus on the psychiatric couch and in Bellevue (self-committed), lost him jobs, got him into trouble with the police, and made him periodically fat. (“I eat out of nerves.”) At the same time, Mingus’s experiences have been steadily distilled into a group of compositions that for sheer melodic and rhythmic and structural originality may equal anything written in Western music in the past twenty years. (Their content has been equally fresh, for they have included, in the Ellington manner, everything from love songs to social satire.) These experiences have, as well, been reflected in his playing, which long ago elevated him to the virtuosic ranks of Picasso and Buddy Rich and Nabokov. But now Mingus has taken another step. He has written a book about himself—“Beneath the Underdog: His World as Composed by Mingus” (Knopf).
The book, which was edited by Nel King, is impressionistic and disembodied (there are almost no dates), and has at least a taste of all the Minguses. It is brutal and dirty and bitter. It is sentimental and self-pitying. It is rude and, in places, unfair (the curt handling of the great Red Norvo). It is facetious and funny. It is sometimes awkward and sometimes unerringly right, and it is the latter when Mingus’s fine ear is receiving full tilt. Duke Ellington’s verbal arabesques have never been captured better:
Mingus’s relationship with jazz critics has been surprisingly amiable, and the lumps landed on them in the book are pretty funny. A party is given for Mingus when he first arrives in New York from the West Coast, around 1950. No matter that the critics named were never in the same room at the same time in their lives, or that at least two of them were still in college and unpublished. Mingus is talking to Dizzy Gillespie:
(There are, for the record, other Mingus liberties in this passage. Feather does play piano, and Lees—and perhaps Coss—sing, but so do Williams and the unmentioned Hsio Wen Shih. The late Marshall Stearns played C-melody saxophone, and this writer plays drums. And Nat Hentoff, who is mentioned elsewhere in the book, once studied classical clarinet. To my knowledge, Wilson and Ulanov are nonperformers. Finally, jazz critics, wallflowers all, rarely dance.) But the best parts of the book deal with Fats Navarro, a brilliant, concise trumpeter who died at the age of twenty-six in 1950. He tells a young and ingenuous Mingus what it is really like to be a jazz musician:
That’s worthy of Mayhew’s annals of the London poor.
After I read the book, I looked Mingus up to see how he was handling his new career. We met late on a Sunday night in a restaurant on West Tenth Street, a week or so before his book was published. Mingus was dressed in an unusually conservative dark suit and tie, and he was in his middle state. That is, he was neither thin nor huge; he was, as they used to say in the two-pants-suit days, portly. A Charlie Chan mustache and beard were arranged carefully around his mouth, and he looked wonderful. The last time I had seen him, a year before, his face was gray and puffy; he had not played a note for two years, and he was very fat and had a listless, buried air. (During the two years, he had tangled with the police while taking photographs of a hippie parade from the hood of someone’s parked car; had been evicted from his studio, an event commemorated in a documentary film; and had been seen riding, floatlike, around the East Village on a bicycle.) Now he was sitting at the bar, sampling a tall white drink. “Ramos gin fizz,” he blurted out. “Milk or cream, white of an egg, orange-flower water, lemon juice, gin, and soda water. I used to drink ten at a sitting in San Francisco.” Mingus talks in leaping slurs. The words come out crouched and running, and sometimes they move so fast whole sentences are unintelligible. It is an obstacle he is well aware of, for, later in the evening, he delivered a lightning two-or-three-sentence volley and asked, “Did you understand what I just said?” I admitted that I had got about sixty per cent of it. Slowing to a canter, he repeated himself and I got almost a hundred per cent. Mingus finished his Ramos fizz and ordered a half bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé and some cheese. He pronounced the name of the wine at a dead run, and it came out “Poolly-Foos.” “We went down to the peace demonstration in Washington this weekend to play, and it was a drag,” he said. “They’ve never had any jazz at these things, and it seemed like a good idea, but we never did play. My piano player didn’t show, and my alto sax couldn’t make it, so we only had four pieces, and it wouldn’t have made any sense going on like that. I went to bed right after I got back this morning. I hadn’t been to bed in two nights. I can’t sleep at night anyway, but I do all right with a sleeping pill in the day. I even had a wonderful dream just before I got up to meet you. I had everything under control. I was on a diet and losing weight all over the place, and I felt so good. But a dream like that is worse than a nightmare. You wake up and the real nightmare starts.”
Mingus asked the bartender if he could get some lobster and was told that the kitchen had closed. “Maybe they got some across the street in that steak house,” Mingus said. He told the bartender to keep the rest of the wine—that he’d be back right after he’d eaten. We crossed the street and went down some steps into a dark, low, empty room. Mingus moved lightly but gingerly, and, squeezing himself into a booth, ordered lobster tails, hearts of lettuce, and another half bottle of Poolly-Foos.
“My book was written for black people, to tell them how to get through life,” he said. “I was trying to upset the white man in it—the right kind or the wrong kind, depending on what color and persuasion you are. I started it twenty-five years ago, and at first I was doing it for myself, to help understand certain situations. I talked some of it into tape recorders, and that girl in the white Cadillac in the book, she helped me type it up. But I wrote most of it in longhand, in the dark backstage or on buses, using huge sheets of score paper. The original manuscript was between eight hundred and a thousand pages. It went up and down, what with parts of it getting lost. I started looking for a publisher more than ten years ago. Things hadn’t loosened up yet, and a lot of them looked at it and it scared them. It was too dirty, it was too hard on Whitey, they said. McGraw-Hill finally bought it, but they put it on the shelf for a long time. Then Knopf got interested and bought it from McGraw-Hill.”
Mingus asked the waitress for a glass of water. She was young and blond. “Say, you my same waitress? It’s so dark in here you look like you keep changing.” Mingus leaned back and smiled his beautiful smile.
“I’m your waitress,” she said, putting a hand lightly on his left arm. “Are you Jaki Byard? “
“Jaki Byard? Jaki Byard? He’s my piano player. He’s a super star now. I’m glad you my same waitress. Now, bring me that glass of water, please. . . . Then I got hold of Nel King, who wrote a movie I was in, and she put the book in shape. It took her a year and a half. A whole lot of stuff has been left out—stuff about blacks wearing Afros because they’re afraid not to, and skin-lighteners, and my wife, Celia. There was a lot about her in there, but she didn’t want to be in the book, so I left her out. I wrote it a-b-c-d-e-f-g-h at first, but then I mixed up the chronology and some of the locations. Like that party when I first came to New York around 1950. It didn’t take place at any apartment in the East Seventies but over at the old Bandbox, next to Birdland. The critics were there, and they didn’t stop talking once. They kept right on even when Art Tatum and Charlie Parker sat in together for maybe the only time in their lives. It was the most fantastic music I ever heard. Tatum didn’t let up in either hand for a second—whoosh-hum, whoosh-hum in the left, and aaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrhhhhhhhheeeeee in the right—and neither did Parker, and to this day I don’t know what they were doing.”
I said I had particularly liked the passages in the book dealing with Fats Navarro.
“Yes. Those are the best part of the book. I loved Fats, and I could hear his voice in my head the whole time I was writing him down. But that’s just my first book. It’s not an autobiography. It’s just me, Mingus. My next book will be my life in music.”
Mingus finished his lobster tails and wine and we went back across the street. He telephoned his manager, Sue Ungaro, and arranged to meet her in ten minutes at a Japanese restaurant on Twelfth Street and Second Avenue. It was almost one o’clock. Mingus emptied his bottle of wine, and we took a cab across town. The restaurant was shut, and Mrs. Ungaro was nowhere in sight.
“We better walk over to her place—maybe meet her on the way,” Mingus said. The street was deserted, but he reached into a coat pocket and took out a big East Indian knife and, removing its scabbard, held it at the ready in his left hand. “This is the way I walk the streets at night around here. I live down on Fifth Street, and we got so much crime I’m scared to be out at night.” We passed St. Mark’s in the Bowery and headed west. I mentioned that Peter Stuyvesant was buried beneath the church.
“Yeh? That the Stuyvesant of Stuyvesant Casino?”
Mrs. Ungaro was putting some trash in a garbage can in front of her building. She is a pretty, slender strawberry blonde, and she was wearing bluejeans, clogs, and a short, beat-up raccoon coat.
“They closed,” Mingus said, pocketing his knife. Mrs. Ungaro said she’d still like something to eat. We took a cab to the Blue Sea, on Third Avenue near Fourteenth Street. It was closed. Mingus told the driver to make a U-turn, and we went down to a small bar-and-grill on Tenth and Third. We sat in a semicircular booth under a jukebox loudspeaker. Mrs. Ungaro ordered a hamburger and salad, and Mingus asked the waitress, who was wearing enormous false eyelashes and a black knitted see-through pants suit, for a dish of black olives and some Poolly-Foos.
“Poolly what?” she said, moving her lashes up and down like a semaphore. “I don’t know. I’m just helping out tonight, because I’ve known these people a long time.”
The manager, a short man in shirtsleeves, with gleaming glasses and a big paunch, said they had Soave Bolla. A half bottle in a straw basket was put in an ice bucket on the table. Mingus scrunched it down in the bucket and piled ice cubes carefully around its neck.
He looked at Mrs. Ungaro and smiled. “It’s been five years, baby. You know that?” She nodded and took a bite of hamburger. “Sue wrote in for the Guggenheim I just got. I want to write a ballet with the money—an operatic ballet. I’ve had it in my head for years, like I had the book in my head. It’ll have to do with Watts, where I was born and raised, and I want Katherine Dunham to choreograph it. I know her very well, and we’ve talked about it a long time. But getting the Guggenheim wasn’t as easy as filling out forms. I had to carry about fifty pounds of music over for them to see. If I don’t finish the ballet this year, I’ll apply again.”
“Charles wants to put together a seventeen-piece band,” Mrs. Ungaro said. “And he wants to use some of the Guggenheim money, but they won’t allow it. It’s only for composition.”
“If I do finish the ballet, I’ll apply anyway, so that I can write some chamber music. That’s what I started out doing years and years ago, and I want to go back to it. I’ve been teaching most of this winter, one day a week, at the state university at Buffalo. The Slee Professor of Composition. They invited me, and I’ve been teaching composition to about ten kids. They’re bright, and they get their work done on time. I used some of my own pieces, showing them how to work with a melody and no chords or sets of chords, and no melody or just a pedal point, to give them a sense of freedom. But I feel sorry about jazz. The truth has been lost in the music. All the different styles and factions went to war with each other, and it hasn’t done any good. Take Ornette Coleman.” Mingus sang half a chorus of “Body and Soul” in a loud, off-key voice, drowning out the jukebox. It was an uncanny imitation. “That’s all he does. Just pushing the melody out of line here and there. Trouble is, he can’t play it straight. At that little festival Max Roach and I gave in Newport in 1960, Kenny Dorham and I tried to get Ornette to play ‘All the Things You Are’ straight, and he couldn’t do it.”
Mingus took a sip of wine and made a face. “I don’t know. This doesn’t taste right.”
“Maybe it isn’t cold enough,” Mrs. Ungaro said.
Mingus fished out his knife, deftly cut the straw basket off the bottle, and put it back in the ice. The waitress appeared and said, “Everything fine, honey?”
“The wine doesn’t taste right. It’s not cold enough.”
The waitress took three ice cubes out of the bucket and plopped them into our glasses and splashed some wine over them.
“Hey, that’ll make it all water,” Mingus said, seizing the bottle and jamming it back in the bucket.
“I’m just helping out, sir, like I said.”
“She’ll make the reputation of this place,” Mingus mumbled.
I asked Mingus what he thought about the black militants, reminding him of the electric evening a few years ago at the Village Vanguard when he had not only tongue-lashed the predominantly white audience for twenty minutes but had publicly fired and rehired Jaki Byard.
He laughed. “Man, I’m a single movement.”
“The Panthers have been to see Charles,” Mrs. Ungaro said, “but he won’t go along with them.”
“I don’t like to see the blacks destroying this country. It’s a waste of time,” Mingus said. “The militants have nothing to sell. And that’s what this country does best—sells. Makes and sells things to the world. But the militants don’t sell nothing. All the black pimps and black gangsters know this, because they have something to sell, like the king pimp Billy Bones in my book. Man, he made millions of dollars around the world. The black people don’t like themselves, to begin with. You’ve got all these variations of color and dialect. You’ve got terrific economic differences. You never hear anything from the wealthy blacks, but they don’t like the militants. Some of them been working at their money seventy-five years, in real estate or whatever, and they not about to let the militants come and take it away for something called freedom. Hell, what’s freedom? Nobody’s free, black or white. What’s going to happen is there will be one hell of a revolution and it’ll be between black and black. Like the big trouble in Watts, when the blacks were ready to shoot the blacks. It all started when a truckload of militants arrived and started throwing bombs into the black stores and such. Well, man, the shop owners—and I grew up with a lot of them—got upset and came charging out with guns, and by this time the truck had moved on and the white cops had arrived and saw all these blacks standing around with guns and started shooting them, and that was it.”
Mingus leaned back, out of breath. The manager passed the table, and Mingus asked him if he had any fresh fish. The manager went into the kitchen and came back with a handful of cherrystones. Mingus looked surprised. He ordered half a dozen on the half shell, and some vintage champagne.
“No vintage,” the manager replied. “I got a bunch of vintage in last week and it was dead, and I sent the whole mess back. I’ll give you regular. Piper Heidsieck.”
The clams arrived, and Mingus coated each one with lemon juice and cocktail sauce and about a teaspoonful of Tabasco. “Hell, a while back I took my daughter to Columbia to hear What’s-His-Name, Eldridge Cleaver, and right away all I heard him saying was ‘mother’ this and ‘mother’ that. Well, I didn’t want my daughter hearing that. That’s vulgarity, no matter if the man is right or wrong. I left. I took my daughter and left right away.”
Mingus looked relaxed and content. In fact, he looked as if he had finally got the world straightened around to his liking. The talk wandered easily along between jukebox selections, and Mingus and Mrs. Ungaro discussed astrology (Mingus: “My birth date is four, two two, two two. The astrologists have never been able to get over that”), weight problems (Mingus: “Man, I get to this size and it’s painful. My arms hurt all the time up here from banging against the rest of me”), the effects on the stomach of too much Vitamin C, the sorrows of drug addiction, and the fact that Mingus suddenly has more “visible, taxable” money than ever before in his life.
The lights started to go out. It was almost four o’clock. Mingus went to the men’s room, and Mrs. Ungaro said, “I don’t really like Charles’ book, and I’ve told him. I think the sexual parts are too savage, and I think that Charles himself doesn’t really come through. It’s the superficial Mingus, the flashy one, not the real one.” Mingus reappeared, and the waitress let us out the door. “Night, now,” she said, with a couple of semaphores. “It’s been a real pleasure serving you.”
Two nights later, I went to the Village Vanguard, where Mingus was opening with a sextet for a week’s stand. The sextet included Lonnie Hillyer on trumpet, Charlie McPherson on alto saxophone, Bobby Jones on tenor saxophone, John Foster on piano, and Virgil Day on drums. Mingus the musician is a tonic to watch. As is true of all great professionals, his husk remains visible while the inner man disappears completely into his work. He becomes a massive receiver-transmitter, absorbing every note played around him and then sending out through his bass corrective or appreciative notes. The result is a constant two-way flow that lights up his musicians, who, in turn, light up his music. A successful Mingus number invariably suggests a transcontinental train rocking and blazing through the night.
Whenever he has felt out of sorts in recent years, Mingus has taken to offering lacklustre medleys of bebop numbers or Ellington tunes, completely ignoring his own brilliant storehouse of compositions. But at the Vanguard he brought out refurbished versions of numbers I hadn’t heard him play since the fifties, among them “Celia” and “Diane.” They were full of his inimitable trademarks—long, roving melodies, complex, multipart forms, breaks, constantly changing rhythms, stamping, howling ensembles, and the raw, against-the-grain quality he brands each of his performances with. Most of them were also done in Mingus’s customary workshop manner. When a number would start hesitantly, he would rumble, “No. No, no,” and stop the music. Then the group would start again. Sometimes there were three or four false starts. In all, I heard half a dozen long numbers, and they were exceptional. Mingus soloed briefly just once, on a blues, but all the empyrean effects were there, and there were also good moments from Bobby Jones, who nearly split open Sy Oliver’s decorous little band in its première a year ago, and from Foster, a mad pianist who easily mixes rumbustious gospel chords and steel-spring arpeggios. Mingus, dressed in a short-sleeved shirt and tie, sat magisterially on a tall stool and played, and he looked as serene and compact as he had on Sunday.
At the beginning of the following week, I went to see a Mingus I had not known existed—the Establishment Mingus. Knopf was giving a publication party for “Beneath the Underdog,” with music. It was held in a couple of boxlike, orange-carpeted rooms in the Random House building, on East Fiftieth Street, and when I arrived, about halfway through, it was jammed, and Mingus’s sextet, with a ringer on bass, was playing “Celia” at close to the one-hundred-decibel level. There were more blacks than whites, and I spotted Mingus, again wearing a dark suit and tie, talking with a lady of precisely his proportions. It was like seeing Sidney Greenstreet and Eugene Pallette porch to porch. Nat Hentoff and Murray Kempton were closeted in a corner, and Nesuhi Ertegun, the president of Atlantic Records, heading toward them, said he hadn’t seen Hentoff in ten years. Ornette Coleman, dressed in a glistening black silk mandarin suit, told me he had just completed a piece for eighty musicians that sounded just like his solo playing. Nel King said that Mingus’s book had been a lot of work and that perhaps her being a woman was a help in managing his tempestuous moods. Mayor Lindsay, who had been invited, hadn’t arrived, but Max Gordon, the owner of the Village Vanguard and a Mingus supporter from the early days, had. He was standing with Mingus and Sue Ungaro and a tall, slender youth in a beard, straw hat, and cowboy boots. Mrs. Ungaro was still in her bluejeans and clogs. “Meet my son, Charles, Jr.,” Mingus said. He poked the tall, slender youth in the stomach. “He doesn’t have any weight problem. And look at his beard! I can’t grow any more than what I have on my face.” Mingus asked his son if he had read his book.
“Listen, I haven’t even seen it yet,” Charles, Jr., replied. “Besides, I’ve been working on my play.”
I told Mingus that one of the minor but unavoidable axioms of the literary life was that children never read their parents’ books, and cited as an example H. Allen Smith’s son, who once admitted to me that he had never cracked a single book his renowned father had written. Mingus grunted. Nel King approached and told him she wanted him to meet someone, and I asked Mingus before he was towed away how he liked the party.
“It’s strange, man,” he said. ♦
