Charles Mingus, Jr. (April 22, 1922 to January 5, 1979)

Composer, bassist, bandleader, music teacher and jazz legend

His genius is world renown. Some who experienced him during his lifetime described him as “bold,” “tangled” and “mercurial.” Others portrayed him as “a romantic,” “brilliant,” “a genius.” But words alone can never capture the essence of genius. Like most creative people, he was passionate about everything he did and especially about his music. Born in Nogales, Arizona, he moved to Los Angeles, California, with his family while still an infant. His mother, Harriet Sophia Phillips Mingus, died shortly after their arrival and his father, Charles Sr., remarried. All the Mingus children took music lessons and, after learning to play the cello, Charles was persuaded to switch to the double bass by schoolmate Buddy Collette at age 11. Collette, nearly a year older than Mingus, needed a bass for his band. A lifelong friendship between the two blossomed from this experience. While playing with Lloyd Reese’s Sunday morning rehearsal band, the young bassist also began learning piano and compositional theory from Reese, a seasoned trumpet player who had played for Les Hite and recorded with Art Tatum.

At 17, Mingus studied with Red Callender who then sent him to his own teacher, bassist Herman Rheinshagen, a former member of the New York Philharmonic and a film studio musician. Stymied by racism from realizing his dream of becoming a classical bassist, jazz became the grist for a raging mill and Mingus took it beyond the traditional sound to become a leader of the progressive jazz movement. In 1952, he formed his own publishing and recording companies, Debut Records, in partnership with his then-wife Celia and drummer Max Roach. The label recorded a wide variety of jazz from bebop to progressive until it folded in 1957. He also founded the "Jazz Workshop," a group that enabled young composers to have their new works performed in concert and on recordings. He took the workshop idea to new levels, incorporating it into his performances and encouraging almost virtual improvisation in his band members.

Mingus idolized and is often compared to Duke Ellington with whom he worked for a brief period. He recorded more than 100 albums and wrote over 300 music scores and suites and became the first African American to have his work acquired by the U.S. Library of Congress in 1993. He toured throughout Europe, Japan, Canada, South America and the United States until the end of 1977, when he was diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.

As a testament to his dedication to the genre, he continued composing by singing into a tape recorder in spite of his having been stricken with ALS, a terminal disease which causes muscular weakness and atrophy. He spent the last months of his life in Cuernevaca, Mexico, where he tried several nontraditional cures, from biofeedback to drinking iguana blood, before his death on January 5, 1979. His wife, Sue Graham Mingus, scattered his ashes in the Ganges River in India. Mingus was 56 when he died, and as written in liner notes from Joni Mitchell’s CD entitled Mingus, 56 sperm whales beached themselves on the Mexican coastline one day after his death—the day he was cremated. Scientists continue baffled by this occurrence, the first of its kind in recorded history.2 Ten years later composer Gunther Schuller conducted the huge orchestra performing the premiere of Mingus’s masterwork Epitaph, the score of which he had rewritten and edited. The concert, produced by his widow and performed at the Alice Tully Concert Hall in Lincoln Center, received rave reviews with the New York Times, which ranked it among “any of the memorable events of the decade.”

Honors/Legacy: In 1971, Charles Mingus, Jr., was awarded The Slee Chair in Music at New York State University in Buffalo, and spent a semester teaching composition. He received an honorary degree from Brandeis, Guggenheim Fellowships for music composition in 1971 and 1978, and an award from Yale University. That year Knopf published his autobiography, “Beneath the Underdog.” In 1972, Bantom published the book in paperback form and it was reissued posthumously by Viking/Penguin in 1980, and again in 1991 by Pantheon/Vintage Books. In a 1972 collaboration with the Robert Joffrey Ballet Company, Alvin Ailey choreographed The Mingus Dances.

On September 16, 1995, the United States Postal Service issued a Charles Mingus stamp. Mingus received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the 1997 National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences Lifetime Achievement Award and the 2003 dedication of the Watts Towers Charles Mingus Youth Arts Center.