Charles Mingus was, to drag out a reductive old cliche, a study in contrasts. He was a jazz musician as prone to volume as subtlety; a composer who favored his musicians' input as much as his own; a bassist who commandeered the spotlight as much as he supported it. His music careens through almost every sub-genre of jazz, but Mingus didn't adapt to whatever form he chose to work with — rather, he bent music to his own indomitable will, smashing barriers and tearing down walls.
The Mingus Legend is embellished, incorrectly remembered, or completely made up — a good bit of that by the man himself. Some of the stories are hilarious, like Mingus cutting his band off mid-set to give chatty audience members "solo breaks" as they continued talking through the sudden silence, unaware they were being shamed for their inattention. Some of them are sad, like when he punched his trombonist/arranger Jimmy Knepper in the mouth, ruining the man's ability to play his horn through its entire range. Some are just bizarre, like his unsolicited counsel to Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh, recounted in Dennis McNally's biography of the ban: "The way to make a woman love you is to fuck her for an hour and not come."
The man's outsize personality led to outsize music, all of it infused with the perfect amount of tension between music visceral and intellectual poles. On my personal favorite of his albums, the nonet and self-consciously "traditional" recording, Blues & Roots, instruments swoop and dive around each other like affable drunks, congratulating and confronting; written parts are replaced by spur-of-the-moment inventions; and throughout it all, Mingus howls in the background, sometimes with instruction, but mostly just for the hell of it. Tom Dowd, the Atlantic Records recording engineer who worked on Blues and Roots as well as virtually every album ever, spoke to the difficulty of recording Mingus's bass: Often, after Dowd had gotten a good recorded sound from the instrument in one spot in the studio's live room, Mingus would get distracted, pick up the instrument and walk away from the mic, sometimes while playing, to instruct a member of the ensemble. This is an apt metaphor for the man's career — as soon as you'd gotten a fix on him, he'd already packed up and marched elsewhere, inspiring others while he waited for you to catch up.
Mingus' approach to composing the songs that make up Blues & Roots' was a tried-and-true one for him: He wrote the parts for the group but didn't notate them (that task was usually left to the unfortunate Knepper). Then, he gathered the musicians around a piano or his bass and played them their individual parts until they'd internalized them loosely enough to embellish or alter according to their own whims. Mingus was after (and achieved) a kind of compositional spontaneity that would allow for structured music to be played in an unstructured way. (Which is a really stupid and reductive way of describing jazz as a whole. I'm aware.) Consequently, when compared to another famous nonet recording from ten years prior, Miles Davis's Birth of the Cool, Blues & Roots is worlds apart — where Cool is intellectual and exacting, Blues & Roots threatens to burst at the seams with its own freewheeling vitality.
Blues and Roots opens with "Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting," a hard-charging tune in 6/4 that features some of Mingus's most "churchy" composing — band members enter and exit over each other's soloing in a way that isn't mean-spirited or showy, but exuberant. At 1:59, Horace Parlan drops into a stuttering ostinato that Mingus grabs onto like a pit bull. The rest of the band creeps back in slowly until Mingus screams "WELLLL I KNOOOOOW," signaling a return to regular time for Booker Ervin's tenor solo. At 3:06, Mingus cuts the band off and starts clapping, leaving Ervin to carry on accompanied by handclaps and vocals from the group. (Depending on the quality of the recording you're listening to, you can actually hear one of the microphones distort a little from Mingus's shouts.) Eventually, the whole band is howling, making it readily apparent that this music was as fun to record as it is to hear. The band's very minor fluctuations in feel towards the end are fascinating — it sounds like they didn't know if Mingus was going to cue another repeat of the melody or cut them off, so you can hear them pull back slightly, as if anticipating an end that Mingus decided to delay after all.
'Cryin' Blues' quickly veers into a stellar bass solo from Mingus, who goads and pushes the tempo around, diving in and out of phrases equally informed by the blues and bebop. Unlike fleeter players like Paul Chambers or Scott LaFaro, whose virtuosity was nimble and effortless-sounding, Mingus makes you feel the physicality of the upright bass, digging in and slurring notes or hammering one note by flicking his index finger rapidly back and forth across the string. There's real earthy grit to his sound — you can practically hear the wood grain of his bass on this recording. Horace Parlan's piano solo jerks the rest of the band into a brief high-step around 3:12 as Mingus howls about goin' home. After another repeat of the chorus, bari sax player Pepper Adams and Mingus briefly trade a theme that bears a passing resemblance to Thelonious Monk's "Blue Monk" before the band brings the tune to a glorious, crashing end.
"Moanin" is the centerpiece of the album and a perfect distillation of everything that makes Mingus's music great. Short, catchy phrases are introduced and layered, building in dynamics and briefly detouring into a "B" theme until the whole ensemble reaches critical mass and slams to a halt with a powerful unison line. You can hear the musicians alter their parts as other members enter in turn, simplifying their own individual parts to free the ensemble sound of clutter; demonstrating the spontaneous telepathy that Mingus' groups were known for. Jackie McLean's signature "just a hair sharp" tone is fully on display during his solo at 2:22, and Mingus repeats the same descending bass lick repeatedly for ear-tickling repetition. It's worthwhile to listen to the section starting at 4:41 a few times in headphones to really understand the genius of Mingus' leadership: You can hear him snapping his fingers to indicate the upcoming section's tempo as drummer Danny Richmond sets up a time change on his kick drum and snare. It's unclear whether or not this change was made up on the fly, but the way the band lurches into the break-neck 6/8 meter after a brief press-roll from Richmond makes it clear they're used to this sort of thing. Richmond hits another tight roll at 5:31 and the band returns to the original 4/4 for the last statement of melody. Whew.
"Tensions" starts with a short but spry bass solo from Mingus that showcases one of his signature moves at :12 — not content to just bend the bass's G string to distort the pitch, Mingus just yanks the whole string horizontally off the side of the instrument's neck, producing a strangled tone that he still manages to keep in tune. "Tensions" is also notable for the brutally fast double-tonguing by the horns — the melody calls for exponentially faster trills as the timbre thickens and builds before Mingus's extended bass solo. Listen for his deft octave skipping lines at 1:41 and 1:52, and the long glissandi and harmonics at 2:18. The tune comes out just as frenetic as it came in: McLean skitters around in the ether above the rest of the band, and at 5:58, it sounds like Parlan just slams his elbow onto the piano, which, you know, same.
"My Jelly Roll Soul" Mingus' tribute to New Orleans composer Jelly Roll Morton — he stiffly slaps and pops his upright's strings as some of the first New Orleans bassists did for some of the sections. Richmond alternates between a relaxed swing over the melody and an infectious parade-march beat during the first part of Knepper's trombone solo before he and Mingus relax into a more contemporary feel, though everybody's solos are pure Big Easy. The tune takes on another odd rhythmic twist halfway through Parlan's solo, and Mingus and Richmond navigate these seemingly spur-of-the-moment changes with such ease, it seems like they're sharing a brain. They close the solo section by passing the melody back and forth between the two of them, and despite the start-and-stop quality of the section, the relaxed swing never feels interrupted and Richmond sounds like he's playing melodies with his trap set.
"E's Flat Ah's Flat Too," another of Mingus' oft-recorded tunes, is a fantastic closer, featuring a singing bass intro from Mingus and another rattling, layered melody section. Ringer pianist Mal Waldron comes out swinging (pun fully intended) for the opening solo, and the rest of the solos are concise and punchy — exactly what you want in an album closer. Mingus resumes his opening line at points throughout the solos, always keeping an eye on cohesion in the midst of the ensemble's relative anarchy. Richmond provides a brief break before the cacophonous melody returns and the band rolls on like a freight train threatening to run off the tracks.
Mingus's life was marked by tragedy as much as it was righteous anger and joy. His career was hampered by financial problems, mismanagement, and all too frequently his own personality. Then, of course, came the cruel irony of Mingus's final years — he was crippled by Lou Gherig's Disease and increasingly unable to play or even notate the music he heard in his head. The last years of his life were marked by the singularly sad image of the great man hunched in a wheelchair, singing bits of compositions into a tape recorder out of the desperation to get some of it, any of it, out of his head and into the world before he passed. But this is not how Mingus deserves to be remembered. Instead, put on a record like Blues and Roots and feel the man's exuberance, creativity, and most importantly, his pure joy at being alive and sharing this wonderful music with us.