| Charles Mingus (1922-1979)
Charles Mingus was one of the most
distinguished and colorful personalities in jazz. He is a virtuoso of the bass
who is credited with expanding the instrument's melodic function. When New
Orleans jazz moved indoors, the bass replaced the tuba and helped hold down the
rhythm of a musical piece. In a revolutionary move, Mingus treated the bass more
like a guitar, leaving the drum to provide the percussive accent.
Mingus always played slightly "out in
front of" the beat, rather than "on" it or "behind" it r la Miles Davis. From
this, Mingus discerned what he called the "core" of the music - not simply its
rhythmic center, but rather the center of a sound in its entirety. It was for
this reason that some critics found his music to be dissonant. Leonard Feather
noted that "more conservative listeners" found his experiments "hard to
appreciate at first."
Mingus was nothing if not a
meticulous composer. And yet, he composed his songs around a core that was not
to be found on the beat, nor simply in a single key - Mingus' core was a kind
of feeling, an affect, or a mood. Mingus' compositions usually involve various
movements, which express their own mood. From ecstasy to playfulness to
melancholy, the moods in his songs travel along an emotive progression. They
evolve through a series of rhythms and keys, each of which is determined by the
emotive "core" Mingus sought to evoke.
His work on "Revelations" has been
described as "a powerful piece which begins with an almost Wagnerian,
brooding-like intensity." Such developments are typical of Mingus. His "Pithecanthropus
Erectus" even has a narrative quality to it; the album chronicles the various
stages in the evolution of man. He seems to have been the first to integrate a
classical mode of composition into the framework of jazz. Before Mingus, jazz
had plenty of soul, but it had not yet achieved a subtlety of mood. Mingus gave
it such subtlety; he combined technical virtuosity with an entire range of
emotive contrasts.
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