One-Man Band

In 1979, the last year of his life, Charles Mingus was dismayed when a radio commentator, during a rebroadcast of a Mingus concert in New Orleans, praised an early composition of his but got its musical lineage wrong. “I was inspired by Duke Ellington, Debussy, Stravinsky, Bartok,” he said. “It had nothing to do with [jazz bassist] Oscar Pettiford.”

Ellington was his lifelong idol, and because Mingus also composed for the full orchestral palette, he is Ellington’s truest successor. His only rival, Thelonious Monk, was perfectly at home with the small ensemble (although his music is periodically the subject of successful orchestral settings).

I remember seeing Mingus one night at Birdland during the 1960s. He stood with his bass to the left on a bandstand that included reeds, horns and a rhythm section, and though his players had scores, Mingus would spontaneously call on soloists or indicate whole sections for particular emphasis or unrehearsed interludes. It was as if he was playing his bass and his orchestra simultaneously.

His body of work is among the most emotionally protean with one of the most varied and informed musical pedigrees in American history. In addition to the influences he names above, his compositions embrace gospel, blues, R&B;, salsa and Afro-Cuban strains--often in boldly articulated “movements.” Works such as “Fables of Faubus,” “Self Portrait in Three Colors,” “Reincarnation of a Lovebird” and “Sue’s Changes” are American classics.

When the New Thing in jazz came along in the 1960s, Mingus readily integrated free jazz intervals into the body of his compositions. But we learn in “Tonight at Noon: A Love Story,” his widow Sue Graham Mingus’ telling and moving memoir, that he considered musicians playing exclusively free jazz to be at best incomplete. “You don’t do anything all the time,” he said.

Sue Mingus reports a conversation between her husband and Ellington apropos the New Jazz, then at its height, quoting from a piece Mingus wrote: “ ‘Duke, why don’t you, me and Dizzy [Gillespie] and Clark Terry and Thad Jones get together and make an avant-garde record?’ Duke’s reply was very quick: ‘Why should we go back that far? Let’s not take music back that far, Mingus. Why not just make a modern record?’ ”

Mingus died at 56 of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. Even so, his body of work is the second largest in jazz, exceeded only by Ellington’s, and includes major compositions still to be recorded.

Like his music, Mingus’ life was multifaceted and inclusive, running the gamut from a childhood and adolescence in the Watts ghetto of Los Angeles to concerts in the capitals of Europe and the Americas; there were friendships with, among others, Norman Mailer and Joni Mitchell, who, late in his life, became a collaborator. Sue Mingus records her husband’s first meeting with Mitchell, which occurred when he was already dying:

“They were an unlikely couple, Joni and Charles: Joni, a singer who didn’t read music, who refused to risk her gifts or her intuition by submitting them to formal study. And Charles, who, as a teenager in Los Angeles, studied composition and music theory with the legendary Lloyd Reese and mastered the classical bass with Herman Rheinshagen, the retired principal bassist of the New York Philharmonic. Joni’s musical talents fell into place on their own, a natural outgrowth of her poetry.

“ ‘You’re the hillbilly singer,’ Charles ... said to her straight-faced from his wheelchair when she first walked into our living room. She stopped dead at the entrance and stared at him without speaking. He’d caught her off guard. She was standing beside Don Alias, tall, black, and handsome, the jazz percussionist who was living with her then. She was taller than I had imagined and looked surprisingly serious. Suddenly she relaxed. She looked at Charles slyly and burst out laughing. They liked each other from the start.”

In the fall of 1964, at the Manhattan funeral of my boyhood friend Steve Reichman, who had died in Europe over his summer break from NYU, I was surprised and moved when it was announced that Charles Mingus, unseen behind the proscenium curtain, would play a solo bass eulogy. The austerely beautiful solo, and Mingus’ generosity to the family of his young fan, was a moving gesture at the abrupt end of a promising life. Earlier that same year, Sue Graham had been introduced to Mingus at the Five Spot, the Greenwich Village jazz club where he was performing. She was married to an Italian artist at the time and was the mother of a young son and daughter.

A Milwaukee debutante and Smith graduate, Graham had broken with her 1950s upbringing and embarked on her own adventurous odyssey during a visit to Europe. And she was living in Manhattan as the 1960s began to go into gear. Pursued by the tumultuous, imperious but also loving jazz legend, she was alternately overwhelmed and repelled. For years the two, married first by Allen Ginsberg in an impromptu ceremony at an Upper East Side townhouse and a second time at City Hall, maintained separate addresses. Eventually Sue Mingus not only merged her life with her husband’s but, in the two decades since his death, has also become the central figure in the perpetuation and proliferation of his musical legacy, releasing his performances on her own label--started to thwart rampant bootlegging of his music--as well as initiating the first large ensemble to perform his music posthumously.

One of this book’s many pleasures is the record, rendered in intimate close-up, of the loving camaraderie in the African American musical community:

“[Mingus] remembered a concert in Europe long ago when Dizzy was playing on the bandstand and he was standing below, some distance away, thinking about Dizzy’s importance and hoping Dizzy would live forever. Although his back was turned, Dizzy swung around suddenly and asked out loud where all the love he felt was coming from. Then he looked straight at Charles.

“ ‘You really do love me, don’t you?’ Dizzy said. ‘I felt just then like I was in heaven!’ ”

When Mingus arrives one night at the Village Vanguard to hear Miles Davis, the trumpeter “came over, wiped Charles’s face with his hands (wiping his own blackness onto Charles’s mongrel skin, as Charles later explained), and tussled his hair. Then Miles headed for the bandstand.

“Charles smiled happily, ‘I don’t feel lonesome anymore,’ he said.”

At the same time, Mingus practiced what he called “creative anger” and would often berate members of his audience for making disruptive noise during his performances. When his friend Timothy Leary wanted him to try LSD, which he believed would allow “people [to] shed their old neurotic imprints and begin again,” his wife reports that “Mingus was less interested in shedding his imprint than in changing the world’s.”

“I know I’m not perfect,” he told Leary, “but I don’t want to play bass any different. I don’t want to write music any different.”

When disease strikes, he suffers its swift, merciless advance with bravery and humor, while at the same time driving his wife to her limits and beyond. After trying Western medicine, they soon look to alternative varieties, including a stop at a clinic in Montreux, where Mingus receives “a dozen injections from the organs of an unborn lamb. Lamb liver cells. Lamb heart cells. Lamb kidney cells. Lamb pancreas.”

Sharing a hospital room with separate beds, Sue Mingus awakens early the next morning: “In the semi-darkness I watched him as he lay in bed. He looked crucified. He could barely move his body .... I realized his eyes were open and that he had been watching me as well. Suddenly his mouth quivered and emitted a long, low sound: ‘B-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a ....’ ”

With a small team in tow, acting on a tip from Gerry Mulligan, the couple stops last in Mexico, where they eventually take up residence at a rented villa in Cuernavaca and Mingus is treated by a 72-year-old female Indian witch doctor named Pachita and her lieutenants. Her treatment culminates with a miraculously (or fraudulently) bloodless surgery.

Virtually paralyzed but still meeting each day with appetite, Mingus dies not long afterward of a heart attack. Honoring his wishes, his widow makes a pilgrimage to scatter his ashes over the Ganges, “certain that the raw air beneath the dark range of the Himalayas was made for the life of the spirit and for reincarnation, as he believed.”

To listen to the music of Charles Mingus is to hear darkness and light, pain and jubilation, beauty and beast, in an enchanted musical continuum. Sue Mingus survives and perpetuates her husband with a loving, exacting portrait: “Tonight at Noon,” titled after one of her husband’s compositions, has the emotional fluency and power of Mingus’ own music.