Word: mingus
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WHEN the great man came to New York in the early '50s, they called him Charlie Mingus. A few years later he announced that Charlie was a name for a boy or a horse--and Charles he has remained. Or simply Mingus, the name as distinctive as its bearer. Given a career that is a case study in the plight of the black American artist, it's not hard to see why the musical importance of Charles Mingus has so often been eclipsed by the drama of his troubled life. Even as he first established his unique and revolutionary talent...
...Mingus was a man of giant appetites and violent passions, and he elevated these traits to mythic proportions in his autobiographical Beneath the Underdog, published in 1972. He shouted, he threw things, he stormed out of clubs. At times he became obsessed with the (probably justified) fear that other musicians were capitalizing on ideas stolen from him, and he refused to solo if he suspected that spies were present. He quit performing in the late '60s, boarded himself up in an East Village apartment, and spent years fighting illnesses, poverty, and severe depression. The '70s found him back...
...MYSELF AN EYE was recorded in January 1978, not long after a nerve disease had ended Mingus's playing career by forcing him into a wheelchair for the rest of his life. It was recorded hastily by a 25-piece ensemble consisting largely of white studio musicians who have little or no previous association with Mingus. The album confirms Mingus's pervasive musical personality precisely because of these limitations. Lacking the leader's enormous presence on bass, as well as the discipline of the handpicked, carefully trained small workshops for which he is best known, Me Myself An Eye remains...
DIED. Charles Mingus, 56, virtuoso bassist and composer whose emotional, free-floating music helped shape modern jazz; of a heart attack after suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's disease); in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Raised in the Watts district of Los Angeles, Mingus began studying bass in high school, later played with Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Charlie Parker before forming his own combo in New York in the mid-'50s. Influenced strongly by blues and gospel, he began writing music that highlighted the bass as a solo instrument and featured contorted harmonies and quick-changing rhythms with...
...ability to play three instruments simultaneously; of as yet undetermined causes; in Bloomington, Ind. Kirk played the manzello (a quasi-saxophone), the stritch (a horn resembling a dented blunderbuss) and the tenor sax together, combining themes of Brazilian Composer Villa-Lobos, Atonalist Arnold Schonberg and Bassist Charlie Mingus...