Charles Mingus

Charles Mingus Jr. was born at the Nogales military base in Arizona on the twenty-second of April 1922 and raised in the Watts district of Los Angeles. He studied trombone and cello through his teens and shifted to double bass at sixteen on the urging of his classmate Buddy Collette — who had pointed out that the segregated Los Angeles musicians' union locals would not admit Black cellists.

He played with the principal West Coast bandleaders of the 1940s — Louis Armstrong, Lionel Hampton, Red Norvo — and moved to New York in 1951. By the mid-1950s he was leading his own ensembles and producing the body of work that established him as the most ambitious large-form jazz composer of the post-Ellington generation.

His major recordings — Pithecanthropus Erectus (1956), The Clown (1957), Mingus Ah Um (1959), Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus (1960), The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady (1963), Let My Children Hear Music (1972) — extended jazz composition through the integration of classical structural ambition, gospel and blues vernacular, and explicit political content. "Fables of Faubus" (1959 — his protest against the segregationist Arkansas governor Orval Faubus) and "Meditations on Integration" set the template for politically explicit jazz composition that John Coltrane (also placed in this archive) and Max Roach would extend.

He suffered from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis from 1977. He composed actively until his last months — the late 1978 sessions with Joni Mitchell, who set lyrics to Mingus melodies for her Mingus album, produced his final major recordings.

He died in Cuernavaca, Mexico, on the fifth of January 1979, age fifty-six. His ashes were scattered in the Ganges River, in accordance with his religious practice.

He is honored here as the composer-bassist whose large-form jazz extended Ellington's ambitions into the post-war era.