By Paul Freeman [August 2012 Interview]

Charles Mingus. He was only on this planet for 56 years, yet he accomplished so much. Composer, bassist, pianist, bandleader, activist. His bold, diverse jazz explorations sound as daring and exciting today as they did when he first recorded them.

Sony Legacy has just issued a box set, “Charles Mingus: The Complete Columbia & RCA Albums Collection.” The treasure-filled package allows the listener to experience this intense artist at both his most accessible and his most challenging.

Born in Arizona in 1922, raised in Watts, Mingus studied trombone and cello. To join Buddy Collette’s band, he learned to play bass. Before fronting his own groups, he played gigs with such greats as Louis Armstrong, Lionel Hampton, Charlie Parker and Duke Ellington.

By the mid-’50s, Mingus was established as one of the jazz world’s most adventurous creative forces. The volatile Mingus often used the stage as a platform to rail against racism, discrimination and injustice. In a world where the word “genius” is too readily bandied about, it fits Charles Mingus just fine.

In 1979, after a long battle with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease), he passed on. But his widow, Sue Graham Mingus carries, on his legacy. She created and manages several repertory bands to perform his music, including Mingus Dynasty, which tours internationally. She produced the album “Mingus Big Band Live at Jazz Standard,” a 2011 Grammy winner. Founder of the nonprofit Let My Children Hear Music and the Charles Mingus High School Competition, held annually at the Manhattan School of Music, she penned the liner notes for the new Sony Legacy box set.

Pop Culture Classics was honored to talk with Sue Mingus. For the full picture of her life with Mingus, read her book, “Tonight at Noon: A Love Story.”

POP CULTURE CLASSICS:
This new box set, do you think that provides a great overview of Mingus’ career?

SUE MINGUS:
Oh, yes. It has material that Sony put out when it was called Columbia Records. And it has some material from RCA, a total of 10 CDs. That’s a lot of Mingus. And it covers a lot of ground.

PCC:
From the liner notes, I gather you’re not a big fan of alternate takes.

SUE MINGUS:
You read between the lines [Laughs] That was part of the fun - they told me, if I agreed to write liner notes, I could also express whatever private dissatisfactions I had. While there are marvelous things there... Charles would pleased that his masterwork, ‘Epitaph,’ is included. That’s his final, large work, written for 31 musicians, that requires almost three hours to perform. And it was performed posthumously, 10 years after Charles died. He would be very pleased that that was included.

And then, again, the two seminal albums, ‘Mingus Ah Um,’ has never gone out of the catalog in the last 50 years. That one and ‘Mingus ‘Dynasty’ have most of the so-called hits, the most familiar pieces of Charles’ that people might know, like ‘Goodbye Pork Pie Hat,’ and ‘Never Get Hit In Your Soul.’ ‘The Haitian Fight Song.’ They’re on those albums.

And then there’s the wonderful Latin album, called ‘Tijuana Moods,’ which was a merging of jazz and Mexican rhythms, which Charles made in the late ‘50s and, for some reason, the record company didn’t release it for five years. And, in the interim, Miles Davis came out with an album called ‘Sketches of Spain’ and got a lot of attention. And Mingus felt shortchanged, because he had done that years earlier. But that material, ‘Tijuana Moods,’ is in the box set, and that’s where we come into the alternate takes situation. There are a number of alternate takes from ‘Tijuana Moods’ and there are also alternate takes from other things. And I’m one of those people that does not believe in every shred of music that an artist left behind. I think there are things that he would prefer were erased. And probably thought were erased. So I got to speak out and make my little comments about that.

PCC:
‘Epitaph,’ did he sense that that was going to be an ultimate work for him? Did he see it as coming to terms with his own mortality?

SUE MINGUS:
I think he saw it as an overview of his life and his progression as an artist and as a musician. There are pieces there that he wrote, very classical pieces, when he was 17 years old. And when he might have hoped, had he been a different color, and his path gone in a different direction, that he would have been a classical composer. But the only way that was open to him in those days was jazz. But he wrote something called ‘Half-Mast Inhibition.’ His titles, they’re a book of their own. And another piece called ‘The Chill of Death.’ And those are in ‘Epitaph.’ And then all sorts of tunes and sections that became pieces in their own right. ‘Peggy’s Blue Skylight.’ They had names and our band played them as individual pieces. But they are part of this suite, ‘Epitaph.’ The score is 500 pages and I forget how many measures. It’s an immense work. Charles said he wrote it for his tombstone. And he said that’s why he called it ‘Epitaph,’ because he was afraid he would never get it performed. He prophesied he would never get it performed in his lifetime.

So that’s there. And some little gems. Some unexpected pieces that pop up, out of nowhere, that I was surprised by. And it’s quite an overview of the variety and breadth of Mingus’ music and his compositions.

PCC:
It must have been especially gratifying for you to bring ‘Epitaph’ to life posthumously.

SUE MINGUS:
It was a long ordeal. It was a year. Gunther Schuller took it over and helped edit it. And in those days, there were no computers for musical programs and everyone wrote everything out by hand. It was really the first time we used the computers. We used two programs, called ‘Finale’ and ‘Score.’ So that was also an experiment. We knew not whether it was going to work out or not. It took about a year to prepare everything. And then we had enormously long rehearsals. But it was very exciting to finally have it see the light.

PCC:
When the ALS diagnosis came, was part of the struggle for him seeing this as another obstacle in the path of creating music?

SUE MINGUS:
Well, he slowly lost his movement and became paralyzed in a wheelchair. And, when he could no longer compose at the piano, which he normally did, when he couldn’t use his hands, he used what was left, which was his voice. Nothing stopped him. And he sang melodies into a tape recorder. And Joni Mitchell took a number of those tunes that were on a tape recorder and wrote lyrics for them. And an album came out posthumously, a couple months after Charles died, an album called, ‘Mingus,’ with Joni singing Charles’ music.

We have repertory bands that play every Monday night in New York. Primarily the Mingus Big Band, but we have two others. And we have those tunes with Joni’s lyrics. And we have a vocalist, Ku-umba Frank Lacy, who sings. And they’re wonderful. Joni wrote a piece called ‘Chair in the Sky,’ when Charles was in a wheelchair up on the 43rd floor. And they’re very evocative, very beautiful songs that she wrote. It was an unusual collaboration - a folk singer and Charles Mingus.

PCC:
Though he composed on the piano, why was it that the instrument that he chose to express himself through was the bass?

SUE MINGUS:
I think it’s common to compose on the piano. He composed only one song on the bass -’Mingus Fingers.’ And everything else he composed on the piano. And there is a lovely album called ‘Mingus Plays Piano.’ He wrote the liner notes, which he was nominated for a Grammy for. He never was nominated for his music, ironically. But he was nominated for his liner notes about what it means to be a composer. And he called himself a spontaneous composer. He said he hadn’t noticed that anybody else called him that. But that’s what he felt he was. And if you listen to the piano album, you hear these pieces taking shape, astonishingly, completely constructed. Alvin Ailey, the dancer, put on an hour performance of Mingus dances, many, many years ago, in the early ‘70s. And he had a 60-piece orchestra of classical musicians. And he took one of those pieces that Charles had simply improvised on the piano. And they could not believe that it was improvised, because it was so structured and so perfect and studied. But he had that sort of mind, that musically ordered mind that could improvise compositions. Not everybody can do that.

PCC:
Did he find it frustrating that not everyone would regard improvisation as another form of legitimate composition?

SUE MINGUS:
Well, you know, when jazz musicians take their solos, they’re also composing. But some are better than others. Not everyone is a great composer. But those aren’t sitting down, writing out composers, which is what Charles was and Duke Ellington was. That’s another kind of composing. But this album of piano compositions was a very interesting view into the process. Charles did all his composing at the piano. And he spent most of his time at home at the piano. It was where he found his peace and his center. It was his creative center.

PCC:
Was he always consciously absorbing as many musical forms as possible, hoping to meld them? Or was that unconscious?

SUE MINGUS:
Yeah, I think he was always absorbing music.

PCC:
When you listen now to the albums, do you hear a lot of different facets of his personality echoed in different pieces?

SUE MINGUS:
Well, yeah, you do hear that. Everything that Charles was is in his music. And he said he was trying to find who he was, through his music. And he said the reason it was difficult was that he was changing all the time. And it was a mantra he always used with his musicians, ‘Play yourself. Play who you are.’ He wanted them to bring their voices and who they were, into the music as they played, their sound. In the old days, people didn’t take solos. It was their sound that was the solo. We have a bass trombone player, Dave Taylor, who has a very distinctive sound. I can hear him throughout the entire band. And you just know it’s Dave Taylor. It’s his sound. It isn’t only that you have to solo with your own notes. There are different ways of projecting who you are, who your voice is.

PCC:
So his group was a great training ground for musicians?

SUE MINGUS:
It was a great training ground. He called it his workshop. We do it today. We’ll bring in new arrangements of Charles’ music. And sometimes our guys don’t get it right away. And we will have a workshop in front of the audience. We’ll steal the same lines that Charles used. We’ll say, ‘This is difficult music. There’s never enough time and enough money and enough rehearsal space to be able to rehearse it properly. So we call it the Jazz Workshop. And the great news is that you get to see the process. You get to see a piece coming together. The bad news is, you can’t get your money back, if you don’t like it.’ That always draws a laugh, still, 50 years later. And Charles was very clever. He called it the jazz workshop. It gave him the opportunity to rehearse his music on stage. And people couldn’t get their money back. They got a lot more... if they were the right audience. They got to watch musicians being yelled out. ‘Don’t do that!’ ‘Do it right.’ And ‘That’s in E-flat, Bernie!‘ [Chuckles] That can be fun.

PCC:
As far as the creative courage, did he see himself as taking risks? Or was he just expressing what he had to express?

SUE MINGUS:
It was courageous, it really was. He was a man who constantly took risks, who had no fear. Charles was, perhaps, the most courageous person I ever know. He stood up for his rights, at a time when that could be dangerous. A lot of people didn’t. He spoke his truth as he saw it, from the bandstand. He used the bandstand as his soapbox. He delivered his political views, social views. And he spoke out. And he spoke out musically. And he was constantly exploring and risking and trying things out and seeing what happened.

PCC:
That monicker of ‘the angry man of jazz,’ was that partly due to his pursuit of perfection?

SUE MINGUS:
It was two things. That was one. But he was angry. If you were born the wrong color in the ‘20s and the ‘30s and the ‘40s, and the ‘50s, if you had something to say, people were constantly keeping you from what you were wanting to do, for reasons that were absurd. Charles, alone in the apartment, performing, was not an angry man. If he was out where it was necessary to battle to get something, he battled. And was he always right? No. Did he overdo it at times? Yes. Sometimes he lost his control and judgment. But, on the whole, he was battling for the right reasons. This was even before civil rights. And he spoke out about injustice, wherever he saw it. And whoever it was.

PCC:
Even beyond that, the sense of being an outsider, all the way back to childhood, was that important to the music?

SUE MINGUS:
Yeah, I mean, he wasn’t dark enough. He was too light to be really dark. He was too dark to be light. He tried to be Mexican. He tried to conk his hair. You know, that’s what he called his book - ‘Beneath The Underdog.’ Great title. Because he didn’t fit in anywhere. But whether that caused... that’s always a tricky thing, I mean, Charles was a musician, for whatever reason. He said, If he’d been white, he might not have written anything. He might have been the first bassist in the New York Philharmonic and never bothered to write.

Opposition can also be a great motivator. He once wrote, ‘an open letter, thanking my enemies for their creative opposition.’

PCC:
In terms of the motivation, was it just a compulsion to get out what was in his head? Or was he driven to achieve greatness and acclaim, as well?

SUE MINGUS:
Charles was about music. You know, everybody likes acclaim and to be a household word and everything. But that was not the motivating factor. Charles could have done a million things. People came to him all the time and he never did anything because it would help his career. When he started playing the Dixieland things, people would say, ‘Charlie, if you keep doing that, you would be a household word.’ But he was doing something else a week later. He didn’t do what he might have done to make himself so-called popular. I’m not saying he wouldn’t have enjoyed that, but he was a musician through and through. And had to create music. Had to explore. It’s who he was.

PCC:
How did you meet him and what were your first impressions?

SUE MINGUS:
I met him at the Five Spot, which was a major jazz spot in those days, where he and Monk could play for six months at a time. Today, you’re lucky to get a week somewhere. Jazz was peaking. It was 1964. Thelonius Monk had been on the cover of Time magazine. And it was just before The Beatles came in. Jazz was in its heyday.

I knew nothing about jazz, whatsoever. But I went out with somebody. I was working at an underground newspaper.

PCC:
And your first impressions of Mingus?

SUE MINGUS:
He was eating a beef bone. And I found it riveting. He was sitting, at intermission, in a packed jazz club, at midnight, at a table for four, all alone. Large man. And actually focused on this huge beef bone. Like he was meditating on a chakra. Completely removed from the din and the noise. And I didn’t know it was Charlie Mingus, as they called them then. He hated to be called Charlie. I always said Charles, not Charlie. I felt an instant connection. Who can say why? Whether it was a time lapse, where I jumped ahead 20 years and there was my husband. I have no idea, because we had very little, apparently, in common at that point. But there was something about him.

And he went over to the bar to get a bottle of wine. I was sitting there with a friend. So I asked him a question about Ornette Coleman, I think, who I think we were supposed to go hear. I mean, I didn’t know who anybody was. I knew nothing about jazz. And he said, ‘Are you his old lady?’ I said, ‘His mother?’ We were speaking two different languages. But that’s how it began.

And then he asked me about my teeth. He said, ‘Doesn’t your daddy fix your teeth?’ I think it was a tooth in the back of my mouth that no one noticed, but Charles noticed. And who would say that? ‘Why doesn’t your daddy fix your teeth?’ [Laughs] So our whole conversation was at cross purposes. But there was some kind of spark. And he said, ‘I’ll play something for you.’ And then he went up and he played something on the piano before the set began, a very tender little ballad. And then he got up and they launched into ‘Fables of Faubus,’ which was a political tune about a racist governor of Arkansas. And the band began. And that was the beginning. And for more, you can read the book [Laughs].

PCC:
As the relationship developed, did you see yourself as a muse and a sounding board?

SUE MINGUS:
I don’t know. I started working for him. He started this record company. I was looking for a job. And I got a job working with Charles, launching this little record company. We put out four records. And that’s how it all began.

It turned into eight years of fighting, because love was an address. I didn’t want to live with anybody. My marriage had fallen apart. I did not want a relationship with anybody. And so, all our fights were about love with an address. He wanted to move in.

PCC:
I guess he won the argument?

SUE MINGUS:
After eight years.

PCC:
As far as the lasting relevance of the music, why do you think it’s been important for each new generation to discover him?

SUE MINGUS:
The perception when Charles died, first of all, it was that he was a bassist and a bandleader and a personality on stage. No one really thought of Mingus as a composer, when he died. So that’s the biggest change in perception. They realize that he has this enormous body of composition, second only to Duke Ellington. And the other thing is, the perception was that Charles’ music just too difficult for most people to play. And other musicians weren’t playing it like Duke or Monk. And now, we’ve got high school kids that are playing the devil out of the music and they are incredible. We have the 12 winning contestants come to New York for three days and on Sunday they all compete. And they’re amazing. And I feel this particularly, because I know for so long, how people said, ‘Oh, Mingus’ music is too hard. You can’t play it.’

And kids love it, because it’s so personal and it demands your own voice and your energy and it’s exciting for kids. They really relate to it.

PCC:
Upon his passing, did you feel a sense of mission, to carry on the legacy?

SUE MINGUS:
I don’t know. I never really felt a sense of mission. It’s been one foot in front of the other. I certainly did not have a design or a plan or anything. But one thing led to another. I found myself a bandleader. I’m not a musician. I studied piano for years and I played in recitals. But I’m not a professional musician. And I’m in this peculiar role of being a bandleader of jazz musicians, of all things, and hiring and commissioning things and going on the road. It’s a very bizarre life that I created for myself.

PCC:
Was it difficult to recapture the magic with these various Mingus bands you’ve assembled?

SUE MINGUS:
Well, I certainly had to prove myself. You can be sure it was not easy. ‘Who’s she? Who’s this woman here, who’s not even a musician? What’s she doing?’ But it worked. It’s amazing. It worked. And that’s a big tribute to the music, because the guys love to play the music. And whatever horrors go on, on the road, and they always do, everything comes together on stage, when they’re playing the music. It becomes transcendent. It erases all disasters, the crises of the day.

PCC:
The taking of his ashes to the Ganges, was that a recognition of a spirituality?

SUE MINGUS:
Charles wanted it. He didn’t want a jazz funeral. He didn’t want to be around the gangsters and the club owners and whoever he imaged could mess with his spiritual journey from this life to the next. I think he wanted to be on the other side of the world, where he would have a peaceful transition. He believed in reincarnation. And he was fond of the Hindu religion, because it accepted all religions. It was not intolerant. It was tolerant. It accepted Hindu, Buddhists, Jews, Christians, everybody. So he liked its openness. And he went, every now and then, to lectures at a Hindu temple in New York City.

But Charles had his own direct connection to the Almighty. He didn’t need to go to church or anything. But I think he liked the idea of having his ashes scattered on the other side of the world, in the Ganges. Or maybe he just wanted to give me one last tour. He knew I liked to travel.

PCC:
And he envision that his music would last?

SUE MINGUS:
Oh, I’m sure he did, yeah. One time, he said, ‘I’ll probably be reincarnated as some cello player playing Bach, Beethoven and Mingus.’

For more on the great Charles Mingus, visit mingusmingusmingus.com.