Residents of New York City are fortunate to have the opportunity to hear the music of jazz composer Charles Mingus almost on a daily basis, as three bands devoted to his legacy n the Mingus Orchestra, the Mingus Big Band and Mingus Dynasty n have regular gigs in the city.
The rest of us have to chase one of these bands to a jazz festival or New York to get a decent helping of jazz’s greatest composer (other than Duke Ellington), who died in 1979. This makes “There’s a Mingus Among Us,” a multimedia celebration of his work to be held 7 p.m. Monday, February 14 at Webster University’s Winifed Moore Auditorium a treat not to be missed.
Paul DeMarinis, saxophonist and director of jazz studies at the university, will lead a band through a set of Mingus tunes that encompass his roots in church music and gutbucket blues, as well as his longing for lyricism and symphonic structure.
Aptly, given its scheduling during Black History Month, the performance will include “Fables of Faubus,” Mingus’ scathing musical assault on Orval E. Faubus, the governor of Arkansas who, in 1957, sent the National Guard to prevent a few black children from entering Little Rock’s Central High School. “Two, four, six, eight: They brainwash and teach you hate!” Mingus and drummer Dannie Richmond shout, in a chant that was censored from the song’s original 1959 release on the sublime Mingus Ah Um.
On another end of the musical (and mood) spectrum, DeMarinis and co. will perform “Goodbye Porkpie Hat,” Mingus’ elegy for the great Lester Young. “What starts off as sad, blue yearning winds up threaded through with joy and hope,” the poet William Matthews wrote of this composition.
Matthews’ work, which often returned to Mingus as a preoccupying theme, will also appear on the program, read by local poet David Clewell.
Clewell will read three poems by Matthews: “Mingus in Diaspora,” “Mingus at the Showplace” and “Mingus at the Half Note,” which describes a 1960 Mingus performance of “Better Get It in Your Soul” (another song on the Feb. 14 set list) during which the bassist/bandleader displayed his characteristic demanding attitude toward his audience, taunting a noisy dude in the crowd: “This is your heritage and if you don’t wanna listen, then you got someplace else you’d better be.”
That fire (and gall) from the bandstand vanished forever with Mingus when he died in Mexico on January 5, 1979, but it was frequently documented on film as well as in Matthew’s verse and Mingus’ own unforgettable 1971 autobiography, Beneath the Underdog. The Webster program will conclude with a documentary film whose title, Mingus n Triumph of the Underdog, borrows from Mingus’ memoir.
The man knew well the sources of his own fire, which burst forth in ugly public episodes as well as glorious compositions. He described his anger well in his own liner notes to his 1971 album Let My Children Hear Music (laughably, this was the only time this genius was nominated for a Grammy n and for his liner notes, not his music!):
“My music is alive, and it’s about the living and the dead, about good and evil. It’s angry, yet it’s real because it knows it’s angry.”
In those same notes, Mingus added a note about race and creativity that might resonate during Black History Month, or any other month.
“Had I been born in a different country or had I been born white, I am sure I would have expressed my ideas long ago,” Mingus wrote.
“Maybe they wouldn’t have been as good, because when people are born free n I can’t imagine it, but I’ve got a feeling that if it’s so easy for you, the struggle and the initiative are not as strong as they are for a person who has to struggle and therefore has more to say.”
The Winifed Moore Auditorium is located at 470 E. Lockwood Ave. Call 968-7032.
