March 17, 2002

My Mingus
By SUE GRAHAM MINGUS
 

I first met Charles Mingus late one 
night in July 1964. I had gone down to the Five Spot, a jazz club in Lower Manhattan, because the producer of a film I was acting in had commissioned a jazz soundtrack from the saxophonist Ornette Coleman, and my friend Sam Edwards, who was working on the film, suggested I check out the scene. I didn't know the first thing about jazz. Sam warned me I was not with it, especially for someone in New York, but added in his usual upbeat fashion that anyone could learn. Members of the cast had given me an Ornette Coleman album called ''Something Else!'' and I had listened over and over to a Miles Davis record called ''Miles Ahead,'' because the director of the film had played it over and over in the apartment where we were shooting during the long intervals between takes. But that was, at that point, the extent of my baptism into the music. 

Sam picked me up at my apartment on the Upper West Side, and we began that summer evening at the Village Gate, where the trumpet player Dizzy Gillespie was performing. Around midnight, when Dizzy's set ended, we drove across town to the Five Spot to hear Mingus play his music and his bass. In those days, the Five Spot was one of the liveliest jazz hangouts in New York City. Jazz was peaking, and Mingus, who would have his breakthrough performance later that year, and Thelonious Monk could play at the same place for six months straight and keep people coming. It was a time, Sam explained, when Mingus was referred to in the press as jazz's angry man. 

I had barely heard of Mingus, though echoes of his reputation had filtered down: the ornery, sometimes violent, often unjust blustery figure who fired his musicians onstage, hired them back, denounced the audience for inattention, picked fights, mastered his instrument, agitated for his political beliefs and created on-the-spot performances for all to see. He was, people said, the essence of a 60's ''happening.'' 

After surveying the room, Sam pointed to someone at a distant table and said it was Mingus. I had already noticed the solitary individual who was eating alone at a table for four. His sleeves were rolled up, a steak bone was in his fist and his eyes were focused on the round plate of food before him, as intense and private as if he were a holy man meditating on his chakra. He looked as if he might lavish the same brooding intensity on everything he touched. 

I liked him immediately. I liked his aloneness in the tumultuous room. An unselfconscious man, exposed and unimpressed, a man too concentrated within himself for fear. My own life had been one of order and balance, founded on grammar and taste and impeccable manners, and yet something about the man across the room seemed oddly familiar, like someone I already knew, a relation in the family, some critical presence or weight like my father, looming beyond scale or size. 

As I watched, Mingus rose from the table and shouldered his way through the crowd to the bar, where he called for a bottle of Bordeaux. I decided to ask him whether he had seen Ornette Coleman, the musician Sam and I were looking for, whose free style of playing was still causing disputes among jazz fans. 

''You mean the calypso player?'' Mingus replied scornfully. He looked at me with curiosity. ''You his old lady?'' he asked. 

''His mother?'' I said. I hadn't the faintest notion what he meant. 

Mingus laughed. ''No, baby, I mean his woman, his lady.'' 

''He's writing some music for a movie I'm in.'' 

''You in a movie?'' He seemed surprised. ''With those teeth?'' 

Now I laughed. ''It's an underground movie,'' I said. ''They're not fussy.'' 

''Isn't your daddy rich?'' Mingus persisted. I looked sideways at Sam. He was sitting straight-backed and noncommittal, staring at himself in the mirror across the bar. I imagined he was waiting to see exactly how far down this communication failure was headed. 

''I lived in Italy,'' I said. ''The dentists aren't so great. I suppose it's not important.'' 

It was time for the next set. The stage lights were on and he looked at me again. Then he said one more time: ''Still, if I was your daddy, I'd fix your teeth!'' 

The week after I met Mingus, I drove down to the Five Spot by myself on a Thursday -- or ''listeners' night,'' as the musicians called it -- when the room was less crowded. I sat at a table directly in front of the bandstand, where a waiter had placed me, wondering whether I should have asked for a seat less visible. I rarely went out by myself. I was glad when the waiter seated at my table someone named Ivan Black, a soft-spoken, pale, middle-aged man who introduced himself as a publicity agent for another club. He was also a black-history scholar, he added modestly, moonlighting in the trenches of New York night life. He seemed to possess a brainy reserve of uncommon facts, which he delivered to outsiders like me as well as to friends and musicians who sat around and bought him drinks, listening to his accounts of centuries and civilizations that never made it to the classroom -- not yet, at least. But things were changing. It was 1964, the year the Civil Rights Act was passed, and a new politics was emerging. 

Despite all the talk of change, Ivan went on, Mingus was unimpressed. 

''Mingus can tell you a lot about life,'' Ivan laughed as the house lights dimmed, ''if you catch him in the right mood.'' 

In the middle of the set, as he had done throughout the evening, Ivan leaned over to explain something to me. This time, however, his words ran on too long. Mingus glowered from the stage. Simultaneously, within the density of the music, a growling bass solo emerged that featured such irate bowing, such dissonant slurs and scratches of protest, that we all snapped to attention. The scratches continued, becoming almost deafening until, satisfied by their effect, Mingus modulated to a tender chorus of ''She's Funny That Way.'' 


I ran into Mingus a few weeks later in Central Park, where we had both gone to see a production of ''Othello.'' When the play was over, he asked if I would have dinner with him at a steakhouse nearby. We caught a cab. In the middle of our ride, Mingus changed his mind about dinner and said there was something important he needed to show me first. When we pulled up to Grand Central, he jumped out of the cab and swiftly led me downstairs, hurrying through the corridors until we reached a corner that echoed our voices along the wall. I waited on one end of the long wall while he spoke in a low whisper from the other side, unexpected words of tenderness that roared across the room, shy words of love that slid along the grimy walls as distant and unreal as the graffiti they swept past. ''I love you,'' he was saying. ''I want you to be my woman.'' I laughed off his words; I hardly knew him. Still, I went on listening. During the rest of the summer Mingus and I met for coffees or meals on the run in the middle of our separate lives. I was separated from my husband, Alberto Ungaro, an Italian sculptor, who despite our differences was my closest friend. Charles kept moving from hotel to married life and back, inventing his life, it seemed, from day to day. His personal life was still remote; despite his advances, we were still just friends. In mid-September, Mingus announced that he was heading out to the Monterey Jazz Festival in California. Along with other compositions he had written, he planned to present an extended work about integration that he called ''Meditations on a Pair of Wirecutters.'' We were sitting in a deli and he was bringing me up to date. ''It's fully orchestrated,'' he said. As people around us were ordering breakfast, he ordered a high-protein array of meat and cheeses from the dinner menu. ''Sometimes I call it 'Meditations on Integration' and sometimes 'Meditations on Inner Peace.' I mean, we'll be performing it with an expanded band. We'll rehearse it for three days out there. You know, in Europe we were only playing with a quintet.'' 

I wasn't sure why the expanded band was special, but he was exuberant, and his high spirits were growing higher. He explained that the piece he had written had become a hymn to injustice, that he had dedicated it to black Americans imprisoned behind electric barbed wire in the South. 

''Where are they imprisoned?'' I asked immediately. He took for granted that his assertions were self-evident. I was constantly catching up. Sometimes I only half believed him. It was hard to separate his excesses from his truths, although frequently they were the same. He said he had heard about the internments from his saxophonist, Eric Dolphy, before their final tour together. He said he couldn't get them out of his mind. 

''They don't have ovens and gas faucets in this country yet,'' he said grimly as a waitress appeared with a hunk of Gorgonzola and two giant steaks. ''But they have electric fences. So I wrote a prayer about some wire cutters. I wrote a prayer we'd find some scissors and get out!'' 

A week later, only moments after the concert was over in Monterey, he called me in New York from a phone backstage. He said the crowd had roared its approval for five solid, unbelievable minutes while he paced back and forth across the raised platform of the band shell, his leather sandals flapping against his bare feet while the crowd stood up and screamed. He said he never even looked; he was too scared. At rehearsal, he had told his trumpet player, Lonnie Hillyer, that the music was a prayer and that he, Lonnie, was the preacher. ''I told him it's like when disorganization comes in and you've got to straighten it out,'' he said. ''I told him it's like a minister in church or like a Jewish rabbi. Everybody's shouting at you. You've got to chant and put them back into condition.'' 

He was on a roll. He said he had been playing to God and that he felt close to death. The next day, I read about it in the press. ''I felt pains in my chest,'' he had told a reporter. ''I felt them once before and it scared me. This time it didn't matter. I said, 'To hell with it, I'll go on playing what I'm playing even if I die.''' 

By the end of the week, Time magazine had ranked him among the greatest composers in jazz. At the end of his concert, the reporter raved, ''5,000 jazz cats rose in a thunderous ovation that they had not accorded Ellington or Dizzy Gillespie, or even Thelonious Monk.'' Another paper compared his bowing with Pablo Casals' and his compositions to Debussy's. The New York Herald Tribune wrote that he had erased the memory of any other bass player in jazz. Mingus told someone else that he was playing to love and to the spirit. When he came home, he said he was playing to me. I didn't really believe him. I didn't understand the size of his feelings -- for me or anything else. I wasn't ready to fall in love. I wasn't ready at all. 

It hardly mattered. He paid no attention. He was bursting with ideas, shouting them over the phone, declaring it was time to start his own record company, listing the crimes of every major label he had had the misfortune to sign with. He described how they favored white musicians, how they withheld royalties. When I mentioned I had been looking for a job, he told me to help him organize a small mail-order record club that would offer Mingus at Monterey to the public. He said that Frank Sinatra's office had called and wanted to release the music but that he had decided to do it on his own. 

''It's the only way,'' he shouted happily before hanging up the phone, ''to get an honest count!'' At the recording studio where he mastered the tapes and where I accompanied him, already hooked on a dozen plans for the future, he included three full minutes of applause. Someone talked him out of the remaining two. 

Within two months, Charles Mingus Enterprises had set up business, the two of us plus a post-office address, one studio and some cafes. He wrote his own liner notes and included passages from his autobiography, then unpublished. 

One afternoon after work, we sprawled on someone's tar roof in Greenwich Village as he improvised verbally on the Manhattan skyline. From his bottomless briefcase, he brought out a bottle of wine, set two paper cups on a ledge and began to expound on his life's book, ''Beneath the Underdog.'' ''I received a big advance for it -- $25,000 from McGraw-Hill. But a senior editor, a guy who was about 6-foot-5, called it the dirtiest book he'd ever read and refused to publish it. The worst part was I wrote the truth about powerful people and their names were still in the book when it was passed all over town. It went to Esquire and everywhere else. When I heard that, I almost went crazy.'' He uncorked the bottle of wine, tasted it and poured a second cup. Then he continued his story. He said there were people who wanted him killed. He had dreamed he was gunned down in a club. 

''See that?'' he cried out suddenly, swinging his head uptown as if someone were already stalking him across the tar. I turned around swiftly, but no one was on the roof. Instead, he was staring at the Empire State Building, whose familiar spire loomed above Fifth Avenue. 
''What are you looking at?'' I asked nervously. 

''It's not a spire, you dig!'' he laughed. ''It's a hypodermic needle infecting the sky.'' He examined the Empire State Building as if it had just landed on the horizon and told me he had written a gospel tune for the junkies of the world, advising them to get a spiritual hit in their lives, not in their arms. He said he had called it ''Better Get a Hit in Your Soul.'' 

He put his arm around me and recounted a recent visit to Columbia Records, where he had gone up on the elevator carrying a shotgun, intent on demanding his royalties. He was dressed in a safari suit and helmet for the occasion, which he had charged at Abercrombie & Fitch that afternoon. His royalties were brought right up to date. He recalled another appointment at Bethlehem Records, where he had gone to negotiate a contract. He had taken along his drummer, Dannie Richmond, who pulled out a knife on cue, stared at the company executive and then casually cleaned his nails. Mingus called it ''creative anger.'' It got results. 

Nothing had prepared me for Charles, an artist for whom music was life itself, for whom everything he lived, all that he was, found its way into composition. The music that he wrote and played for the world outside was as personal as his love letters, as urgent as the messages he scribbled inside his books and Bibles or left on his answering machine at home. He once told his friend Nesuhi Ertegun, the record producer, that he was trying to play the truth of what he was. 

''The reason it's difficult,'' he said, ''is because I'm changing all the time.'' 

He wasn't writing out music on paper when I met him. He said he didn't like ''pencil composers.'' He wanted his musicians to communicate the freshness of composing on the spot. He changed his composing techniques according to the players in his band, adapting to their strengths as readers or as improvisers, writing more complex parts for those who read easily, shouting out the lines vocally for those who did not. Real life lapped around and folded into the music with ease. As an artist, he was in charge. 


Real life off the page was another story. One night at the Village Gate, in the spring of 1965, his band burst onstage like an explosion. Charles wandered across the platform like a man possessed, breathing down the necks of his musicians, shrieking orders, goading his men until they expressed the visions in his head. He shouted to his drummer, insulted his piano player, roared like a locomotive off its tracks -- the huge angry shout of an original, contrary voice that would not be stopped. He tromped around the stage, his force and energy and fury and passion bringing the audience to its feet. 

Afterward, on his way to the dressing room, he knocked over a slew of chairs. Soon we were arguing about his drinking. 

''I'm not drunk, baby. . . . I didn't knock over all those chairs; they fell over 'cause I'm a big man.'' 

''Go ahead,'' I said. ''Destroy everything. Your job. Other people's acts on stage. Your musicians. Go ahead.'' 

''I know what I'm doing,'' he replied. ''I can play bass hanging from the ceiling. Up there onstage, I know what I'm doing. I ain't destroyin' nothin'. I just had something to drink and I'm drunk, so what? Order me another margarita.'' 

There were times when I wished I could have plunked down my money at the door, heard the extraordinary music, witnessed the prodigious event that was Charles and drifted onto the street, a free woman. But I was caught in his struggle now, no longer outside, trapped in the middle of his vast appetites and imagination, his sexuality, his angry intelligence, his nonsense and his pain. 

Mingus went back for a second set that night, and it was fantastic. He wandered around the stage, eyeing people in the audience, playing his ''catching and throwing'' game with himself or with some other self he had got around, insulted the trombone player, shouted at Dannie and blew everyone away. They were onto something, all of them, as he roared across the stage, whipping his musicians together, the familiar intensity and fury exploding full force. At the end of the set, he chased his piano player off the stage, shouting with disbelief: ''Ain't that a bitch? I wrote the music, and he's telling me it's wrong!'' 

One day, Charles took me to meet his former therapist, Edmund Pollock. It was part of a continuing rendezvous with his past that he was determined to share. Like it or not, lovers, girlfriends, wives and I were thrown together in an ongoing stew. He needed to spill out his flaws, his friendships, his secrets, which were never secrets for long. 

At the time of his sessions a few years before, he had invited Pollock to write liner notes for an album he was recording called ''The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady.'' It was a unique request, asking your analyst to comment on your music. As people said at the time, it was typically Mingus. He wanted the public to know how Pollock saw him. (No guarantee, of course, that a month later he might not be somebody else.) Around that time, he had spent several days inside Bellevue Hospital, where he had talked himself in one evening, despite warnings from the night guard that ''inside'' was not exactly a hotel. He had explained to the guard that he was an insomniac exhausted with New York and needed some sleep. Personally, he believed that if he spent time in a mental institution, he could obtain ''crazy papers,'' as he called them, documents that would invalidate a contract a Mafia promoter had induced him to sign. 

Once inside Bellevue, however, he quickly found himself a prisoner in a ward. He was unceremoniously yanked from bed at dawn, terrifyingly at risk of a lobotomy and dreadfully aware of his mistake. After a few days, he miraculously succeeded in calling his friend Nat Hentoff, who was able to help secure his release. Later, he recorded a composition based on the chord changes to the classic tune ''All the Things You Are'' and retitled it ''All the Things You Could Be by Now if Sigmund Freud's Wife Was Your Mother.'' With a mischievous smile, he would repeat the title from the bandstand. Slow. Then fast. Then slow. Making sure the audience got it right. 

Pollock was grave and cordial when we met, as uncertain as I was about why we had been brought together. Perhaps Charles had some sort of validation in mind. I think he wanted Pollock to serve as a witness to who he once was. Or perhaps to all the things he still could be. 

Eight years after we met, we finally moved in together, Charles as tranquil at home, composing at the piano, as he had been combative in the world outside. We married in 1975, not knowing our time together would be cut short. Two years later, the day before Thanksgiving, we found out he had Lou Gehrig's disease and had only months to live. He had just performed what would turn out to be his last concert in Phoenix, Ariz., the state where he was born. 

Now, more than two decades after I scattered his ashes in the Ganges, I am at the center of his legacy in a role I could scarcely have imagined -- publishing music, producing concerts of his music, founding repertory bands devoted to his work -- immersed in his sound and sometimes his fury, hiring and firing musicians, sometimes storming the stage. I suspect Charles, with his mischief and prescience, knew I would be here. 


Sue Graham Mingus is the author of ''Tonight at Noon: A Love Story,'' to be published by Pantheon Books in April and from which this article is adapted.