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I Know What I Know: The Music of Charles Mingus
From the mid-1940s until his death in 1979, Charles Mingus created an unparalleled body of recorded work, most of which remains available in the 21st century. While there have been several volumes devoted to Mingus's colorful and tumultuous life, this is the first book in the English language to be devoted fully to his music. General jazz fans as well as musicians and music students who would like a better understanding of Mingus's complex, often difficult music, will find a complete, chronologically arranged, listener's guide to all of his legitimate recordings, from the 78s he recorded in Los Angeles and San Francisco in the mid-1940s, through the legendary albums he made for Columbia, Candid, Atlantic, and his own labels. In the process of providing these in-depth examinations, Jenkins corrects common errors and clears away old misconceptions about certain recordings. His approach will illuminate long-obscure aspects of this imposing and incredibly creative man's contributions to the art of jazz.
Touching upon Mingus's many innovations as a jazzman, I Know What I Know explores his advancement of the art of bass playing; his assimilations of Ellington and Monk with ideas leaning toward free jazz; his experiments with ensemble dynamics, instrumentation, and extended form; and his working relationships with partners such as Jaki Byard, Eric Dolphy, Jimmy Knepper, and Dannie Richmond. The book provides a broad, informative overview of Mingus's work without veering into technical musical terminology. Readers without an extensive background in music will thus understand and appreciate the analyses provided, and be able to use them to enhance the experience of listening to the brilliant work of this legendary jazz great.
Touching upon Mingus's many innovations as a jazzman, I Know What I Know explores his advancement of the art of bass playing; his assimilations of Ellington and Monk with ideas leaning toward free jazz; his experiments with ensemble dynamics, instrumentation, and extended form; and his working relationships with partners such as Jaki Byard, Eric Dolphy, Jimmy Knepper, and Dannie Richmond. The book provides a broad, informative overview of Mingus's work without veering into technical musical terminology. Readers without an extensive background in music will thus understand and appreciate the analyses provided, and be able to use them to enhance the experience of listening to the brilliant work of this legendary jazz great.
216 pages, Hardcover
First published June 1, 2006
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July 30, 2016
Charles Mingus' music is not something you regard casually; it cannot be backgrounded or half-liked. It is something to be wrestled with, puzzled over, sucked into. It doesn't often give up its secrets easily. Like a difficult book or film, it can reveal its layers through repeated encounters and postulations. The marvelous thing is that, at some point, you will get it, and then give yourself over to it completely. It's something that gives and gives and reveals more of itself every time. It's the most fascinating bellicose friend whose stories will agitate and excite you and have you crying into your beer, alternately.
I've had a lifelong relationship with this music, and I've been very slow to make friends with it; evolving from perplexed diffidence to unconditional love. Mingus' jazz now sits at the top of my pantheon with that of Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk. His body of work is staggering, and with maturity I realize how much of the world it contains.
I could continue to wax rhapsodic over the music of Charles Mingus, and wish I could do the same for this book, because author Todd Jenkins has, in many ways, done a unique and extraordinary thing with it. I don't think I've ever seen a more thorough, fine-toothed-comb analysis of any musical artist's body of work. Jenkins literally analyzes every album track ever issued by Mingus: its soloists, instrumentation, phrasing, tempi, you name it -- and does so without getting into heavy musicological jargon.
But this presents me with a conundrum, for as much as I admire this effort -- and as much as I would highly recommend it for the most rabid OCD-prone Mingus nut as the ultimate guide to Mingus' recorded output -- I just couldn't bring myself to find it a scintillating read. I more or less skimmed the 90 percent of the book detailing all of these musical details and focused on the purely biographical passages. From those, I did learn some cool stuff.
I didn't know that Mingus "faked diabetes" to get out of World War II (though I wish Jenkins had explained just how one fakes diabetes; a footnote would have been nice). And I wasn't aware of just how influential Mingus' own Debut label was to the history of jazz in its 1950s heyday. I enjoyed learning about the autobiographical threads in his music; for instance, that "Memories of You" and "Celia", were odes to his failed second marriage. I found it interesting how Mingus re-titled songs under different names to avoid problems with competing recordings and record companies, or recorded variations of the same tunes under different names.
The title of this book derives from the song, "Moanin,'" which is on the album, Blues and Roots (1959). On the track, Mingus shouts, "I know what I know!" Author Jenkins interprets that phrase in the larger context of Mingus' highly unorthodox musical education, a kind of randomly thrown-together crazy quilt of influences and experiences. He compares the musical structures and disparate influences of Mingus' music to the famous Watts Towers, those cobbled junk spires of primitive folk art that were erected in the LA neighborhood where Mingus grew up, and which he, indirectly, helped to build. Jenkins unapologetically calls Mingus a "primitive," but not in a pejorative sense. Mainly in the sense that he came to "know what he knew" in ways outside of formal musical education and synthesized that knowledge into something superior to and more original than anything that could come from a rigid system that stressed the "right" way of doing things.
Mingus' first and continuing major influence of his life was the rich and romantic swing music of Duke Ellington. Even in the most complex and dissonant of Mingus' work you can always hear the Ellington touch. Mingus brought the Ellington wall of sound into the space age.
Mingus' other early love was classical music, but a racist instructor somehow convinced Mingus that classical cello wasn't for him because, to paraphrase, black musicians were too inferior to play classical music. Nonetheless, the influence of European art music informed Mingus' jazz-symphonic composer's sensibility. So, ironically, his turn away from pure classical music might have helped him realize his true creative potential.
Mingus' music incorporates all the influences of his musical and personal life. It fuses classical, blues, church/gospel music, bop, swing, Latin, and more. When Mingus took up the bass as a young man, the influence of Duke Ellington's innovative bassist, Jimmy Blanton, loomed large over him. Blanton opened up the possibilities of the bass with his fat melodic lines that made the instrument more than just a limited percussive time-keeping tool. That influence informed both Mingus' own bass playing and his later overall symphonic musical thinking as an arranger and bandleader.
In the course of his career, Mingus met and played with anybody who was anybody in jazz. Along the learning curve, he explored older styles, then blended and fused them with new ideas bubbling in the fertile post-war bebop era to create a wildly eclectic and unique stylistic palette from which to work.
Mingus was equally adept at creating both lyrical ballads and challenging cacophonous free-for-all compositions. His difficult arrangements and charts were very challenging, and his working methods for conveying and realizing those visions with his musicians often proved difficult and frustrating for all involved. Despite acrimony, the work got done and we can now enjoy the timeless and sublime results.
The book hints at some of the complexities and dualities of Mingus' nature, but I was left wanting more. Mingus was a temperamental taskmaster but also a sentimental poet; a man who could elicit fierce loyalty even from those he slighted. As trumpeter Jack Walrath unexpectedly tells us, Ray Charles was actually much harder to work with than Mingus was. Our received perceptions and images always, it seems, come in for a drubbing.
Mingus suffered from depression and poverty throughout his life as he chased his muse, but through it and several failed relationships his eye never left the prize, apart from a dry period in the late 1960s when exhaustion and fear of the influence of rock music put a temporary hold on his creativity.
There's a funny story in the introduction of the book in which jazz pianist Sy Johnson talks about his working life with Mingus. As a cub pianist in the early days, Johnson had been hired to play a gig with Mingus, but when Johnson arrived at the gig it was already underway and Mingus had replaced him with the phenomenal sax player, Yusef Lateef. Seething, Johnson sat through the set at a table and when it finished Mingus brushed by Johnson's table. Asking what the hell was going on, Johnson was met with Mingus's callous, yet coldly reasonable reply; "If you was me, and you had the chance to hire Yusef Lateef or you, who would you hire?"
Damn.
The apex of Mingus' career was arguably the year 1959, when he produced his most famous album, Mingus Ah Um and two other equally fine efforts, Dynasty and Blues and Roots.
Although Mingus Ah Um and The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady , are generally considered to be his masterworks, my own favorites among his albums are: Dynasty, Blues and Roots, Mingus x 5, Let My Children Hear Music, Tijuana Moods, Cumbia and Jazz Fusion, Changes One and Changes Two. His long-lost extended piece, Epitaph which was reassembled and reissued in the later 1980s might also be a favorite, but I have never sat down and listened to that massive work in its entirety.
Mingus, of course, devised the best and baddest song title of all time: "If Charlie Parker Were a Gunslinger, There'd Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats."
The great artist was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's Disease in the mid-'70s and died in 1979, but not before he worked on a fascinating rock-jazz fusion album with Joni Mitchell, simply titled Mingus. I'm glad that author Jenkins agrees with me that it's a fine album, despite the ample criticism it has engendered. I love it.
As for this book, I think this is a case of an author's intention being noble and his research and informational prowess topnotch. It's an incredible guide to the music itself, but I'm afraid, it was not quite what I was looking for. It can't see the forest for the trees, and for all the book's detail I wanted a little overarching poetry -- an essay-like nod now and again about what this music means in the larger sense. That seems to be beyond the purview of Jenkins' archival aspirations.
So, in a certain sense, this may be a five-star book, and my rating, perhaps unfairly, reflects my expectations more than reality.
(KR@KY 2016)
I've had a lifelong relationship with this music, and I've been very slow to make friends with it; evolving from perplexed diffidence to unconditional love. Mingus' jazz now sits at the top of my pantheon with that of Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk. His body of work is staggering, and with maturity I realize how much of the world it contains.
I could continue to wax rhapsodic over the music of Charles Mingus, and wish I could do the same for this book, because author Todd Jenkins has, in many ways, done a unique and extraordinary thing with it. I don't think I've ever seen a more thorough, fine-toothed-comb analysis of any musical artist's body of work. Jenkins literally analyzes every album track ever issued by Mingus: its soloists, instrumentation, phrasing, tempi, you name it -- and does so without getting into heavy musicological jargon.
But this presents me with a conundrum, for as much as I admire this effort -- and as much as I would highly recommend it for the most rabid OCD-prone Mingus nut as the ultimate guide to Mingus' recorded output -- I just couldn't bring myself to find it a scintillating read. I more or less skimmed the 90 percent of the book detailing all of these musical details and focused on the purely biographical passages. From those, I did learn some cool stuff.
I didn't know that Mingus "faked diabetes" to get out of World War II (though I wish Jenkins had explained just how one fakes diabetes; a footnote would have been nice). And I wasn't aware of just how influential Mingus' own Debut label was to the history of jazz in its 1950s heyday. I enjoyed learning about the autobiographical threads in his music; for instance, that "Memories of You" and "Celia", were odes to his failed second marriage. I found it interesting how Mingus re-titled songs under different names to avoid problems with competing recordings and record companies, or recorded variations of the same tunes under different names.
The title of this book derives from the song, "Moanin,'" which is on the album, Blues and Roots (1959). On the track, Mingus shouts, "I know what I know!" Author Jenkins interprets that phrase in the larger context of Mingus' highly unorthodox musical education, a kind of randomly thrown-together crazy quilt of influences and experiences. He compares the musical structures and disparate influences of Mingus' music to the famous Watts Towers, those cobbled junk spires of primitive folk art that were erected in the LA neighborhood where Mingus grew up, and which he, indirectly, helped to build. Jenkins unapologetically calls Mingus a "primitive," but not in a pejorative sense. Mainly in the sense that he came to "know what he knew" in ways outside of formal musical education and synthesized that knowledge into something superior to and more original than anything that could come from a rigid system that stressed the "right" way of doing things.
Mingus' first and continuing major influence of his life was the rich and romantic swing music of Duke Ellington. Even in the most complex and dissonant of Mingus' work you can always hear the Ellington touch. Mingus brought the Ellington wall of sound into the space age.
Mingus' other early love was classical music, but a racist instructor somehow convinced Mingus that classical cello wasn't for him because, to paraphrase, black musicians were too inferior to play classical music. Nonetheless, the influence of European art music informed Mingus' jazz-symphonic composer's sensibility. So, ironically, his turn away from pure classical music might have helped him realize his true creative potential.
Mingus' music incorporates all the influences of his musical and personal life. It fuses classical, blues, church/gospel music, bop, swing, Latin, and more. When Mingus took up the bass as a young man, the influence of Duke Ellington's innovative bassist, Jimmy Blanton, loomed large over him. Blanton opened up the possibilities of the bass with his fat melodic lines that made the instrument more than just a limited percussive time-keeping tool. That influence informed both Mingus' own bass playing and his later overall symphonic musical thinking as an arranger and bandleader.
In the course of his career, Mingus met and played with anybody who was anybody in jazz. Along the learning curve, he explored older styles, then blended and fused them with new ideas bubbling in the fertile post-war bebop era to create a wildly eclectic and unique stylistic palette from which to work.
Mingus was equally adept at creating both lyrical ballads and challenging cacophonous free-for-all compositions. His difficult arrangements and charts were very challenging, and his working methods for conveying and realizing those visions with his musicians often proved difficult and frustrating for all involved. Despite acrimony, the work got done and we can now enjoy the timeless and sublime results.
The book hints at some of the complexities and dualities of Mingus' nature, but I was left wanting more. Mingus was a temperamental taskmaster but also a sentimental poet; a man who could elicit fierce loyalty even from those he slighted. As trumpeter Jack Walrath unexpectedly tells us, Ray Charles was actually much harder to work with than Mingus was. Our received perceptions and images always, it seems, come in for a drubbing.
Mingus suffered from depression and poverty throughout his life as he chased his muse, but through it and several failed relationships his eye never left the prize, apart from a dry period in the late 1960s when exhaustion and fear of the influence of rock music put a temporary hold on his creativity.
There's a funny story in the introduction of the book in which jazz pianist Sy Johnson talks about his working life with Mingus. As a cub pianist in the early days, Johnson had been hired to play a gig with Mingus, but when Johnson arrived at the gig it was already underway and Mingus had replaced him with the phenomenal sax player, Yusef Lateef. Seething, Johnson sat through the set at a table and when it finished Mingus brushed by Johnson's table. Asking what the hell was going on, Johnson was met with Mingus's callous, yet coldly reasonable reply; "If you was me, and you had the chance to hire Yusef Lateef or you, who would you hire?"
Damn.
The apex of Mingus' career was arguably the year 1959, when he produced his most famous album, Mingus Ah Um and two other equally fine efforts, Dynasty and Blues and Roots.
Although Mingus Ah Um and The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady , are generally considered to be his masterworks, my own favorites among his albums are: Dynasty, Blues and Roots, Mingus x 5, Let My Children Hear Music, Tijuana Moods, Cumbia and Jazz Fusion, Changes One and Changes Two. His long-lost extended piece, Epitaph which was reassembled and reissued in the later 1980s might also be a favorite, but I have never sat down and listened to that massive work in its entirety.
Mingus, of course, devised the best and baddest song title of all time: "If Charlie Parker Were a Gunslinger, There'd Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats."
The great artist was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's Disease in the mid-'70s and died in 1979, but not before he worked on a fascinating rock-jazz fusion album with Joni Mitchell, simply titled Mingus. I'm glad that author Jenkins agrees with me that it's a fine album, despite the ample criticism it has engendered. I love it.
As for this book, I think this is a case of an author's intention being noble and his research and informational prowess topnotch. It's an incredible guide to the music itself, but I'm afraid, it was not quite what I was looking for. It can't see the forest for the trees, and for all the book's detail I wanted a little overarching poetry -- an essay-like nod now and again about what this music means in the larger sense. That seems to be beyond the purview of Jenkins' archival aspirations.
So, in a certain sense, this may be a five-star book, and my rating, perhaps unfairly, reflects my expectations more than reality.
(KR@KY 2016)
September 18, 2020
Excellent book, probably the best resource there is for listening to mingus' music. Definitely worth coming back to the passages on each albums when listening to them.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews