Charles Mingus, 1968
A Concertized Thing
An abyss of counter-revolutionary decadence and disaffected apathy marked the post-1968 political and social scenes in the USA, and throughout the west. This was the inevitable burnout following a decade of concerted militancy and civil disobedience that ended in assassinations and mounds of then-classified of FBI files. At least that’s how it’s framed to make history seem tidy and patterned. In an alternate interpretation, black music, especially the mode called “bebop,” which thrived throughout the 1960s, moved space and time to exist, and the shifts in rhythm and tempo that the music demanded made a revolutionary consciousness possible in people who had no access to that frequency under the previous acoustic reality, which was safer, often maudlin, and not evocative of rebellion and change.
Also In 1968, when bassist and composer Charles Mingus tried to create a jazz school in Harlem, to teach that consciousness-expanding music to the community and enhance the skills of those already playing it, and was undermined, spectacularly, his missteps made into a spectacle in case anyone like him had been considering that same brand of altruism, it was omen for a frequency war that would dilute black music and culture and unravel what the previous decade had built until it spiraled into a psychedelic stupor. The new sound would be taught to long for popularity. It would go pop, be driven to squealing and gusting like teenagers to get the attention of teenagers and itself. The trained composer would be replaced by the pop star, the rock star, the philistine with a marketable demeanor. And the studious, constantly rehearsing and woodshedding and dreaming and collaborating jazz musician, would be replaced by the industry plant or the isolated switch board operator, alone in a trance with his electronic instruments constantly playing the trance back to him.
The shifts would be gradual and cajole the public into considering them natural progressions. Collectively everyone would make believe a trendy exhaustion with substance and a need for the frivolity and ease of drugs, sex, and rock and roll, or the languid ease of folk music strumming its quaint sensibility and ennui into the hearts of millions. The first lie in categorizing music is the imposition of an artificial binary between so-called genres that goes beyond good music and bad music. But once listening audiences buy into camps they also trap musicians and entertainers in those camps with them. Jazz would be phased out and domesticated to make way for the next set of attitudes. Theorists might say the improvisational form had exhausted its potential ideas, but that’s another exaggeration. Jazz players were practically run out of town, and their ideas condescended to the point of dissipation. Ultimately they were driven to Europe where there was still an avid audience for all black music. Mingus saw this coming, or felt it, felt himself becoming a relic, and wanted the school to at least signify on his own terms, to play and practice without remaining at the mercy of clubs, booking agents, and record labels, and to make a living without living on the road in a never-ending European tour.
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No Show
The documentary Charles Mingus, 1968, directed by Thomas Reichman (who was either a fan or a federal agent, or both), let’s us into the would-be Mingus School, a shabby and disheveled flat in Harlem that was robbed the day after Mingus moved his things in, and appears somewhere between ransacked and unpacking. When asked who robbed him, Mingus guesses not a friend but someone close to me. They had taken his jewelry first. The film’s cast includes: Mingus, his piano, his 5-year old daughter, his vintage gun, a sombrero, some poems he recites or freestyles, a typewriter, a jug of wine he shares with his daughter, a spool of rope he asks his daughter to whip and hang him with, jokingly, his brutally disarming grin and laughter, his tears, the battering ram sent to remove his belongings, George Wein, his manager, Sue Mingus, his wife, and sheets of his music flung into the street like detritus. Before finding the space we see in the film, Mingus had been searching for a venue for his proposed school for five years. The effort is clearly implicated in his Jazz Workshop (inc.) a company he created to give musicians more autonomy, actively producing recordings and compositions with a collective of involved musicians. As a composer and not just a performer, he had a stark awareness of the vicissitudes of both the art form and the market. He understood that life as a musician could only truly be sustainable if he controlled some of the means of production. A school would give him that control, and allow it to be handed down as a legacy for generations. He had enlisted bebop drummer Max Roach and several other serious musicians to join him in the endeavor. This was the precipice before academia acquired jazz as one of its pet disciplines. At the time this was filmed, it remained possible for the black musicians who invented the form to also invent and sustain its pedagogy so it did not become both ahistorical and exiled to the past.
Throughout the 24 hour period the film covers, Charlie goes between monologue, diatribe, clowning, and sulking. He’s bending time, pretending he doesn’t have serious packing to do, reminiscing on the impossible, staving off the intruders by exhausting himself so that when they arrive he is emotionally elsewhere and they can’t get to him, while he’s watching his dream dismantled as if he’s watching himself in a movie. Charles Mingus, 1968 is really a film composed by Mingus— a score about keeping score in which he overturns what oppresses him with a candor that no amount of municipal bureaucracy can distort. He is the just soul here, the one with a soul. Even his daughter plays into the aggression that mounts around him by pretending to whip him when he asks, preenacting the arrival of police who will try to discipline him with the invisible shock collar that is their presence, grotesquely huddled around our hero’s personal space like a cluster of dense machines awaiting their mechanic. Mingus is their mechanic, the mechanism through which the state is operating and seeking repair of its authority; and he is the dreamer who the state must silence before he takes this black American music out of the hands of the demagogues and returns it to its sources.
I hope the communists blow you people up, Mingus promises, when asked how he feels about them removing his personal effects from the property. And he’s serious, and his face dampens with tears. The cops, for all their swarming, find some amphetamines he’d been taking during a period of dieting—I’d have lost this belly if I got my school, he assures his daughter when she taps it teasingly. The pills give them just enough incentive to arrest him, the crescendo which makes for better cinema, a real black character, taken to jail over some old prescription they dug out of a shoebox. Or maybe the pills were planted somewhere obvious by the same enemy/friend who robbed him, or maybe it was the cops who broke in the first time too. They are insolent and comfortable with their mission, comfortable stepping on sheets of music to get to furniture and pills that they’ll take themselves later or cash in at auction. Mingus is escorted into a police car.
By 1979 Mingus was dead. He did not, however, become docile between 1968 and 1979, he kept composing, recording and touring until it was no longer physically possible for him. He did become terribly ill for the final years of his life. He never did recover his school. Jazz education is now primarily handled by white institutions who hire some musicians to be on faculty but control the distribution of formal jazz “studies.” In the candid footage throughout Charles Mingus, 1968, Mingus feigns a hip casualness, near-cheerfulness, and most are convinced that he’s not tortured by the infinite limbo of his position on the threshold of a vision deferred forever. He undergoes a treacherous heart surgery while awake and functional in the film. His bleeding heart is ripped out and consumed by legalese, then tossed back to his bass as consolation, as if to say as long as you don’t try and get any more property or any more big ideas, nigg*r, just play. It was important for the establishment to police the black artist’s affinity for self-determination early in the liberation struggle, it would insure that most never tried or even had the capacity to imagine trying, to own the rights to their creative output. Schools, clubs, and record labels, were to be run by oligarchs who hired their chosen blacks to decorate the brochures and share their perspective and make beautiful sounds, never to establish sovereignty over those sounds or ways of seeing the world that the sounds indicate.
But revenge requires evidence, forensics. Mingus will always own the rights to his humiliation, his degradation, his gregarious rage, his fake out and fade out, his moment of exile and captivity recurring as refrain, the pain in his eyes as he condemns the west to doom, the image of him with a rope around his neck but nothing to tie it to save for his music, the noose noises swooping into his compositions brisk and wicked and perfect as nightmares, the way he plays like he’s negotiating his way out of a long nightmare. This glimpse into Mingus’s life, his cadences, his dangerous wishes, is one of very few instances when voyeurism behaves like justice. What would go down as part of a character assassination of Mingus right during the assassination spree of the late 1960s, one that tried to frame him as gruff and careless, transforms into a love poem from him to his children, and to everyone who will listen, lashing him at his request for a chance to witness the beauty of his singular reverb when he bounces back. Eventually, surveillance backfires by building its subjects a shrine and not a graveyard. Mingus’s shrine to his practical fantasy in the form of this film, is also his school realized. He deflects what’s being publicly stolen from him with a curse that the west is still under; each hope he expresses on camera still pending, each spectator still pretending not to notice.