The Heist We Intend

Some thoughts after a conversation with Charles Mingus's daughter Keki

The mafia put a hit out on Charles Mingus’s children when he refused to pay them a cut of his earnings from nights he spent playing at New York clubs. He once referred to the clubs themselves as pigpens, and if he resented the atmosphere he was subjected to to play his music, he surely resented distributing his hard won earnings to idle criminals for the right to continue subjecting himself to pigpens. The pressure of the threat imposed by the mob inspired him to feign insanity, buying his family some time while he had an ex-CIA agent train his kids in self-defense. For musicians, sometimes a trip to Bellevue or rehab was the only way to get a leave of absence from work as the endless hours they spent entertaining were what everyone else considered leisure, no one noticed they were overworked and under-compensated until they could no longer physically, mentally, or emotionally perform. And then the heckling came, and the disgrace, as if the need for a break was abject failure and none of their former charm could be restored by the dignity of rest. I suppose it’s different now because so much music is frivolous or unserious or purely mercenary that no one is waiting around to be healed by it. The working musician of today has to be more concerned with how to maintain a circus act than how to channel creative power in environments that don’t respect it. Many of today’s musicians might be too well rested, asleep on the job.

I learned about Mingus’s dealings with the mob from his daughter Keki, who I interviewed this past weekend. She went on to dispel many the myths circulating about her father as if they are facts— that he was the angry man of jazz— no, she counters, he was a loving almost doting man who played the role of a mother by day while her mom worked as nurse, loved Christmas and Disneyland and long walks through central park with his family. I also learned from Keki that what is called his archive and locked away inside the Library of Congress after a high profile sale brokered by his widow Sue, is held there against the wishes of some members of the family, who were simply never asked or included. Keki herself was never asked if she wanted anything of her father’s for herself, like the locks of her own hair he kept after her first haircut, which are now filed away in DC, absurdly. Keki was seventeen when her father died and found out on the news, because Sue notified news outlets before notifying his kids. Sue Mingus seems to have taken hold of the legacy of the Mingus Dynasty in a desperate and groping way, possessive of the narrative that gets out to the public and possessive of the revenue that belongs to his heirs and not just his wife. This explains some of the stiltedness that seems to trail the legacy of a man who was anything but stiff and aloof, and it also dispels the notion that all record keeping is earnest and benevolent. 

I wonder now, if I’m against the very impulse I’m also for— my conversation with Keki Mingus was refreshing in that it introduced ambivalence into my heart about one of its truest loves, the love of the so-called archives of black music. How often are the materials collected in the more formal of the archives being sequestered there and withheld from a musician’s living family? How often is there a skein of acrimony and misrepresentation that makes all of the perceived openness of an archive a slant of light angled on lies or half-truths? And what is the difference between research materials and zoo-like exploitation of a person’s lived experience, decontextualized and supplanted in some academic or government building of surveillance and other veils? The pain of watching your father branded without you is surmountable, you tell yourself people are naive and lecherous and karma will resolve the fictions, but the ache of watching your father sold out from under you after he spent his entire life refusing to sell his soul, seems gaping and impossible to heal without retribution. 

Are archives vampiric? Yes, is the answer. Is the kind of bloodletting and blood eating that happens within them justified? No. Does bloodthirst desire justification or even justice? No. Archives are happy to be unjust if that means they can survive, in that way they are as alive as you and I, reading or thinking about them, cannibalizing or spilling blood with them. A record does not protest its own sampling even when families who own the rights are never paid, ripe fruit uneaten will rot on the ground. Why institutional archives have a reputation for being harmless and uncontested might have to do with their modes of presentation, their visible cleanness, all that order, and their seemingly noble and airtight intentions— to preserve a history that might otherwise go missing. Meanwhile, Keki was allowed to go missing in the service of the Mingus records and the only finding aids we had were will and wonder, a bit of luck, and the authentic push of the ghosts of yesterday, which resurface again and again to whisper the truth as a new desire until we want it enough to go after it and decipher it for real. I feel a little cured of a fixation following our conversation. I no longer trust in monolithic archives, I now have more faith in theft and counter theft, in threats, in the mafia’s notion of family that says: in this club we do violence to get by, and our story is no less beautiful or real because we happen to be terrible. And I have more faith in fragments, the corners of stories, the sheets of music we tossed into the wind to save them from the prison library, or held in the mouth of a gagged jazzman’s daughter like flecks of golden laughter, impossible to distort or steal. The classic archive style is so obsolete it’s almost new again. That style depends upon the human voice and the ear and is only as secretive as you are too lazy to seek it. It turns out fixed documentation attracts fraud, and bias, and police, and hysterics. Back to spreading these rumors hand to hand, tone for tone, on the way to retrieving the blues, the absence, and the mob ties we didn’t know we needed.