Question A -Charles Mingus: His unique style of performing

and composition and how he was influenced by the jazz

greats
Charles Mingus was born in 1922 in Arizona, USA. Growing up in the
west of America he was always looking to other cities such as New
Orleans and New York for inspiration in jazz performance and
composition. He was first influenced by gospel music due to his
strict Christian mother, although in secret he enjoyed listening to
Duke Ellington. These influences are evident in much of his work
and he often looked to the past to commemorate the jazz greats.
Mingus is best known for his virtuosic bass playing and extending
the techniques of the bass, where he helped liberate it from its
usual time-keeping role.1Some would argue his style is most closely
linked with bebop and this is due to his interest with Charlie Parker.
Parker was an inspiration to Mingus, however he grew disappointed
with Parker and other musicians whose substance abuse clouded
their brilliance and caused them to lose sight of there goal, to make
innovative jazz music. In Eric Porters What Is This Thing Called Jazz?
he picks apart Minguss use of the bebop idiom and describes his
move to other types of music.
Contemplating the legacy of bebop was but one element of Minguss
intellectual project, which sought, among other things, to make sense of
his music, the position of improvised and composed music in mid-

1 Adam Shatz, An Argument with Instruments: On Charles Mingus,

Sep 2013, http://www.thenation.com/article/argument-instrumentscharles-mingus/, [accessed 11/01/2016]

twentieth-century America, the experiences of African American musicians

in the jazz business, and the future of American society. 2

His peers due to his strong opinions on jazz and tempestuous

personality labelled Mingus the angry man of jazz. Minguss anger
and emotion came across in his music and he wanted to create
music that, in his words, was as varied as my feelings are, or the
world is.3

In this essay I will be looking at the many different styles and

techniques that Mingus uses within his performance and
composition. The first recording is Night in Tunisia from the album
Jazz at Massey Hall. The recording includes Mingus and some of the
biggest names in bebop including Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie.
The significance of this performance is that it brought together
many of the jazz greats and helped Mingus cement his position as
one of the top jazz bassists within the bebop idiom. The second
recording I am looking at is the ten-minute tone poem
Pithecanthropus Erectus (P.E. for short), which was one of Minguss

2 Eric Porter, What Is This Thing Called Jazz, London, University of

California press (Jan 2002)
3 Adam Shatz, An Argument with Instruments: On Charles Mingus,
Sep 2013, http://www.thenation.com/article/argument-instrumentscharles-mingus/, [accessed 11/01/2016]

masterpieces and is an example of Avant-garde jazz. It is an

important piece in his career as it shows his transition from playing
traditional bebop to creating his own unique compositional style and
performance.

Night in Tunisia-Jazz at Massey Hall (1953)

This recording is very important in the overall history of jazz it
brings together some important figures within bebop: Dizzy Gillespie
on trumpet, Charlie Parker on Saxophone, Max Roach on drums,
Charles Mingus on bass and Bud Powell on piano.
In the original recording of Jazz at Massey Hall, Minguss bass
playing is barely audible, however him and Roach overdubbed it for
a second release of the album and it then becomes very prominent
in the texture and you could argue over powers the rest of the
rhythm section especially the piano. Even though the bass may be
too prominent in the second recording it is important to note the
importance of the bass within a jazz ensemble and Minguss desire
to create ensembles that featured it as more than just for time
keeping. We see this use
Analysis of the piece reveals the piece is founded in the bebop style
and there are trademark indications to this.
The structure is 32-bar form with coda (AABAC) and 4-bar
introduction.
The notated melody contains prominent ascending arpeggio figures
and rising chromatic appoggiaturas at ends of phrases in A section.

In B we hear falling sequential pattern that is underpinned by a

circle of fifths.
The coda is 12 bars and the melody consists of a repeated riff with
the harmony changing each bar. Before the solos there is a break
that is filled by solo sax. The solos are based on AABA section. This
jazz standard composed by Dizzy has had many interpretations, this
one in particular includes many interesting solos and styles of
playing because the musicians are highly skilled and wish to push
boundaries within their playing.
A more detailed analysis of this recording reveals some interesting
uses of instrumentation. One interesting feature of the piece is
Charlie Parkers use of the Grafton saxophone rather than a brass
saxophone. He used it as he sold his other saxophone presumably
for drugs and alcohol and he was outside of the USA, where he was
contracted to use only one type of branded saxophone. This change
in instrument meant there is a different sound quality to the piece
and it affects the timbre of this already unique recording.
When listening to the piece they have structured it so the chorus
and coda is played through once and then leads onto solos from
trumpet, sax and piano with the full AABA being played through
three times for each solo.
The piece starts with 4 bars of solely drums and bass playing a
counter rhythmic ostinato against each other, the drums is playing
only on a cymbal. The saxophone then comes in with the intros

melody playing fairly softly. The trumpet is muted and plays the A
section staying very close to the original melody.

Pithecanthropus Erectus (1956)

P.E. is one of Minguss most important pieces as it is arguably the

birthplace of avant-garde jazz. Salim Washingtons All the Things
You Could Be by Now places P.E. as the start of the timeline for
avant-garde describing the sonic intentions of the album as
swerving away from well-tempered sound in favour of percussive
pounding and saxophone blats, wails, and screams. Mingus moves
away from the traditional bebop style we hear at Massey Hall and
creates new innovative music. One key feature in P.E. is the lack of
notation given to performers where by they learned the melody by
ear. Mingus did this to stop there being constraints on the musics
inventiveness and fluidity. It was a struggle for the performers
which included Jackie McLean on alto sax, J.R. Monterose on tenor
saxophone, Mal Waldron on piano, and Willie Jones on drums. He
made it difficult because he would sing the players the melody then
sometimes when he sang it again it had changed. Some think the
reason for this was he didnt want everyone to sound exactly the
same to create colour within the piece. Others thought he had
forgotten his original melody. In the liner notes of the original
release Mingus said jazz, by its very definition, cannot be held

down to written parts to be played with a feeling that goes only with
blowing free.4

In the bebop style there is a basic chord structure that the song is
built on, the blues-based I-IV-V-I structure. The following analysis will
show how, even though this piece appears to be very complex it still
has the blues-based progression at its basis.

The beginning of the song gives little foreshadowing to what is to

come. It begins unassumingly with the horns playing sustained
notes, but the way that Mingus has dictated the roles of the
instruments seems to challenge the frontline role that the horns
would ordinarily play. Mingus likes to focus more attention to the
bass and rhythm section than traditionally heard within other styles.
Here in the beginning of the piece he decide to give the horns less
of a frontline role than they are used toEven though all of the
instruments of the ensemble play through the first section of the
piece, Mingus had carefully crafted the role of the horns through his
use of contrasting sustained and rapid, jagged melodic material and
ensemble dynamics to create a shifting melodic focus.
At times it seems as if Mingus is backing the horns and at other
times it is alto saxophonist Jackie McLean and tenor saxophonist J. R.
Montrose who are backing Mingus. Up to this point it is simply
4 Charles Mingus, Pithecanthropus Erectus, The Jazz Workshop,
New York, Atlantic Records(1956)

another brooding blues-influenced work similar to a number of other

Mingus compositions. It is in the next section that we see the
innovations that have made Pithecanthropus Erectus such a
historically important piece.
In the next section, which could be labelled as the first B section,
Mingus gives the soloist the tonal guidance in the form of a number
of notes to gravitate toward in their solo. Figure 43 Primary notes for
second B section of Pithecanthropus Erectus The musicians almost
exclusively use these notes as they craft the section. Mingus has
carefully choreographed this section using a blues-based sensibility
and allowing for the talents of his musicians. He has created a
scenario in which there is a composer within a composition who
Mingus carefully guided in his contribution to the final creative
product. Each of the entrances in this section are staggered and
each instrument is used to build tension through traditional means.
Figure 44 shows the transition from the last three bars of the first A
section into the B section and includes independent solo lines that
closely follow the tonal guidance as outlined in figure 43.
Figure 44 Melodic Material for the first B section of Pithecanthropus
Erectus

Minguss dedication to jazz as an ensemble process begins to

surface in this section, although the evidence of his importance to
avant-garde jazz has not yet appeared. The tension of this section
finds its release in the second A section, which is identical to the

first. It is in the second B section, which is perhaps more

accurately labelled B prime, that we see how Mingus introduces
the concept of avant-garde within a meticulously prepared
ensemble framework, the most important part of which may have
been the drum-set performance of Dannie Richmond. Mingus would
stretch the boundaries of jazz rhythm and tonality in his work with
Richmond. The drummer was so influenced by Minguss musical
concepts that Mingus considered him a musical son. Over the course
of a very long-term musical relationship, Richmond would become
one of Minguss most important collaborators. With Richmond, he
worked out a concept in which they were able to place emphasis
before and after the beat in a sort of musical spiral. Mingus labelled
this concept as rotary perception. The rhythmic concepts
represented by rotary perception fuelled the free jazz movement,
and is clearly displayed in the B prime section of Pithecanthropus
Erectus. Mingus creates the illusion of musical chaos through the
careful assembly of a number of advanced techniques into a
precisely crafted ensemble collaboration that centres on the concept
of rotary perception. The most important aspect of understanding
the concept is that multiple points of emphasis can exist
simultaneously and that those points can be manipulated so that
they are seemingly incompatible. Although it is not possible to
completely and accurately represent this concept on paper, in its
simplest form it is represented through the simultaneous existence
of 4/4 and 3/4 time. It differs from a three against four feel because,

depending how you perceive the passage, it is either wholly in 4/4

time or wholly in 3/4 time, as is partially shown through Figures 45
and 46.

Gene Santoro, Myself When I Am Real: The Life and Music of Charles
Mingus (New York: Oxford University
Press, 200), 178.
Figure 45 Rotary Perception Example perceived in 3/4 time

Figure 46 Rotary Perception Example Perceived in 4/4 time

This section exists in the rotary perception state until it is developed
fully into a musical section that is not beholden to time or pitch
centre, although it eventually gravitates, via a very traditional
supertonic, to dominant progression in F minor. In the second B
section, McLean also plays saxophone in a manner that cannot be
translated into western notation, another example of how Minguss
ensembles pushed the boundaries of jazz technique. The
accompaniment for each of the solo sections follows the same
pattern, giving each soloist the opportunity to use the varying
sections as a foil for his own creative energy. Mingus also shows his
ensemble ethic as he designs backing for the soloist that uses the
ensemble in every possible manner, including using his own voice
as part of the texture.

Jelly Roll Soul-Blues & Roots (1960)

The line up for Jelly Roll Soul is a close representation of instruments
you would hear around the 1920s in New Orleans ragtime. This
includes John Handy on alto sax, Jackie McLean on alto sax Booker
Ervin on tenor sax, Pepper Adams on baritone sax, Jimmy Knepper
on trombone, Willie Dennis on trombone, Dannie Richmond on
drums and Horace Parlan on piano.

When comparing these pieces we can see straight away from the
different performers and influences that the styles of pieces are
vastly different. The transition for Mingus from bebop performer to
avant-garde composer is evident and we see how his style
developed throughout the 50s. When we look at the different
analysiss of each piece the crucial comparison is with the use of
basic structure and harmony in each. The reason for this is the need
for stability within the pieces. When Mingus experimented with more

complex compositional techniques in P.E. where he taught his

performers to learn the piece by ear he knew that some elements of
the piece needed simplicity in order to function as a coherent piece.
His argument also for using simple basis for pieces is so the jazz
traditions are not lost and this evident in Jelly Roll Soul where he