Charles Mingus/Let My Children Hear Music

The album Mingus called his best

Program Note: The boldface quotations that appear sprinkled through this essay are from Charles Mingus' own liner notes, which he wrote specifically for Let My Children Hear Music. Mingus received a Grammy nomination for Best Album Notes (Non-Classical) in 1973, the only Grammy nomination he would ever receive. He lost, with the award going to a collection of songs by Tom T. Hall.

Charles Mingus was easily one of the Great American composers, one of a handful of iconoclastic individuals who carved a serious body of work into the sheer rock face of overall indifference on the part of the general public. Charles Ives, Duke Ellington, Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber--these are Mingus' peers, the equals with whom he shares the rarefied air of true genius. Mingus himself said that his bass playing, which was formidable, was the result of sheer hard work and listening, but that his compositional skills were a gift from God. That must be true, because Mingus was able to continue to be a composer even after ALS took his ability to stand, to walk, and to play his music.

The string of recordings that he made, beginning in the 1950s and extending into the early '60s--Pinthicanthropus Erectus, Mingus Ah Hum, Oh Yeah, Mingus Mingus Mingus, Black Saint and the Sinner Lady--is testament to both his talent and the massive expenditure of energy, physical and emotional, that it must have taken to create all of this music and to put together a group of musicians who had the individual voices to bring it to light and to record them when it was possible. Charles Mingus was not merely a great Black American composer nor an American jazz composer--like Ellington, who is one of his strongest influences, he is *just* a composer. And like many other American composers, he is inspired by the source music of America, the music of its people. All of them.

Mingus occupies the jazz space because that is the genre where black men who are musicians have traditionally ‘belonged’. In fact, Mingus was heavily influenced by classical composers and he sought to study traditional composition.

I discovered that Mingus and I shared something: both of us wanted to play cello as our first choice of instrument.

I scored well on the school district's musical aptitude test (the contents of which I don't even recall) and was eligible to start orchestra lessons. It was a full year before eligibility to play band instruments, and I was eager to start something. I wanted to play the cello. I found its tone plaintive and deeply human.

But my cello career was cut short by the suggestion of whatever educational gatekeeper was in charge of this exercise, that I play bass instead. As in double bass. And that is what they wanted me to play. There was a very practical reason for this: bass is a large, unwieldy instrument and it requires someone who is taller and with longer arms and bigger hands to manage.

Mingus changed instruments for a different reason. His good friend and mentor Buddy Collette, who became a successful jazz saxophonist and woodwind player, encouraged Charles to switch to the bass because the chances of him making it into a symphony orchestra or into the classical world as a black man were slim and none. Playing bass would allow Mingus to pivot to the jazz world, where he would be able to make a name for himself.

"As I say, let my children have music. Jazz - the way it has been handled in the past - stifles them so that they believe only in the trumpet, trombone, saxophone, maybe a flute now and then or a clarinet. But it is not enough. I think it is time our children were raised to think they can play bassoon, oboe, English horn, French horn, full percussion, violin, cello. The results would be - well the Philharmonic would not be the only answer then. If we so-called jazz musicians who are the composers, the spontaneous composers, started including these instruments in our music, it would open everything up; it would get rid of prejudice because the musicianship would be so high in caliber that the symphony couldn't refuse us."

And he did, demonstrating himself to be an excellent bassist, a highly original composer, and a musically magnanimous, if cantankerous, leader. But mental health issues, financial pressures, and his own outsize ambition took their toll, and by 1966 he was performing little and recording even less This created a period of financial instability, eviction, and a lack of creative outlets (recording opportunities and club bookings).

Mingus' career began to turn around with the 1971 publication of his rather sensational book Beneath the Underdog. Part autobiography, part therapy session, part robust work of imagination, it helped bring attention back toward the remarkable music he had already created. Next, he recorded and released Let My Children Hear Music. It marked his return to Columbia Records for the first time since 1959 and 1960 with Mingus Ah Um and Mingus Dynasty.

Columbia, with a strong jazz division, promoted the album heavily, and Mingus provided a lively liner note essay. While the composer had never been reticent about his work, this sudden burst of written material further served to put him in the spotlight.

When we talk about composers such as Beethoven or Mozart, we don't generally compare their works. That is to say, we may have favorites, and we may feel certain compositions didn't work, but we don't routinely say 'Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is better than his Sixth.' For the composer each piece is its own puzzle to be worked, and while one can see rises and falls that perhaps correlate to advances and retreats or changes of focus, it is all considered to be part of a body of work.

This goes out the window with jazz, and, to the extent it can be applied, with modern popular music as well. Records, which are part of the commercial aspect of music, speak the language of the marketplace. That means sales, marketing, media coverage. For an artist like Charles Mingus or Duke Ellington, that is entirely separate from the language of art, where the composer is competing, more than anything, with him or herself, as well as time. The clock is always ticking, and for Mingus it began to tick very loudly in the seventies.

So when you hear it said that Let My Children Hear Music is one of Mingus' best albums, you have to take a step back and qualify that. Whether you believe it to be true is going to depend on a number of factors: whether you like Mingus big ensembles or smaller ones, whether you prefer the more formal compositions or the freer stuff, and how you feel about edited performances. Let My Children Hear Music was produced by Teo Macero, and in 1972 Macero was deeply into a studio-as-instrument aesthetic in his work with Miles Davis. Macero was a master at editing tape and creating a gorgeous performance using the technology of the time.

Mingus was no stranger to edited performances, having used them previously to get the very best representation of his music down on tape. He had supreme confidence in the talent and individual voices of the musicians he hired, but sometimes the sum of two takes turns out to be better than any individual take. In this regard, Mingus is no different in his musical aesthetic than Steely Dan. The major impression left by Let My Children Hear Music is one of complete participation by the artist, the musicians, and the record label, a record where everyone brought their 'A' game to create an album that truly stands out in the Mingus discography. Mingus himself chose work from various points in his composing career to have orchestrated and arranged, modified and molded to the musicians at his disposal.

Mingus begins Let My Children Hear Music with a composition first recorded in 1965, though under a different title. "The Shoes of the Fisherman's Wife are Some Jive-Ass Slippers" was originally titled "Once Upon a Time There Was a Holding Company Called Old America" and was premiered in 1965 at UCLA during a live performance. Mingus liked to refer to his performances as workshops where the band continued to rehearse and learn the details of the pieces, often with interruptions, suggestions, and hectoring from Mingus himself.

The 1965 UCLA performance was a chance to perform and record music that Mingus had composed for the '65 Monterey Jazz Festival. His performance there in '64 had been a triumph, but the following year there were problems with the program and Mingus' set was reduced to a mere half hour, meaning most of the music he had planned would not be played. Music Written for Monterey 1965 Not Heard ... Played Live in Its Entirety at UCLA was self-released by Mingus, though he ran out of money after pressing only 200 copies. The album was reissued on CD in 2006. Because Capitol Records had cleaned out its vaults, the original master was destroyed and it had to be remastered from an original vinyl copy.

What the UCLA recording demonstrates is that, while Mingus is well-recorded and represented compositionally at the small group level, his considerable catalog of music composed for larger bands is represented sketchily. We can readily recognize the beauty and structure of the composition, but it is still in a rough format. On the contrary, there is nothing 'workshop' like about Let My Children Hear Music--it's a heavily rehearsed, carefully arranged, and liberally edited record of the music. For some that may give it an air of illegitimacy, but ask yourself: why do we hold the best, most creative musicians to a standard of not using technological means to create the recording they are trying to achieve while allowing the meanderings of pop musicians subjected to heavy studio effects to pass unremarked? Mingus was no stranger to editing, going as far back as Tijuana Moods, so this was no departure for him.

Another thing that stands out on both performances is the incredible saxophone voice of Charles McPherson. His passionate, plaintive alto rings out, particularly on Let My Children Hear Music, where it is shaded gorgeously by the production. Like Duke Ellington, Mingus often wrote parts for instrumentalists who were currently in his band, playing to their strengths and utilizing their unique creativity.

"Anything Milhaud has done in classical music, McPherson and Bird, alone, do with ease as well as human warmth and beauty...And take Jimmy Knepper. One of his solos was taken off a record of mine and written out for classical trombone in my ballet. The trombone player could barely play it. He said it was one of the most technical exercises he had ever attempted to play. And he was just playing the notes--not the embellishments or the sound that Jimmy was getting."

Though "Holding Company" and "Shoes of the Fisherman's Wife" are substantially the same composition, it underwent some evolution on its way to a definitive recording. McPherson is featured on solos throughout the piece, whereas on the UCLA recording the solos that follow McPherson's opening cadenza are trumpet solos. "Fisherman" includes a free jazz group improvisation near the end as well.

"Don't Be Afraid, the Clown's Afraid Too" is a highly emotional and seemingly vulnerable piece from this same period, also performed on the UCLA record. The title might be a gentle suggestion to coulrophobiacs, but it also might be an admission that free floating anxiety is a universal feeling. The track opens with some sound effects courtesy of Macero, which always sounds to me like the crowds at a carnival, echoed screaming heard from the roller coaster, a creaky oompah band.

The clown is, for Mingus, a symbol of the musician, particularly the jazz musician, who attempts to please an audience that is largely antagonistic or, more benignly, indifferent, to his efforts. In 1957 he recorded "The Clown," a composition that used group improvisation interacting with a narration by writer Jean Shepard. The narration was suggested by Mingus and then improvised in its particulars by Shepard. In it, the clown slowly becomes aware that his audience is malevolent, and only laughs when he actually hurts himself (is vulnerable) in front of them. "Now he really sees" Shepard repeats several times, then, "but it was too late." "Don't Be Afraid" was one of the charts that Sy Johnson worked heavily on, and part of the 3/4 time bridge section uses motifs from "The Clown."

"Don't Be Afraid, the Clown's Afraid Too" is not nearly as terrifying a look into the abyss, sounding more like a brief interlude that careens around with circus and vaudeville themes, telling us 'life is a carnival' with, as Willy Wonka asserts, little surprises around every corner, but nothing dangerous. That's a lie. Art is always dangerous, it always puts some tired piece of hegemony to the test, and Mingus certainly always rose to the occasion in that regard.

And what are we most afraid of? Well, there's death, and Mingus directly addresses that here as well with "The Chill of Death." The text is a poem that Mingus wrote in 1939 and set to music sometime in the early forties; Mingus recalled Charlie Parker hearing it in the studio and telling him it "was the sort of thing I should keep on doing, and that I shouldn’t be discouraged." Recited by Mingus in his deep, gravelly voice, it is indeed a meditation on death, but characteristically Mingus imagines he is tricked into making a wrong choice and being thrust, at the last moment, into some hellish bardo.

"Here is a piece I wrote in 1939 and I wrote it like this because I thought in 1939 I would probably gel it recorded someday. But when you have to wait 30 years to get one piece played – what do you think happens to a composer who is sincere and loves to write and has to wait 30 years to have someone play a piece of his music? That was when I was energetic and wrote all the time. Music was my life."

"Hobo Ho" is a composition that was originally intended to honor saxophonist Illinois Jacquet. During the big band era, soloists from the various bands played wild solos on record and then sought to recreate those solos for live audiences, making their solos part of the actual composition rather than an improvisation. While Jacquet was a featured soloist with Lionel Hampton's band, he played a solo on "Flying Home" that caused audiences to whoop and roar, and he played it to the hilt during live performances, eventually becoming known for playing 'wild man' solos that verged on the edge of out of control. Mingus had part of that solo transcribed and then arranged for a full sax section, Supersax style, to include in "Hobo Ho." But for whatever reason Jacquet could not make the sessions and the piece was rearranged for James Moody, even incorporating part of his 'Moody's Mood for Love," and his performance is spiritual and invigorating.

Mingus concludes this valedictory with "The I of Hurricane Sue," which is a piece written 'for, but not about" his wife and longstanding business partner Susan Mingus. Opening with sounds of howling wind and raging sea, it manages to settle into a gorgeous large group chart with extended solo choruses for McPherson and Knepper, dissolving again into the maelstrom at the end, making the piece a calm center in the inevitable storms of life and the indignities of the music business.

"Let my children have music! Let them hear live music. Not noise. My children! You do what you want with your own!"

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