Who is charlie mingus

While his early works were written out in classical fashion, during the s, influential albums such as Pithecanthropus Erectus , The Clown , and Ah-Um offered a new method of getting his unconventional vision across: he dictated various parts of a composition to his sidemen, all the while allowing room for their individual musical personalities and ideas.

This continued throughout the '60s and '70s. His transition from bebop to his pioneering place in hard bop brought to the fore an exciting array of future jazz luminaries including Jackie McLean , Eric Dolphy , Dannie Richmond , and Jimmy Knepper , to mention a few of the musicians he mentored.

Mingus was also a formidable pianist, easily capable of playing that role in a group -- which he did in his bands, hiring another bassist to fill in for him. The first music he heard was that of the church -- the only music his stepmother allowed around the house -- but one day, despite the threat of punishment, he tuned in to Duke Ellington 's "East St.

Louis Toodle-Oo" on his father's crystal set, his first exposure to jazz. He tried to learn the trombone at six and then the cello, but became fed up with incompetent teachers and ended up on the double bass by the time he reached high school.

A proto-third stream composition written by Mingus in , "Half-Mast Inhibition" recorded in , reveals an extraordinary timbral imagination for a teenager. As a bass prodigy, Mingus performed with Kid Ory in Barney Bigard 's group in and went on the road with Louis Armstrong the following year. He began to attract real national attention as a bassist for Red Norvo 's trio with Tal Farlow in , and after leaving that group, he moved to New York and began working with several stellar jazz performers, including Billy Taylor , Stan Getz , and Art Tatum.

He was the bassist in the famous Massey Hall concert in Toronto with Charlie Parker , Dizzy Gillespie , Bud Powell , and Max Roach , and he briefly joined his idol Ellington : he had the dubious distinction of being the only man Duke ever personally fired from his band.

Around this time, Mingus tried to make himself a rallying point for the jazz community. He founded Debut Records in partnership with his then-wife Celia and Max Roach in , seeing to it that the label recorded a wide variety of jazz, from bebop to experimental music, until its demise in Among Debut's most notable releases were the Massey Hall concert, an album by Miles Davis , and several of his own sessions that traced the development of his ideas.

He also contributed composed works to the Jazz Composers' Workshop from to , and in , he founded his own Jazz Workshop repertory group that found him moving away from strict notation toward a looser, dictated manner of composing.

One of the most important figures in twentieth century American music, Charles Mingus was a virtuoso bass player, accomplished pianist, bandleader and composer. Born on a military base in Nogales, Arizona in and raised in Watts, California, his earliest musical influences came from the church-- choir and group singing-- and from "hearing Duke Ellington over the radio when [he] was eight years old.

Rheinshagen, principal bassist of the New York Philharmonic, and compositional techniques with the legendary Lloyd Reese while absorbing vernacular music from the great jazz masters, first-hand. His early professional experience, in the 40's, found him touring with bands like Louis Armstrong, Kid Ory and Lionel Hampton.

One of the few bassists to do so, Mingus quickly developed as a leader of musicians. He was also an accomplished pianist who could have made a career playing that instrument. By the mid's he had formed his own publishing and recording companies to protect and document his growing repertoire of original music. As he developed as a composer, his music—by turns raucous and romantic, tender and turbulent—incorporated all that he had learned and experienced, while drawing on many styles from around the world.

His musical methods were his own, too. At the helm of his Jazz Workshops, he often dictated his ideas, rather than write them down, and then encouraged the talented young musicians he was always engaging to improvise collectively, thus blurring the lines between soloists and sections. The result is singular: achieving a raw human intensity and fullness rarely encountered in any music.

Stricken with ALS, Mingus found himself increasingly unable to play his bass, and instead turned to composing. His final decade marked even greater depths of musical exploration, broader genre lines, and ambitious collaborations and large-scale works that sound unceasingly fresh, even more than four decades later.

Mingus took orders from no one. Mingus is included in our first list of 10 Essential Jazz Albums; check it out here. Jazz at Lincoln Center remembers the life and legacy of Chick Corea, a towering figure whose innovations spanned decades and genres.

Jazz pianist, bandleader, composer, and Essentially Ellington alum Isaiah J. Although Mingus grew into a great bandleader it is interesting that one of his defining musical statements, Money Jungle , saw him as the junior partner in an all-star trio with this idols Duke Ellington and Max Roach.

The album was recorded in but inspired an ambitious interpretation by Terri Lyne Carrington in , proving that the anti-capitalist message was, sadly, more relevant than ever to the internet age.