WHEN Jenny Bilfield first went to New York, Charles Mingus’ big band was playing the legendary jazz club Fez every Monday night. She lived nearby and went to see them as often as possible. Mingus’ performances left quite an impression.
“I’d never heard a big band play that way before,” says Bilfield, the artistic and executive director of Stanford Lively Arts.
Nor had she ever seen audiences respond to a musician the way they did to Mingus. “It was about listening to the music,” she says of those shows. “Yes, you’d have a drink, but you’d e really quiet. There was a reverence and respect in that room. It had the quality of a sacred space.”
With those Monday nights as a formative experience, perhaps it’s no surprise that Bilfield has returned to Mingus’ music all these years later, as Stanford Lively Arts undertakes a season-long celebration of the jazz great.
Much has changed about the way the world looks at Mingus in the more than 30 years since his death in 1979. A larger-than-life figure whose collaborations—and feuds—with other jazz geniuses like Charlie Parker and Duke Ellington are the stuff of legend, Mingus was once known more for his performances as a bandleader and bassist than for his work as a composer. In fact, many of his compositions were so experimental for their time that it was widely believed they couldn’t be played without Mingus’ direction.
The person most responsible for challenging that myth is his widow, Sue Mingus, who started the group Mingus Dynasty to show that her late husband’s music could and should be performed. It was her hard work as an archivist, author (her memoir, Tonight at Noon: A Love Story, was released in 2002), producer and all-around crusader that brought about the shift in the public perception of Mingus. Now his work is widely performed and he’s celebrated as one of the great American composers. There have been strokes of luck along the way—she discovered his epic masterpiece, a composition over 4,000 measures long which Mingus himself had tried to perform and record with disastrous results before abandoning it in 1962, and produced its first performance, which ran over two hours long, in 1989.
Sue Mingus will speak at Stanford on Tuesday, Feb. 1, as part of the Mingus-related events (the Mingus Dynasty septet she founded will perform Wednesday, Feb. 2, and the Mingus Big Band comes to Stanford April 13). She spoke to Metro about her work and her husband’s legacy.
METRO: What’s different now when you speak to audiences about your husband than when you started to do it?
SUE MINGUS: I think people have understood a different side of Charles Mingus than when I started. When I first started the Mingus Dynasty, no one could imagine a Mingus band without Mingus. It seemed unthinkable, because he was such an outsized personality and dominated the stage and his band. Nobody thought of him first and foremost as a composer. They thought of him as a bandleader and a personality on stage and a virtuoso bass player. But they did not think of him first as a composer, as they did with Ellington. That’s the big change in perception of Charles since he died 32 years ago. He’s now understood as one of our foremost American composers. He’s left one of the largest legacies of American composition, second only to Ellington.
You’ve been instrumental in changing that perception since his death. you’ve always said he was a composer first.
Well, he said that. I took my cue from Charles. He always said he was first and foremost a composer. He said, “People don’t say that,” but he knew who he was. A few months after he died, [New York jazz promoter] New Audiences was doing a Mingus tribute at Carnegie Hall. They asked me to get a number of bands to perform, and I got the people I knew. I got Sonny Rollins and Lyle Hampton and Dexter Gordon. I forget, I think there were four bands. And then I formed a band to play Mingus music, it was the first. Julie Lokin, who was one of the heads of New Audiences, came up with the idea of “Mingus Dynasty.” There was already an album of Charles’ called Mingus Dynasty, and it was a natural name for a band carrying on the music. I put together a band knowing nothing about doing anything like that. I looked at those seminal Columbia albums—we just celebrated the 50th anniversary last year of those albums—and it was four horns and a rhythm section. I hired all the musicians who had played with Charles, except of course the bass player, and it took off. [Newport Jazz Festival producer] George Wein immediately asked if he could book it for the summer festivals. The most interesting aspect of that Mingus tribute—it was a two-day tribute at Carnegie Hall—was that nobody played Mingus music except our band. That was the cue that people were not playing Mingus’ music, they did not think of him as a composer.
So the world has finally caught up to where Mingus was 50 years ago?
Absolutely. I think that’s exactly what it is. It’s easy now, because there’s a big pool of musicians that learned what was considered to be such difficult, inaccessible music way back when. Our ears have grown up to the music; that’s really what happens when you have very original music like this. People have to absorb the sound. We’re now in our third year of our Mingus high school competition, which will be next month, and you should hear these young kids play the devil out of this music.
Tell me about the discovery of ÔEpitaph.’
Well, a musicologist from Canada [Andrew Homzy] came. He was teaching Mingus’ music, and he asked what music I had. I pointed to a chest that had a whole bunch of music piled together. He asked if he could come and put it in order. He and his wife came back and forth from Montreal to New York for several months, and catalogued everything. It was during that cataloguing process that he discovered it, after he kept finding a piece that began with measure No. 2053, that was called “Peggy’s Blue Skylight.” He pieced it together like a detective. We actually discovered later on that were more pieces probably meant to be part of Epitaph, like “Black Saint and the Sinner Lady,” which was on the same kind of score paper. We’ve discovered a number of things since then. It probably would have been a four-hour concert. As it was, [conductor] Gunther [Schuller] called it the “Gotterdammerung of Jazz” when he came over to look at it.
You’ve talked about how, contrary to the many famous stories about his temper, Mingus was a peaceful and gentle man in his private life. But do you think his larger-than-life reputation has been helpful in keeping his legacy alive?
No, I think Charles’ reputation as “Jazz’s Angry Man” was more hurtful than helpful, and I think there’s still a residue of that, where people focused on the personality rather than the music. That was an uphill battle for me in the beginning. I don’t think that helped Charles. He had battles to fight, some of which were unnecessary, but a lot of which had to do with the times and the lack of acceptance of his music and his color. In retrospect, certainly he did a lot of things that were unforgivable, but he also spoke out on every occasion very boldly and with great courage, when not everybody did.
Sue Mingus speaks Tuesday (Feb. 1), 7:30pm, Pigott Theater, Stanford; free
The Mingus Dynasty performs Wednesday (Feb. 2) at 8pm, Dinkelspiel Auditorium, Stanford; $38Ð$42
