The world is a screwed-up place. That has always been more or less true, if more true lately. For statesmen, military leaders, and political activists, the question is how to make the world less screwed-up; for most others, given the negligible extent of our ability to affect world events—beyond the occasional and very limited exercise of power known as voting—the question is not how to improve the world but how to live in it as it is, in the least painful way possible. Much of that amounts to how we think about the world and ourselves. Some of us, though we may be tempted by the seeming comfort of believing that there is a reason for everything that happens, a higher, benevolent power who has you and me, sister, in his hands, are unable to make the intellectual leap away from what we can see and touch (or at least read about in the New York Times)—and we may look on the religious with the same prejudice and sense of superiority of which we accuse them. Instead of an other-centered (that is, God-centered) approach to life, we may take one that is, in the most positive sense, self-centered, saying to ourselves: I will lead the best—most principled, most successful, or most enjoyable—life I can and not worry about the rest.
Sometimes it works. And yet surely, for even the happiest, most enviable, and most upstanding among us in the self-centered camp, there come those dark moments when, even if we don’t ask What It’s All About, we tremble in acknowledgment of the great, seemingly random, and non-benevolent forces outside our control. Even if the world were at peace—which it never will be—there is the stuff of ordinary human life to contend with. We can be struck down early, or we may live to be very old and weak; either way, we will die, an outcome that is closer every day. With luck no tragedy will befall our children; they will simply grow up and leave us, move on from our deaths with a mix of sadness and relief, then grow old and die themselves. In the moments when we consider these things, we may seek solace—one not based on faith in the unseen but incorporating, perhaps in a sense even stemming from, a clear-eyed look at life’s bitter truths.
When I think of the jazz bassist and composer Charles Mingus (1922–79), the word “canvas” comes to mind, for a couple of reasons. Non-visual artists who create works broad in scope are often said to work “on a large canvas,” a phrase that certainly applies to Mingus’s compositions. And his works bring to my mind’s eye—I have just realized this—an image that is very much like a painted canvas, a wide, Jackson Pollock–like work: abstract, full of energy and simultaneous happenings, dark here, humorous there, turbulent, explosive. The strapping Mingus was no stranger to fistfights, sometimes drawn in by racial slights, real or imagined, that no doubt recalled for him the abuse he suffered at the hands of benighted teachers in his youth. His humor is evident in his works as well as in many of their titles, notably “Bemoanable Lady,” “The Shoes of the Fisherman’s Wife Are Some Jive-Ass Slippers,” and the prize winner—a riff on the title of the jazz standard “All the Things You Are”—”All the Things You Could Be By Now If Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother.” He dealt with his feelings about racism in intellectual/compositional as well as physical ways, titling one of his works “Fables of Faubus,” after the segregationist Arkansas governor Orval E. Faubus, and another “Meditations on Integration,” also known simply as “Meditations.” Recently, the bassist’s widow, Sue Mingus, discovered tapes containing performances of those two works—each a half-hour in length—along with other tunes recorded at a 1964 concert at Cornell University. In 2007 Blue Note released the recordings as a two-CD set, under the title Charles Mingus Sextet with Eric Dolphy-Cornell 1964.
One of my college English professors was fond of saying, “Great writers write greater than they know.” I would change “greater” to “with a greater variety of meaning,” and expand “writers” to include writers of music. Racism and integration are certainly weighty subjects, but what I hear in listening to “Fables of Faubus” and “Meditations” on Cornell 1964 are musicians grappling with issues that are weightier still, if only because they are timeless: the path of the self-centered individual, and that same individual buffeted by the much, much larger forces of the world and the universe.
Traditional jazz pieces feature one or more soloists backed by a rhythm section (piano, bass, and drums), which keeps up a more or less steady beat. In “Fables of Faubus,” the tempo provided by Mingus, his pianist, Jaki Byard, and drummer, Dannie Richmond, is all over the place, meaning that trumpeter Johnny Coles, tenor saxophonist Clifford Jordan, and multi-instrumentalist Eric Dolphy play against a kind of moving background; that, in turn, lends the piece a journey- or story-like feel that is as much like classical music as jazz. (As Nat Hentoff noted in his 1961 book The Jazz Life, Mingus considered “all music as one.”) The sextet starts out playing the composition’s theme—with Mingus, as was his way during performances, gabbing unintelligibly—and then, not quite two minutes in, Coles takes the first solo. His vibratoless lines suggest the hardness, the durability, of youth. Still, he plays over a bass/piano/drum accompaniment that is alternately frenetic and somber, and his trumpet sounds downright sleepy during one slow phase of the rhythm section, as if the pace and quality of his lines, of his young life, are not up to him. Byard, who has the next solo, encounters much the same difficulty, but as a slightly older, stronger version of the character voiced by Coles, he is able to resist the bass/drum slowdowns a bit more, carrying the melody—that is, taking charge of his life despite external events—by launching playfully (in the jazz way) into tunes, including a slightly cracked version of “Yankee Doodle” that morphs into Chopin’s funeral march. Jordan continues that progress, establishing his own pace even as the other horns wail like coyotes behind him, setting the stage for the performance of the character as fully mature, in-command individual: Mingus. The bassist, playing either a cappella or with minimal piano or drum accompaniment, holds forth for six minutes, a big man producing deep, round, resonant tones; nimble-fingered, full of fire and humor, he alone makes the music happen, sliding here into “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” there into “When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again.” The last solo is from Dolphy, here on bass clarinet; he interlaces his deep, hard tone with squeaks and honks, the eccentricities of the aged, before his lines give way to the composition’s theme. (The date of the recording was March 18, 1964. Three months later, on June 20, Dolphy turned thirty-six, and nine days after that, he died, of a diabetes-related heart attack.)
I find no evidence that Mingus had Marcus Aurelius (A.D. 121–180) in mind when he composed “Meditations,” which shares its title with the classic text by that Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher. In my own mind, though, there is a connection. Marcus was one who believed that there is an order to the universe, established by a good higher power, which he referred to variously as “Nature,” “the gods,” or even “Zeus.” His philosophy, however, seems grounded at least as much in an assumption of hardship as in a belief in the goodness of Nature. (Marcus, who wrote his great work while at war with the barbarians, knew a thing or two about hardship.) For him, Nature and hardship were not conflicting things, or even different things. Just as a medical consultant “has prescribed horseback exercises, or cold baths, or going barefoot…so in the same way does the World-Nature prescribe disease, mutilation, loss, or some other disability,” he wrote. How should one deal with hardship, whose forces have one outgunned? Largely through attitude: “Here is a rule to remember in future, when anything tempts you to feel bitter: not, ‘This is a misfortune,’ but ‘To bear this worthily is a good fortune.'” For, in Marcus’s view, what is important is not pleasure but how we conduct ourselves, how successful we are at bringing forth the best that is in us, in times of happiness or its opposite—especially its opposite. “Either the world is a mere hotch-potch of random cohesions and dispersions, or else it is a unity of order and providence,” he wrote. “If the former, why wish to survive in such a purposeless and chaotic confusion; why care about anything, save the manner of the ultimate return to dust; why trouble my head at all; since, do what I will, dispersion must overtake me sooner or later? But if the contrary be true, then I do reverence, I stand firmly, and I put my trust in the directing Power.” Here, some of us would disagree with Marcus, feeling that our conduct should not depend on an order to the universe or its lack. We just might, though, see wisdom in what he writes in another passage: “Be master of yourself, and view life as a man, as a human being, as a citizen, and as a mortal. Among the truths you will do well to contemplate most frequently are these two: first, that things can never touch the soul, but stand inert outside it, so that disquiet can arise only from fancies within; and secondly, that all visible objects change in a moment, and will be no more. Think of the countless changes in which you yourself have had a part. The whole universe is change, and life itself is but what you deem it.”
Marcus also wrote that “oneness of feeling exists between all parts of nature, in spite of their divergence and dispersion”—not a bad description of Mingus’s compositions. In the beginning of Mingus’s “Meditations,” the horns and bowed bass intersperse an ethereal melody with a repeated three-note phrase, the near-formlessness of the one bringing to mind primordial mist, the hardness, relentlessness, and unfeelingness of the other suggesting prehistory’s great cataclysms—the forming and breaking of continents and other nonhuman events. Later, in wonderful, delicate passages, Dolphy—on flute—and Byard explore the ethereal mode further. Not until nine-plus minutes into “Meditations” do traditional-style solos, with piano/bass/drum backing, begin. In other words, the solos—individuals and their achievements and statements— are not the point here, at least not the whole point. That is true even during the solos: here, the rhythm section does not so much accompany or support each soloist as spar with him—Dolphy first (on bass clarinet), then Byard, Coles, Mingus, and Jordan; of them, only Mingus plays without such adversity. (Do we hear this as rare human triumph, or, since Mingus is otherwise part of the rhythm section, as total domination by external events?) Coles faces a particularly fierce piano/ bass/drum onslaught, and Jordan’s solo is subjected to the return of the harsh, insistent phrase from the beginning of the piece. How do the trumpeter and saxophonist hold up? It is difficult to say if they triumph, or even what that would mean; but they are beautiful in the attempt. Not a bad thing to have said of us, when all is finished. Marcus Aurelius, of course, would scoff at our striving for even that modest tribute. “This mortal life is a little thing, lived in a little corner of the earth,” he wrote in his own Meditations; “and little, too, is the longest fame to come—dependent as it is on a succession of fast-perishing little men who have no knowledge even of their own selves, much less of one long dead and gone.”
Clifford Thompson, the editor of CurrentBiography magazine, is the author of numerous essays about jazz, literature, family, and other subjects.
