On The Fringes Of The Free

In its rush to explain history, jazz criticism has often been mistaken in presenting the explosion  of free jazz and the supremacy of improvisation over writing as the sole significant developments of the sixties. 

Horace Silver

After this decade the history of jazz no longer moved in one direction; many tendencies showed themselves on the fringes of free jazz. Besides Charles Mingus and Eric Dolphy, other, influenced by Horace Silver, John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman (some recording under the Blue Note and Candid labels), declared themselves outside of any identifiable group. Musical Language advanced, feeding both the autonomy of the improviser and the emancipation of rhythm. The players of 'the new thing', involved in a political struggle, embraced their cultural heritage, but, in contrast, a large number of their contemporaries demanded the freedom to control, master and assimilate what they wanted from the cultural environment at large, from classical music to free jazz.

Sonny Clark Sextet Blue Note LP

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'Meditation For Integration'

'If you want to play, play a black instrument. Learn the bass. '

It was on this advice that Charles Mingus gave up his vocation as a classical cellist to become one of the greatest double bass players of bop.Still, he retained a tremendous amount of bitterness from this decision - some have blamed this for the violent and unpredictable behaviour  that marked his numerous collaborations. While laying claim to the earthy realism of the blues and the spiritual that impregnated all of his work and fed his strong anti racist positions, Mingus remained preoccupied with the erudite structures he encountered while studying Bela Bartok and the romantic repertoire.

  

Charles Mingus

He kept his aesthetic identity crisis going while he worked with Lennie Tristano and the representatives of the third stream. In the course of the fifties, he went from being solely an instrumentalist (he played the bass) to become, as the head of his Jazz Workshop, one of the most original composers and bandleaders since Duke Ellington.

Mingus was not fully capable of accepting all the requirement of the free jazz. Still, his music proved to be very innovative: he alternated "spontaneous polyphony' with classical counterpoint and - always terribly effectively- relentlessly varied the tempo and the beat, and he solicited the most unheard-of instrumental timbres.

Charles Mingus Eric Dolphy Sextet, 1964

 

A formidable agitator, from 1959 on he pulled Eric Dolphy, the saxophone, clarinet and flute player, in his wake. Without ever identifying completely with the extreme solutions of free jazz, Dolphy imposed a discontinuous melodic line, following violent breaks that somehow never escaped from his control.

Eric Dolphy

Long after Dolphy's death in 1964, Charles Mingus was still mourning this visionary partner in whom he had found the ideal instrumental echo of his concerns as composer and arranger. Mingus' concerns endured, however, into the late sixties.

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