'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.

____________________

Evans, Mulligan and Davis

Whereas in some bands there was a very clear musical separation between the trumpets, trombones and saxophones,Gil Evans preferred the density and the richness obtained by fusing their varied tones in his arrangements. His orchestrations evoke the shimmer of colors and weight of fabrics.The seduction of the sounds took precedence, and his 'Moon Dreams' stretched itself out in dramatic torpor.

Gil Evans - Miles Davis in Studio, 1949

Among the other arrangers Miles Davis worked with for the occasion, all of them regulars at Gil Evans room, baritone sax player Gerry Mulligan was particularly innovative: he made deliberate efforts to break with the traditional eight measure form.When the harmonic structure still revered to this convention, he would shift his orchestration to the theme of 'Jeru' he called the sovereignty of the four-beat measure and rhythmic unity into question with isolated two- and three-beat measures.

Miles Davis nonet went against all the then current ideas about the lightweight quality of jazz. It seemed to demand the kind of listening one would expect Carnegie Hall, not a noisy club.

The alto sax player Lee Konitz, one of the principal soloists Miles Davis invited to the 1949 Capitol Records sessions, seemed an unlikely candidate for major role. He was to the bebop saxophone what Woody Allen is to American cinema: he had the pallor of an absentminded student, in sharp contrast to the exuberant faces of bebop. The same was true of his playing. He softened the aggressive virtuosity of Charlie Parker through the influence of the floating phrases of Lester Young and the pianist Lennie Tristano.

Gerry Mulligan in Live Performance 1940s

Tristano contributed a theoretical foundation to bop musicians discoveries and spread their ideas through his teaching. Emphasizing melody, harmony and rhythm, he streamlined bop's expressionistic aspects. The coterie of young white musicians he assembles, particularly sax players Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh, tempered bop's dazzling language by adopting airy resonances and vibratoless tones. Referring to the fugue and counterpoints of Johann Sebastian Bach, these musicians loved to do two part improvisations and, with Lennie Tristano, were responsible for the first free improvisations (without any written theme or even any agreed upon harmonic pattern).

____________________