by David Yaffe
Among the listeners who were reacting to Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter—the two records, the insatiable musical ambition, the black male costume on the cover—was the Italian record and film producer Daniele Senatore, who had produced a film, Todo Modo (1976), with a score by the legendary Charles Mingus, although none of Mingus’s music ended up on-screen. (The score was entirely by Ennio Morricone.) The unused score represented a departure Mingus had been wanting to make since first teaching himself music theory—including the twelve-tone method of Arnold Schoenberg, which he had been studying since he was a teenager back in the 1930s, before Schoenberg was widely taught in school. But just as Mingus was continuing to move ahead, he was, suddenly and shockingly, diagnosed with ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease), a rapidly progressive degenerative motor neuron disease. Most people who get diagnosed with it die within a couple of years. (The quantum physicist Stephen Hawking is an extremely prominent and rare exception.) The colossus of the upright bass—the loud, angry genius, the troublemaker—would be wheelchair-bound and struggling to speak.
Mingus was well known as one of the greatest bass players and bandleaders in jazz, but he wanted, above all, to be recognized as a great composer. He had played behind Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Charlie Parker, the three greatest figures in all of jazz history, and yet these gigs were but a footnote. His body of work was huge and wildly ambitious; he was a shambolic personality who produced music that packed a distinctive punch in more ways than one. He was known to fire and rehire musicians in a single set. He broke a stage light at the Village Vanguard that was never replaced. He punched the trombonist Jimmy Knepper in the mouth, breaking one of Knepper’s teeth and ruining his embouchure—and attenuating his top octave—for several months. And yet Knepper kept working for Mingus anyway.
Joni knew where Mingus was coming from. “I hear too well, and I need purity of spirit,” she told me. “It’s the same thing with my master, Chögyam Trungpa. People would play music. He hated everything that they played. He told them to listen to me. I know why. It’s the same reason Mingus listened to me, or Judy Garland, there’s another one—pure. There’s no guile in that music. There’s no guile in Miles, even though he was a bad boy, offstage. He was pure as could be onstage. Mingus would punch players and say, ‘You’re falsifyin’ your emotion!’ Most people can’t hear that. The phony note.” Joni and Mingus were simpatico spirits.
Mingus could also be tender and sensitive, writing beautiful and complex love songs—“Celia” for his second wife, “Sue’s Changes” for his fourth—that reflected his stormy, romantic, and all-too-human heart. Mingus’s work is as demanding as it is pleasurable. Melody lines lead to unfamiliar places. Horns collide and work it out on the bandstand. Mingus took all that anger and sweetness and confusion and put it on his charts, indulging the brilliance of the multi-reedist Eric Dolphy and the pianist Don Pullen, two unorthodox virtuosi who played outside the laws of harmony, but in a way that fit into his own artfully constructed compositions, where chaos would come and go and come again. The most basic of jazz collections would be incomplete without at least a couple of these: Pithecanthropus Erectus (1956), East Coasting (1957), Mingus Ah Um (1959), Mingus Dynasty (1959), The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady (1963), Mingus in Europe (Volumes 1 & 2, 1964), Let My Children Hear Music (1972), Changes One (1974), and Changes Two (1975), among others. As he was nearing the end of his recording career, he was exploring the untrodden South American rhythms known as cumbia. He was still reaching for something new to the bitter end.
Mingus kept the past alive while looking to the future. His music is jam-packed with Dixieland, church shouting, Ellingtonia, bebop drive, and classical ambition. In a Mingus composition, many moments in jazz history are happening at once. Mingus manhandles that bass like no one else, and he makes the chaos sound intentional, artful, as passionate, violent, and vivid as Picasso’s Guernica. Some of his ensembles were called the Mingus Workshop, and they were like group therapy, a wrestling match, or a think tank for improvisers, a place for instruments to come together, argue, and come together again. He looked deep within himself and once wrote a song called “All the Things You Could Be by Now If Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother.”
In an idiom where even Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, and Miles Davis sometimes took credit for songs they didn’t write, or fully write, Mingus’s accomplishments stand on their own. If his emotional volatility made it hard to organize his life—or maintain the kind of loyalty among band members that was part of Ellington’s genius and Miles’s aura—his compositions were his and his alone, with idiosyncratic touches like flamenco guitar, spoken-word rambles, and a cacophony that always made musical sense. There was no one like him. Mingus seemed larger than life—even larger than death. The final humiliation of such a terrible illness was a matter between him and the God he still wanted to write for. When Miles Davis and the rest went for fusion in the late ’60s, he just kept writing for upright bass, acoustic piano, and brass, and had some great years before ALS did him in. In his final, terrible year of 1978, life was slipping from him each day, and he needed to do something to spread the word—maybe find a new audience for his records. Damn, he was fifty-five years old and not ready to check out. The concert stage was finally opening up for him! He was just getting ready for his renaissance.
Sue Graham Mingus, his indefatigable wife—who knew a thing or two about working the press when she edited the hip magazine Changes—was frantically looking for a final project. She wrote some lyrics for his songs, but they weren’t good enough. The Philharmonic was booked. She needed something big right away. Daniele Senatore showed Sue and Charles the cover of Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter and played it for them. Joni was clearly more than jazz curious, and was even using her record cover to explore her inner (and outer) black man. Could this be the woman to give Charles a fancy funeral? Could this be a way for Joni to get some musical education from a true master? They sent smoke signals in Joni’s direction, and they wanted to give her an impression that Mingus, who had actually been unfamiliar with Joni’s work, was a fan of “Paprika Plains,” and admired how she was stretching out with Jaco Pastorius and other musicians not exactly on his radar. It hardly mattered. Not only was Joni summoned, she was importuned, but by the great man himself, a shrewd tactic on Sue’s part.
Shortly after finding out that he was dying of ALS, Mingus invited Senatore over. “I want to talk to you about God,” he said. Daniele said, “You’ve got the wrong guy,” and suggested he read T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. Reading Four Quartets is a sublime and distilled way of talking about God, in particular the God of Anglicanism, to which Eliot converted upon becoming a British subject in 1927—whether you believe in that God or not. Four Quartets is a devotional poem, but it is also apocalyptic, published in 1943, two years before the end of World War II. Although Eliot would live until 1965—and receive the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948—Four Quartets would be his final major work of poetry. Mingus had a sense of eloquent farewell. “Burnt Norton,” the first of the quartets and originally conceived as a stand-alone farewell to the medium, begins with these lines, “Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future,” and ends with “Quick now, here, now, always—/ Ridiculous the waste sad time / Stretching before and after.” This was absurdity, this was keeping track of the clock, this was memory, and it was indisputably beautiful.
“Quick now, here, now, always”: the poem is circular in its sense of time. The fire of cremation and the rose of fertility are one. Mingus, whose fecundity was fading fast, could dig this mixture of pastoral, eulogy, and ritual. He felt he could set it to music as a big send-off, the epitaph he had struggled to write on and off for decades. But he had to do it fast and make a little green while he was at it.
Joni, upon reading Four Quartets, was not inspired by it at all, and she was convinced that Mingus didn’t even understand a lot of it. It is a good thing that
she never told him this. Although Joni wrote poetic lyrics, her interest in poetry was very limited, mostly to poems she had memorized in high school, along with a little Leonard Cohen and what he recommended to her back in ’67. “It certainly wasn’t appropriate literature for a man who just found out that he was going to die,” Joni told me, even though it actually seemed very apropos. “Mingus couldn’t get anything nourishing out of it. And he didn’t understand a lot of it. There was a lot of pseudo depth, a lot of tricky wordplay in it, but not a lot of meat. I always think poetry is kind of like cracking sunflowers with your nails to get the meat out. It’s a lot of work for very little reward, in most cases. Even the hallowed ones among them. I didn’t see that it had any kind of great pertinence to Charles’s situation. But, still, the first project that he offered me was that he was going to get an Englishman with an Oxford or Eton accent, an upper-crusty accent to read passages from the Four Quartets. Then he wanted me to translate it into what he called ‘the vernacular,’ to make sense of it, if there was anything to glean from it. So that you could get something out of it so that you didn’t have to crack this nugget with your fingernails, right? He likened it to tag-team preachers. Apparently, in some churches, you have a guy reading the ‘thee, thou’ text and another one putting it into street or bebop language. And he wanted me to play acoustic guitar. He was an acoustic man. He was a folkie in jazz. He didn’t like electric jazz at all.”
Joni knew almost nothing about Mingus—including his ability to comprehend T. S. Eliot. In fact, unlike Joni, Mingus loved poetry. His second wife, Celia Zaentz, recalled him wooing her with his own poems. He recorded part of an album with Langston Hughes and conscripted Allen Ginsberg to perform an ad hoc wedding ceremony with Sue Graham. He performed with the Beat poet Kenneth Patchen, and in 1972, wrote an unconventional string quartet (two violas and two cellos) as a setting for “The Clown,” by the great New York School poet Frank O’Hara. A manuscript in the Charles Mingus Collection at the Library of Congress reveals a setting of “A Sane Revolution,” a poem by D. H. Lawrence. And so forth.
John Guerin told her she would be crazy to give up this opportunity. He was also more than annoyed that it had landed in the lap of someone who knew so little about Mingus. She absolutely had to do this, he told her. Most musicians he knew would kill for this opportunity. She’d better learn fast.
Elliot Roberts and David Geffen, who had guided her career with so much freedom and so much care, thought it was finally time to intervene. They begged her not to take on this collaboration. Joni, you’re going to lose your audience! Joni, you will be banned from the airwaves! And you will never recover!
When she first met Mingus, he was already in a wheelchair, facing the Hudson River. He had not yet lost his ability to provoke. “That song ‘Paprika Plains,’” he told her. “The strings are out of tune.” Mingus was testing Joni, but she adored him immediately and, of course, agreed with him about the strings on “Paprika Plains.” She wished someone else had noticed. Illness had made Mingus vulnerable. He was sweet, but she saw the devil in him, too. Joni takes pride in her jive detector, and she knew that she was in the presence of the real thing.
When Joni read Four Quartets, she said she concluded that she’d rather set the King James Bible to music. The poem wasn’t too daunting—she just didn’t think it had enough meat on it. It reminded her of a quotation from Nietzsche she enjoyed repeating: “Poets muddy the water to make it seem deep.” Anyway, wasn’t she there for lyrics? It was for the best that Joni didn’t appreciate Eliot; she, not Eliot, was to be Mingus’s scribe. Mingus figured this out pretty fast. It wasn’t long until Mingus informed her that he had written seven pieces, titled “Joni I,” “Joni II,” all the way to “Joni VII.” Mingus composed these melodies by singing weakly into a tape recorder; they were then set with chords by the arranger Sy Johnson. The melodies sound so peripatetic, it is a testimony to Joni’s powers that she could find words for three of them. After all, it’s not as if she had a background in doing such things. In the liner notes to the album, she compared turning these melodies into songs with lyrics to jumping into deep water, and it was not an exaggeration. Letting Jaco and Wayne riff behind you was one thing; this project was the biggest musical dare she had ever received, even bigger than “Paprika Plains.” She was charged with taking Mingus’s final melodies—with chords far more weird and obscure than anything Joni was accused of playing—and not only finding lyrics for them but words that would express the dying wishes of this larger-than-life genius.
“What’s the first melody about?” Joni asked of “Joni I.” She couldn’t read music, so she was looking for a theme before she got a chance to hear it.
“Some things I’m gonna miss,” he said.
Joni saw Mingus facing the Hudson River—looking north to the wilderness of the New Jersey Palisades and forward to construction of high-rises he knew he would never see completed—thinking of all the styles of music he wouldn’t explore, all the musicians he wouldn’t hire and fire, all the friends he’d miss, and, of course, all the beautiful lovers he would never get a chance to kiss. Mingus was entering a liminal space between life and death. ALS would make Mingus mourn himself, while watching others mourn for him.
The apartment on the forty-fourth floor of Manhattan Plaza had a spectacular view, but he felt like a hostage. The adventure was winding down. Joni took on his voice, his rage against the dying of the light. In his final summer, Mingus would be invited to a jazz performance at the Carter White House—the one where Dizzy and the onetime peanut farmer president shared a mic on “Salt Peanuts”—and, when everyone stood up for him, this guy who slapped the bass with as much force as anyone, and who could no longer play, was reduced to a quivering mess of tears. Joni, taken by the authentic and profound gravity of Mingus’s condition, wrote an elegy. He knew that her voice would be narrating his music, his life. Blond Miss Thing would somehow become Mingus’s spirit, and get his last melodies out to the world. He called her “Hillbilly” and “that skinny-ass folk singer.” She adored him. He trusted her. After she had written some lyrics, she called him and asked, “How are you?”
“Oh, I’m dying,” he said.
Joni had never put her voice or lyrics to someone else’s music before, but this was an extraordinary figure in a dire circumstance. The idea of missing things was enough to fill a song. Sonny Rollins was making frequent visits, as were other musicians, including Dexter Gordon and Jack Walrath, who had played trumpet in some of Mingus’s last ensembles, and who lived in the same building. Ornette Coleman stopped by, despite Mingus’s backhanded compliment, back in 1959, that he was “playing wrong right.” Even Jimmy Knepper, who got punched and severely injured onstage for “falsifyin’ his emotion,” called him in April 1978 on what would be Mingus’s final birthday. Rivalries and alliances were all melting together on this farewell tour.
In addition to the seven melodies, Mingus instructed Joni to write lyrics for two melodies from his 1959 classic album Mingus Ah Um. One had the painterly title of “Self-Portrait in Three Colors,” a composition that actually sounds closest to Joni’s approach on Mingus to anything Mingus actually did. The song has an elaborate melody, with an impressionistic meeting of euphony and dissonance that would hit Joni’s sweet spot. But what made it most like Joni’s Mingus album is that it has no solos. It’s like a classical piece for a jazz ensemble. Miles Davis’s “Nefertiti,” one of Joni’s favorites, was also recorded this way, but only because the band made the spontaneous decision to keep repeating the melody, building up momentum with each turnaround. “Self-Portrait in Three Colors” was planned without solos, using subtle variations in tone in each verse. The three colors are the three verses. The first verse features a unison of the alto saxophonist John Handy with the tenor saxophonists Booker Ervin and Shafi Hadi; the second verse adds Jimmy Knepper on trombone; and on the third verse, Handy, Ervin, and Hadi break away from one another, then come back, Handy ending with a lingering, rhapsodi
c flourish. When Joni was at work on the album, she mentioned “Self-Portrait in Three Colors” among the album’s projected contents. Even though the track was never finalized, the song would, consciously or not, provide a template for Joni’s method and feeling. The balladic pace became fit for a dirge.
“Goodbye Pork Pie Hat,” another ballad and perhaps Mingus’s best-loved composition, was a requiem for Lester Young, the great tenor saxophonist, whose cool style would be, to Mingus’s chagrin, imitated by an entire school known as “Cool Jazz.” Even though Rahsaan Roland Kirk had already written lyrics for it (on his 1976 album The Return of the 5000 Lb. Man), Mingus believed that Joni could write better ones. He also told her to take John Handy’s classic solo and make vocalese lyrics out of it. Joni initially balked.
“Why don’t you get Jon Hendricks?” she asked. “He’s the best bebop lyricist.”
“I did,” said Mingus. “Do you want to hear it?”
Mingus played it for Joni. “What do you think?” he asked.
“Oh, my God, it’s maudlin,” Joni said.
“Isn’t it? The poor black guy this and the poor black guy that.”
Now Joni had to outdo one of her few teenage heroes. And so she wandered all over Manhattan singing Handy’s solo to herself, looking everywhere for inspiration. If you can believe in Magic Mind, you can think that the universe—or, in this case, Manhattan—is laid out with you in mind. Indeed, walking around Harlem, it seemed that she was given a sign. The song now had a structure. She just needed to know what to do with it. Mingus talked to Joni about Lester Young, who inspired the song. “This guy was the sweeeetest guy,” Mingus told her. Mingus was lamenting a great who was gone, while Mingus himself was a great who was about to go, too. Joni wanted that lyric to contain both of them. The first verse was easy, but the rest of it was still a mystery. “HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME,” wrote T. S. Eliot in The Waste Land. No doubt. She was dating Don Alias at this point, and they decided to get off the subway a block early. “And we came out near a manhole with steam rising all around us, and about two blocks ahead of us was a group of black guys—pimps, by the look of their hats—circled around, kind of leaning over into a circle,” Joni recalled. “It was this little bar with a canopy that went out to the curb. In the center of them are two boys, maybe nine years old or younger, doing this robot-like dance, a modern dance, and one guy in the ring slaps his knees and says, ‘Ahaaah, that looks like the end of tap dancing, for sure!’ So we look up ahead, and in red script on the next bar down, in bright neon, it says ‘Charlie’s.’ All of a sudden I get this vision, I look at that red script, I look at these two kids, and I think, ‘The generations . . .’ Here’s two more kids coming up in the street—talented, drawing probably one of their first crowds, and it’s . . . to me, it’s like Charlie and Lester. That’s enough magic for me, but the capper was when we looked up on the marquee that it was all taking place under. In big capital letters, it said ‘PORK PIE HAT BAR.’ All I had to do was rhyme it, and you had the last verse.”