By the start of the Sixties, Charles Mingus was one of the brightest of the modern jazz stars. He had long been celebrated as a bass prodigy adept at a number of contexts and styles, whether accompanying Kid Ory, Red Norvo, Lionel Hampton, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, or Miles Davis. He was a veteran of the New York scene, having arrived in 1951 from Los Angeles and immediately established himself as a formidable presence. His loose, improvisatory groups attracted many of the day’s young talents — saxophonists Eric Dolphy and Booker Ervin, for instance — and delivered music composed by the bassist that fused raucous gospel energy with classical timbres and colors. He recorded the results of his improvisatory workshop approach for a number of labels, most notably Columbia and Atlantic.
In 1962, Mingus was unsigned even as his name began to reach beyond the jazz circle. In high-profile interviews in Time and Newsweek, his outspoken remarks on race relations, the music business, and his own stature added to the attention. Though an ambitious Town Hall concert that year had ended in confusion, the fiasco did not dissuade Impulse Records chief Bob Thiele. He was clear that he wanted Mingus, and why.
“I was initially more impressed with his arranging capabilities as opposed to his bass playing,” Thiele said in an interview with jazz researcher Michael Jarrett. “Not that he wasn’t one of the great bass players! But I was always amazed at how he could come up with these arrangements. That was really my reason for wanting to record him.”
Mingus arrived at Impulse in 1963 with a warning that he could be as volatile as he was creative. Thiele soon had firsthand experience.
Mingus, Thiele recalled, “was a real character. Once, I went into the office at ABC-Paramount . . . I was always in the office, certainly no later than nine o’clock — and on the back of my chair was a note with a knife through it, stuck into the chair. It was addressed to me from Mingus, saying that he hadn’t been paid for his last recording date. He said he wanted to be paid as soon as possible or else. Which, of course, I had nothing to do with. I would merely do the necessary paperwork. That would go to the accounting department, and they would send out checks. It was scary at the time but funny now.”
According to Gene Santoro, the author of a Mingus biography, the incident occurred at the close of 1963, when an advance due from Impulse was supposed to be raised $5,000 from the bassist’s initial $10,000 deal. But his sales had not reached beyond the label’s investment, and the label had been reluctant to pay. Thiele put in the call, Mingus was eventually paid, and he subsequently delivered albums that today are praised as a career-high trifecta, on a par with his best projects for Atlantic and Columbia. Of the three, the most significant arrived first.
The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady was an artfully arranged self-portrait presenting the various facets of a complex, fiery soul in suite form. “My living epitaph from birth til the day I first heard Bird and Diz” — approximately the first twenty years of his life, Mingus described it in the liner notes.
Mingus himself did not clarify it further, but as the titles of other autobiographical compositions suggested — “Myself When I Am Real,” “Self-Portrait in Three Colors” — the Saint and Sinner could be seen as parts of a fractured self. One biographer sees the two as his parents. Dr. Edmund Pollack, the bassist’s psychiatrist, hired for $200 to write a second set of liner notes for the album, interpreted Mingus himself as the “Black Saint who suffers for his sins and those of mankind.”
Conceived for an eleven-piece band, the music was initially imagined as an extended, non-stop performance with dance accompaniment. The bassist settled for a flowing, suite-like structure, traveling an emotional range — from sentimental and elegant to bold and, yes, angry — flavored with strong hints of Ellingtonia and Iberian flourishes from a flamenco guitar.
The session went well, with Mingus satisfied beyond his normal expectations. “I’m doing what I want to do on the Saint and Sinner album, with people trying to get the best balance possible,” he noted soon after, and predicted his next step with Impulse: “Throw all other records of mine away except maybe one other. I intend to record it all over again on this label the way it was intended to sound.”
True to his word, his next album, Mingus, Mingus, Mingus, Mingus, Mingus, featured re-recordings of a few of his better-known tunes: “Haitian Fight Song” was renamed “II B.S.”; “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” became “Theme for Lester Young”; and “Better Get Hit in Yo’ Soul” was recorded for the third time (after versions on Columbia and Atlantic). The session also featured another nod to Ellington — an expressive take of “Mood Indigo” — plus the moody, race-conscious message of “Freedom,” a poem-put-to-music left off the original LP release.
The project still serves as Mingus’s own “greatest hits” collection, overviewing his most compelling compositions from his first decade and a half as a bandleader.
The solo effort that followed, Mingus Plays Piano, captured him at his most pensive, playing his primary compositional instrument. An in-house counsel at ABC Records, Phil Kurnit, recalls witnessing the album’s birth.
“Somebody was playing the piano in there very hauntingly — very beautifully. Then it would stop, and start again. It didn’t sound like practicing. It sounded like somebody was just thinking on the piano. That’s the best way I could say it. I looked in the music room and it was pitch black. The lights weren’t on. So I went into Thiele’s office and said, ‘Who’s playing in there?’ ‘It’s Charlie Mingus. A very close friend of his died.’ I never knew who he was grieving over. But about a half-hour later Thiele said, ‘Charles, let’s go into a studio.’ That became Mingus Plays Piano.”
The album was subtitled Spontaneous Compositions and Improvisations, and featured a painting of the large, goateed bassist, seated and solemn, on its cover. Of the music, Mingus characteristically found it hard to be humble: “All I can say is that if a bass player like myself can attempt what I’ve done here, by myself, some of the other musicians who are full-time pianists ought to at least consider practicing more.”
Mingus’s run with Impulse was brief and served as a capstone to the first phase (1951–64) of a prodigious and prolific jazz career. He would not return to a recording studio for any label until 1970. On one of his three Impulse recordings — which time has now appraised as five-star jazz classics — he expressed his appreciation to producer and label.
“Impulse went to great expense and patience to give me complete freedom, [and] there is Bob Thiele. Thanks, man, for coming to my Town Hall open recording session, hearing the music, liking it, and hiring my band to record for your company when the critics scared the pants off the people for whom I wrote the music.”
