A New History OF JAZZ Revised and Updated Edition Alyn Shipton XN continuum NEW YORK * LONDONCOLTRANE AND MINGUS 55S Charles Mingus Here’s Charles Mingus, standard issue thumbnail sketch. A fat, bristling, light-skinned black guy who busted people on the bandstand, who stopped his shows midstream if a cash register rang or a fan or a musician said or did something that set him off. If he was set off enough, he yelled at or lectured or swung on or pulled a blade on the offender, like he was the 240-pound wrath of Zeus. Gene Santoro, from Myself When I Am Real reas John Coltrane was the outstanding jazz instrumentalist of the 1960s, Charles is was its outstanding composer — building on his considerable achievements of middle-to-late 1950s, He was an outsize personality as well — a stocky, powerful ing man, and on stage he had a charismatic presence, although he was often at the ser of controversy and rows. I first heard him perform at the New Orleans Jazz and ‘tage Festival in 1976, where fortunately there were no rows. He played a ficent solo set lasting over an hour; his intense concentration and sheer force of ical ideas held a vast, bustling tent almost silent as he played both on double bass556 NEW JAZZ and on piano. Much of that set was a long exploration of the Vernon Duke standard | Can’t Get Started — one of the pieces that fascinated Mingus, and from which he seemed constantly able to squeeze new ideas.’ Later, playing a set with his quintet of the time and performing his own music, he went a long way to proving that he was, after Duke Ellington, the most prolific and versatile composer in jazz. Not every audience in every venue saw that pensive, creative side of Mingus at work. Mingus viewed himself as an outsider, and all too often he behaved as one. His frequently stated anti-establishment views, and the kind of behavior as caricatured above by Gene Santoro, often tended to obscure the creative genius of his finest work. However, starting from his childhood in Los Angeles, the reasons mounted as to why he should feel excluded: he could count European, African, and Asian blood in his lineage, and his schoolmates taunted him as a “yellow nigger.” His father (an ex- soldier) had “passed” for white, but Mingus’s complexion precluded this; however, it also prevented his acceptance by many of his African-American contemporaries, thereby effectively excluding him from the two main social groups in the district of Los Angeles in which he was raised, He recalled: “I just found myself with the Japanese, the Greeks, the Italians and Mexicans, and a few more guys like me.””** He carried this sense of social isolation into both his education and his music. Despite an unusually high IQ, he performed abysmally in school; as an instrumentalist, a false start on trombone having led him to become a cellist, he was essentially self- taught, so that, even in the area in which he was to excel, he did not at first learn to read music fluently, and relied instead on his exceptional musical ear. ‘The quality of his ear was readily apparent to saxophonist Buddy Collette, one of Mingus's lifelong friends who, when he was fourteen and Mingus was just thirteen, coerced the young cellist into trading in his cello for a double bass. By the following week, Mingus was playing a Saturday night dance with Collette’s band. Collette wid The things he did that first night on the bass showed that he had real ability. It’s amazing to hear somebody with musical talent, . .. Mingus's notes that first gig were not right — not that he didn’t have good ears. It’s just that he didn’t know where the notes were . .. but his time was good. . .. All of a sudden there was a feeling and a choice of rhythm patterns right from the beginning that told me this was someone special. Collette and a small circle of musical acquaintances, including the trombonist Britt Woodman, recognized immediately that Mingus was outstandingly talented, and they took his musical education in hand. Collette introduced him to Red Callender, = prominent bassist in Los Angeles who had worked with many high-profile musicians including Louis Armstrong. Callender became a teacher and mentor for Mingus, whe in due course ended up briefly playing in Armstrong’s big band himself. Mingus als» went on to study with Herman Rheinschagen, a former bassist with the New Yor Philharmonic. In addition to intensive musical practice, Mingus improved his personal confidence through self-defense training and weight lifting, and allied himself firmly with the loca! African-American community, making what his biographer Brian Priestley describes = “a conscious choice to be an underdog rather than an outcast.” Mingus became a prominent figure on the Los Angeles jazz scene during the heist of Central Avenue’s importance as the center of local activity, described in Chapter =COLTRANE AND MINGUS 557 While they were still teenagers, to the amusement of other passengers, he and Collette would jam on the Red line streetcar that wound its way via Central from Watts in the south to downtown Los Angeles in the north; they also took part in the rich world of after-hours playing that was on offer. Also, Mingus — along with many other Promising musicians of his generation — studied with trumpeter Lloyd Reese, a key figure in the musical community of Central Avenue, who taught at the old black Musicians’ Union building in the heart of the area’s clubs, Much of the prewar world of African-American entertainment rubbed off on Mingus, both from playing gigs around Los Angeles with veterans like Kid Ory and Barney Bigard, and from his subsequent period in Armstrong's big band, Just as Charlie Parker and Miles Davis were to do on the East Coast, he rejected the eye-rolling, mugging stage persona of such older entertainers, nevertheless simultaneously acquiring a knowledge of and respect for the sounds they made: “our” music, as he called it. This was to resurface in a significant proportion of his later work as a composer and performer, which contains a dramatic balance between material drawn directly from both the African-American vaudeville tradition (songs like Eat That Chicken, or his parody of a 1920s dance routine on Cocktails for Two) and the uncompromisingly moder improvisations of musicians like saxophonist Eric Dolphy (another Central Avenue alumnus). Mingus was also to draw the sounds of gospel music and the church into his jazz vocabulary, just as he was to assimilate the compositional language of Duke Ellington, whose band made a huge impact on his own as young man. Initially, however, his career was more of a player than of a composer. Mingus appeared on the scene at the right moment to build on the innovations in double-bass playing that had been pioneered by Milt Hinton, Jimmy Blanton, and Oscar Pettiford, and which were being taken forward by other musicians of his own generation such as Ray Brown. He instinctively understood the harmonic innovations of bebop, although these played a more significant role in his own playing after 1950, but to start with, by combining his own ideas with the technical approaches to ensemble and solo playing learnt from Callender, he became both a melodic and an artful constructor of bass-lines, and a soloist of distinction. In between his work with the “name” bands of Armstrong (in 1943) and Lionel Hampton (1947-48), in which he began to prove his credentials at a national level, he worked with Collette in a cooperative octet called the Stars of Swing. When the group opened at the Downbeat on Central Avenue, its leadership was almost hijacked by tenorist Lucky Thompson, but the members of the band had established, through long hours of rehearsal at Mingus's house, a set of new compositions and a novel approach to dynamics, so ‘Thompson was forced to back down in the collective interest, eventually being replaced by Teddy Edwards. Several members of the group recorded under “Baron” Mingus's leadership, and the results are comparable to a forward-looking Ellington senall’ group of the period, unusually rich in color and texture. (A. particularly Ellingtonian aspect of Mingus's highly atmospheric recording from May 1946 of Pipe Pream comes from Britt Woodman’s eloquent trombone solo — much in the style of Lawrence Brown, whose place he was to take in the Ellington band in February 1951.) Pianist Gerald Wiggins was working close at hand to the Downbeat, and he described Mingus at that time: Mingus was a hothead, he was ready to fight for anything. He was a bit erratic, but he had so many things going on in his mind. He wanted to do it ea558 NEW JAZZ all — write, compose, play bass — and if it was possible to do all those things at the same time he would have done it.*” The Stars of Swing did not last, but its discs helped to cement Mingus's local reputation, and his opportunity to make a national name arrived in Los Angeles in 1947 with Lionel Hampton’s orchestra. The vibraphonist was looking for a second bassist to play alongside Joe Comfort in his lineup, and take solos — something Mingus was well equipped to do. The young bassist also brought an arrangement of his own Mingus Fingers to the band, which Hampton recorded in November 1947. There was something of an altercation over payment, as Gladys Hampton (Lionel’s wife and manager) tended not to pay such inexperienced arrangers for one-off pieces of work. After Mingus left, taking the parts for his chart with him, he recorded the piece again with his old friend Buddy Collette back in Los Angeles. Collette recalled: Those sessions were done for Dolphin’s of Hollywood. We did Mingus Fingers and These Foolish Things. Dolphin didn’t pay you any money, but he was recording everybody. Nobody, none of the big companies like Capitol, were taking any interest in jazz, but this man started recording jazz. His discs got played on the radio and that helped you get a name.” The playing on this chamber jazz disc is sufficiently unusual to make the point immediately as to why radio play would have boosted Mingus’s reputation, After a chromatic introduction from Collette’s clarinet, he and Mingus play the head of Mingus Fingers in unison, showing Mingus's clear articulation. His subsequent unaccompanied bass chorus makes light of the chordal structure of the piece, in a solo that very much builds on the style established in the early 1940s by Oscar Pettiford. What is unique about it is Mingus’s singing sense of melody — it is clear this is a bassist with no hidebound concept of his role as simply that of anchoring the rhythm section, and with a formidable ability to attack his notes with precision and power. He was fortunate to be able to develop this side of his playing by becoming part of a group that was designed to show off the bass to the full, In 1950, he joined a trio with guitarist Tal Farlow and vibraphonist Red Norvo (precursor of the lineup that played opposite Gerry Mulligan at the Haig), and their lightweight, open sound was the perfect setting for his playing. He was with the group only until 1951, but in that brief time, the trio began to be featured in jazz polls, and they made several discs. In them are plenty of details that pick up on the small-group innovations in Mingus Fingers, including Mingus playing high-note solos while Farlow accompanied him by producing bass-lines on the guitar. Not since Jimmy Blanton had a bassist generated the kind of press attention that Mingus attracted. Ralph J. Gleason's Down Beat review of the trio, late in Mingus's tenure, was typical: Musicians and public share one opinion regarding Charlie — he’s the greatest bass player they have ever scen. Smiling and happy, playing unbelievable things with apparent ease, Charlie after all these months with the beautiful Norvo trio still knocks out Red and Tal every night. Charlie Mingus is not only one of the most impressive of the contemporaryCOLTRANE AND MINGUS 559 musicians, but one of the most impressive thinkers about music that jazz % has produced. One reason in particular for Gleason’s interest in Mingus was that the bassist had written him a lengthy letter, setting out his beliefs, which Gleason went on to publish, In it are many ideas that Mingus had already explored both in his life and in his work for example, the question of the difference between jazz and classical music, and the respective abilities of such musicians to swing. But most important is a statement — almost a mission statement — that linked Mingus’s philosophy directly to that of Ellington: “True jazz is an art, and as with all the arts, is the individual’s means of expressing his deepest and innermost feelings and emotions.” In the mid-to-late 1950s, Mingus was to move further and further toward the position where his music would get fully to grips with those deep feelings and emotions, and to do so, he drew on the full breadth of the jazz tradition, He was not a narrowly restricted bebop player, any more than he was merely an adventurous swing player: he was already showing signs of his genuine originality. His friends Buddy Collette and Britt Woodman both commented that if there was a different way to do something normal and straightforward, Mingus would probably find it. Except, that is, in actually getting down to the business of writing music. On his return to Los Angeles from a road tour with Les Hite in the 1940s, Woodman had been staggered to observe how Mingus had developed as a musician, not just as a bassist, but as a pianist and composer, and he immediately made the very telling comparison to Ellington: “His writing was similar. He had Duke in mind. See, the thing was, Mingus was so natural, what he heard, he could write.’”*? After leaving Norvo, with whom he had traveled quite extensively, Mingus settled in New York. Once there, he built on his reputation as an innovative and versatile bassist, and he began playing at the highest level with musicians, including Bud Powell, Billy Taylor, and (briefly) Duke Ellington. His short stay in the Ellington Orchestra was ended in typically hotheaded fashion, through an altercation with trombonist Juan Tizol, the first of many high-profile scuffles from Mingus's East Coast career. In the mid- 1950s, Mingus and drummer Max Roach coformed a record company, called Debut, which preserved much of Mingus's work from this period, including the famous 1953 Massey Hall concert with Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, discussed in Chapter 7. Perhaps because of the long hours that he, Collette, and the Woodmans had spent jamming at Mingus's house in Los Angeles, he was drawn to the idea of writing and playing in a workshop setting. Other composers with whom he joined forces included Teo Macero and Teddy Charles, but this first stab at a Jazz Composers’ Workshop did not give Mingus quite the forum he wanted for composition and improvisation. So, in 1955, he began his own Jazz Workshop, assembling a like-minded collection of individuals (many of them having West Coast connections, including trombonist Jimmy Knepper and saxophonist Eric Dolphy from Los Angeles, and altoist John Handy, who had worked for years in San Francisco). There are parallels here with the work of Gil Evans and his “salon” during the Birth of the Cool period, and also with the Jazz Workshop group of George Russell, But whereas Evans was interested in developing his very individual style of orchestration and arrangement, and Russell was experimenting with his modal theories, Mingus was aiming higher — to create a body of work that would genuinely explore the whole gamut of human emotion.560 EW JAZZ The workshop was to be his preferred method of evolving his compositions over the following years. In order to communicate ideas that did not translate easily to paper, he liked to sing or dictate the parts each musician was to play, so that they heard rather than read the music. (There are, however, stories of how his regular pianist Jaki Byard surreptitiously jotted down the parts so that the band could remember them later.) As he composed, Mingus increasingly used the piano, eventually playing the instrument in his live performances In the ten years from 1955, Mingus established two constants in his work: a set of related pieces that changed gradually from performance to performance, and the pool of players mentioned above, who specialized in interpreting his ideas. Consequently, a composition like Fables of Faubus (written in 1959 and reworked in 1964) was also developed into Original Faubus Fables (1960) and New Fables (1964). Over time, this and numerous other pieces mutated, just as improvising musicians might alter their approaches to playing a solo, One of the pieces that altered over time was Mingus's Haitian Fight Song (later called I! B. S.). His comments on the 1957 recording made for Atlantic (some two years after first writing the piece) are illuminating about why this and so many of his performances were packed with meaning — becoming Signifyin(g) events for their audience: [It] could just as well be called Afro-American Fight Song. It has a folk spirit, the kind of folk music I’ve always heard anyway. It has some of the old church feeling too. I was raised a Methodist but there was a Holiness Church on the corner and some of the feeling of their music, which was wilder, got into our music, There's a moaning feeling in those church modes. ... My solo in it is a deeply concentrated one. I can’t play it right unless I'm thinking about prejudice and hate and persecution and how unfair it is. There's sadness and cries in it, but also determination. And it usually ends with me feeling, “I told them! I hope somebody heard me!’"* On this recording, originally issued on his album The Clown, as he was to do in the majority of his groups in the later 1950s through to the 1960s, Mingus used drummer Dannie Richmond, with whom he developed an exceptionally flexible rhythmic platform for his soloists. Bass and drums moved the beat around, making abrupt transitions into double or triple time, or sometimes dropping out altogether. In this piece, after an introductory section for solo bass, Mingus introduces a five-note ostinato pattern that underpins the main theme statement and its various repetitions Trombone and alto are joined in the opening section by shouts and wails, before the trombone takes off into a solo. Underpinning this, Mingus and Richmond run through several ideas — alluding to the ostinato, then frantically doubling the tempo, before playing a series of stops that emphasize the first three beats of each measure, then returning to a swing tempo. This series of basic accompanimental ideas is used for both piano and alto solos but varies the sequence in which they are introduced, so creating the impression that the piece is a more complex construction than it appears. Mingus's bass solo is suitably harsh and angry to express the feelings he described, but it also runs through the same basic variations in pattern and speed that are used behind the other soloists. On other pieces with this “folk spirit” or gospel feel, Mingus and Richmond ringCOLTRANE AND MINGUS 561 the rhythmic changes even more dramatically, governed by the sense that the beat itself is a movable element and that they could break down old swing era or bebop concepts of a constant, unvarying pulse, yet without losing a sense of being directly connected to the entire African-American music tradition. Whereas a musician like Don Ellis (who occasionally collaborated with Mingus) was to experiment with unorthodox time signatures, Mingus and Richmond proved that it was possible to create immense flexibility, a sense of ebb and flow, inside a conventional time signature. On Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting, with a larger Jazz Workshop band, from the 1959 album Blues and Roots they create a six-eight pulse into which pianist Horace Parlan feeds in and out, sometimes playing with and sometimes against them; at other times they stop playing, leaving the brass and reeds to continue with just handclaps or shouts for accompaniment In contrast to the cool of Miles Davis, or, contemporaneously, the reductions by John Coltrane of the harmonic complexity of his accompaniments, Mingus’s backings are extrovert, both rhythmically and harmonically dense, and driven by a sense of ensemble in which all the players are equal — there is no sense (as there sometimes is with Coltrane) that the band consists of a star soloist being backed by a mere rhythm section. Against this kind of varied setting, in much the same way as Ellington had done, Mingus created music that would exploit the musical personalities of his musicians: the jagged saxophone and bass clarinet of Eric Dolphy, the sparring saxes of John Handy and Booker Ervin, the gospel-tinged reeds of Roland Kirk, the rounded trombones of Jimmy Knepper and Britt Woodman, and the witty, eclectic piano of Jaki Byard. For much of the second half of the 1950s, Mingus recorded for the Atlantic label, to whom Coltrane was also signed at the end of the decade. Briefly, these two musicians, who were responsible for shaping so much of the music of the years that followed were marketed alongside one another. Today, Atlantic’s continuing reputation rests largely on its innovative and exemplary jazz catalog of that period, which was also to include Ornette Coleman. But in the eyes of Ahmet Ertegun, its then chief executive, this music was something of an indulgence compared to his own mission to keep signing hit rhythm-and-blues records. Looking back at those days, during the celebrations of his company’s fiftieth birthday in 1998, he told me: They were all signed by my elder brother Nesuhi, who died in 1989. I didn’t have time to get too involved . .. when they were recording for us, I was simply trying to keep the company alive. We were undercapitalized, at risk from distributors who paid late, and depended on the product for the following month to keep us going. I loved jazz, but it didn’t sell that quickly, although over the years that followed, my brother’s sessions sold a lot more copies than the overnight hits I got into.** Mingus’s Blues and Roots session, recorded for Atlantic in February 1959, took several months to appear, a delay explained by Ertegun’s frank exposition of the company’s financial health. In April, during the gap between recording it and seeing it released, Mingus signed with Columbia, and, although the original concept was a disc of Jelly Roll Morton pieces updated in his own style, instead he made one of his most consistently brilliant albums. Displaying the entire range of his compositional interests and the degree to which he was in tune with the spirit of the times while562 NEW JAZZ simultaneously going his own way, Mingus Ah Um was not just a brilliant pun — it was a landmark in his career. Better Git Ie in Your Soul was a six-eight gospel piece that far outdid Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting in intensity and feeling, with shouts, handclaps, speaking in tongues, and a range of other musical impressions. (As Gene Santoro points out, this number was in stiff competition with the Adderley Brothers’ This Here, described in Chapter 13, which became a hit when released as an eleven-minute single."*) Jelly Roll (the only link with the original concept of the album) was a revision of his earlier Jelly Roll Soul and looked backward to New Orleans and forward toward some elements of free jazz. But the most enduring piece was a long, slow lament, Goodbye Pork Pie Hat. From the sinuous, weaving opening, with the combined tenors of John Handy and Booker Ervin, to Handy's exquisite, mournful solo, the piece is a masterpiece of combined restraint and feeling. In it, despite the slow tempo, are many hallmarks of the workshop’s approach. The wide open beat of Mingus and Richmond, with Mingus occasionally offering a commentary on the solo rather than a bass-line, Horace Parlan placing the occasional chordal accent in the most unexpected place, and Handy’s own playing, which includes a section in gospel-like flutter-tonguing, all add up to the most moving tribute to Lester Young, the wearer of the hat in question, who had died a couple of months before the recording. The theme itself is what sticks in the mind, and it is only after repeated hearings that one realizes that almost the entire second half of the piece is a scored reading of the theme — Mingus’s ideal blend of the composed and the improvised, with the join almost impossible to discern in the emotion of the performance. As the new decade began, Mingus entered his period of greatest creativity with a series of outstanding compositions, including another series of musical laments, this time for Eric Dolphy, who died in Berlin in June 1964, shortly after taking part in a European tour with Mingus. Praying with Eric led to a whole series of evolutionary Meditations. He also produced what many commentators believe to be his greatest sustained work with the eleven-piece workshop of 1963, The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, which has the widest mix of eclectic influences found in any of his recordings, But despite this high level of musical creativity, his own life was in turmoil, He found it impossible to resist taking on the establishment — setting up rival free concerts outside the Newport Festival, launching another new independent record label of his own, and organizing performances that were often an uncomfortable mix of rehearsal and performance, of which his 1962 New York Town Hall event was the most spectacular disaster. By the mid-1960s, he faced financial ruin and was suffering from unstable mental health. His career was put on hold until 1969, when he began once more to tour and perform, and soon afterward a Guggenheim fellowship gave him a degree of stability and public recognition. In the early 1970s, he made his most successful big-band recordings, Until 1977, with the onset of Lou Gehrig’s disease (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), a form of muscular paralysis, he toured and recorded quite regularly with his quintet. After his paralysis took hold in earnest, he supervised a final big-band recording of his music and wrote themes for a collaborative project with singer Joni Mitchell, although the recorded large-band sections of this work were not included in the final album. He died in January 1979. Mingus was a transitional figure in jazz history. By working collectively and dictating his compositions, he drew strong parallels with the free jazz movement, aCOLTRANE AND MINGUS 563 which began at the start of the 1960s. Yet he never lost a sense of compositional form, and remained fascinated by one of the biggest central issues in jazz — the boundary between composition and improvisation. His early experience with the likes of Louis Armstrong and Lionel Hampton gave him a strong sense of continuity and tradition, and it is perhaps fitting that his final recorded bass solo should have been on an album with Hampton. However, his own bands were at their best when tradition became just one of the elements that he fused into performance, adding a wider range of effects and ideas, including vocal tones, voice, and poetry, than any jazz bandleader before him. The strength of his themes and compositional frameworks for improvisation have given rise to several movements that perpetuate his music and keep it alive into the twenty-first century. These began with the Mingus Dynasty bands of the early 1980s, which involved several of his former sidemen, and have continued with the Mingus Big Band, which has played regularly in New York and around the world since 1991 Gunther Schuller has frequently supervised performances of some of Mingus's large. scale orchestral works. Since his death, his compositions have continued to be recorded and have been performed by musicians as different (and unexpected) as the British traditionalist Chris Barber and the former rock guitarist with the Police, Andy Summers, thereby proving something of his universal appeal and the durability of his writing,NOTES 761 ? Francis Davis: “Take the Coltrane,” Village Voice, February 18, 1992. > Author’s interview with Gary Giddins, May 9, 2000, * Don DeMichael: “John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy answer the jazz. critics,” Down Beat, April 12, 1962. ° Author’s interview with Jimmy Heath, November 17, 1999. © Author's interview with Ira Gitler, May 8, 2000 {tra Gitler: “Trane on the track,” Down Beat, October 16, 1958. ® Brian Priestley: John Coltrane (London, Apollo Press, 1987). ° Author's interview with Ira Gitler, May 8, 2000. "© John Coltrane and Don DeMichael: “Coltrane on Coltrane,” Down Beat, September 29, 1960, quoted in Eric Nisenson: Ascension: John Coltrane and His Quest (New York, St. Martin's Press, 1993). ae {, August Blume: “An interview with John Coltrane,” Jazz Review, January 1959. ? Interview with Rudy Van Gelder, included in the multimedia section of The Uhimace Blue Train (Blue Note) '3 John Coltrane and Don DeMichael: op. cit. ™ Author’s interview with Lewis Porter, May 7, 2000; for further details, see Lewis Porter: John Coltrane: His Life and Music (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1998). ' Author's interview with Pat Metheny, February 21, 2000, Author's interview with Tommy Flanagan, December 4, 1999. 7 Lewis Porter: “John Coltrane: The Atlantic years,” in The Heavyweight Champion (liner notes to Rhino R2 71984, 1995). *® Val Wilmer: “Conversation with Coltrane,” Jazz Journal, January 1962, ° Author's interview with Archie Shepp, April 13, 2000 °° Author's interview with Ravi Coltrane, May 8, 2000. Benoit Quersin: “La Passe dangereuse,”” Jazz Magazine, January 1963; transcribed and = in English by Carl Woideck in Carl Woideck: The John Coltrane Companion: Five Decades of Commentary (New York, Schirmer, 1998). ? Author's interview with Gary Giddins, May 9, 2000. ° tra Gitler: ep. cits; pushed hard on the subject by Frank Kofsky, in “John Coltrane: an interview" (originally published in Black Nationalism and the Revolution in Music, and republished in Carl Woideck: op. cit.), Coltrane says: “In music I make or have tried to make a conscious attempt to change what I've found.” Author's interview with McCoy Tyner, March 1998. 25 Frank Kofsky: op. cit. Elvin Jones interview from the BBC Radio sound archive. °7 Tan Carr: “Jimmy Garrison," in lan Carr, Digby Fairweather, and Brian Priestley: Jazz: The Rough Guide (2nd. edn.) (London, Rough Guides, 2000) * Author's interview with Roy Haynes, May 8, 2000. ® Eric Nisenson: op. cit. °° Frank Kofsky: op. cit ' Archie Shepp, quoted in liner notes to Ascension. * Author's interview with Ravi Coltrane, May 8, 2000. ° Part of that performance on solo piano has been issued as Themes for a Movie (Flying Fish FF 099) ** Brian Priestley: Mingus: A Critical Biography (London, Quartet, 1982). at =p Collete (with Steven Isoar (London, Continuum, 2000). Jazz Generations: A Life in American Music and Society762 NOTES 3 Brian Priestley: Mingus: A Critical Biography (London, Quartet, 1982). *7 Author's interview with Gerald Wiggins, November 19, 2000. * author's interview with Buddy Collette, March 19, 2000. *° Ralph J. Gleason: “Charlie Mingus: A thinking musician,” Down Beat, June 1, 1951 * Ibid. “1 “Britt Woodman,” in Clora Bryant et al. (eds.): Central Avenue Sounds: Jaz in Los Angeles (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1998). *? Mingus, quoted in Nat Hentoff: “The clown” (liner notes to Atlantic 1260, 1957). * Alyn Shipton: “How the stars got into the Atlantic groove” (interview with Ahmet Ertegun), The Times, September 17, 1998. Gene Santoro: Myself When I Am Real: The Life and Music of Charles Mingus (New York, Oxford University Press, 2000).