The occasion may pass without major hoopla. Perhaps it’s because a 90th birthday commemoration: too far past 75, but too close to 100, to attract much notice among the milestone-obsessed.
But April 22 marks the 90th anniversary of Charles Mingus’s birth. And while it remains to be seen what fireworks that occasion might engender on the jazz calendar, the Chicago Jazz Ensemble offers the first salvo this week, with Friday night’s concert exploring The Musical World Of Charles Mingus. It guest-stars two of those who have followed in Mingus’s wake – the prodigious and still young bassist Christian McBride, and the genre-smashing bass guitarist and vocalist Meshell Ndegeocello.
The show hits at 7:30 Friday night at the Harris Theater (205 E. Randolph). In addition, the CJE is hosting two “listening sessions” in the run-up to the concert. Wednesday featured CJE artistic director Dana Hall on stage with McBride; Thursday (for those reading this bright and early), he’ll conduct a similar up-close-and-personal discussion with Ndegeocello, at noon in the Hokin Gallery of Columbia College (623 S. Wabash).
In case you don’t know why you should care about Mingus and his music – reckless, tender, muscled and bluesy, dense and complex, and uniquely capable of expressing the fullest range of complexities that make us human – skip down a few paragraphs. But in any case, the lineup for this concert is among the most ambitious in the CJE’s recent history, and one guaranteed to raise eyebrows.
One reason is Ndegeocello. She has a fairly low profile in jazz, but deserves better. Her reputation rests primarily with her expertise in rock, hip-hop, and neo-soul (and the fusion of all of them), but she has an improviser’s natural inclination toward taking risks in the service of rewards. And on her 2005 disc Dance Of The Infidel, she worked hand-in-glove with a mostly jazz-centric cast, including Cassandra Wilson, saxists Ron Blake and Kenny Garrett, trumpeter Wallace Roney, and recently inducted NEA Jazz Master Jack DeJohnette.
The other reason for those levitating supercilia involves the presence of Ndegeocello and McBride on the same program. McBride began his career as a wunderkind of the acoustic bass (like Mingus himself). Not yet 40, he has appeared as a sideman on nearly 300 recordings, as well as 10 under his own name, including his recent big-band disc up for a GRAMMY® next month. But he also plays electric, which makes for a potentially crowded stage of a sort you don’t often see: two bass guitars and two bass violins (if you include the CJE’s splendid regular bassist, Dan Anderson).
Ndegeocello’s vocals will come in handy when the band performs music from the 1979 album that united Mingus and singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell – a stone classic that had such jazz luminaries as Herbie Hancock, Jaco Pastorius, and Wayne Shorter on board. Beyond that, Dana Hall explained (in a discussion we had last year about this concert),
“Meshell is a great collaborator, as was Mingus. And I think there are lots of ways we can explore [the music from that album] – and also other music Joni was doing at that time that reflects her interest in jazz. But it’s about re-imagining that music – not just re-playing it – for the 21st century.”
As for McBride, Hall pinpointed that his connection to Mingus starts at a place many people forget – Mingus’s groundbreaking virtuosity on his chosen instrument – as they confront the monumental storehouse of his compositions. “He was such a profound composer and bandleader and character; what often escapes people is that he was a pretty heavy bass player. And that’s where Christian comes into play. He can really exploit the fact that Mingus was such a strong instrumentalist.”
To my ears, Mingus is probably the greatest jazz composer not named Ellington (all due respect to Monk, Shorter, and Chick Corea). Brilliant and mercurial, he found and expressed emotions that few artists could locate. Martin Williams, the esteemed jazz historian and analyst, summed up the reaction that even today’s listeners experience when confronting Mingus’s music when, hearing the composition “Pithecanthropus Erectus” for the first time, he reportedly commented, “I didn’t know you could say that with jazz.”
(And naming a tune “Pithecanthropus Erectus”? Or “Remember Rockefeller At Attica,” or “All The Things You Could Be By Now If Sigmund Freud’s Wife Were Your Mother” – all of them titles in the Mingus repertoire? Hell, he gets props just for that.)
More than any of his contemporaries in the heady 50s and 60s, Mingus utilized the compositional potential of jazz to envision a wider canvas for the music. Then he used the basic materials of hard-bop to fill it up, covering every centimeter in pastels and primary and neon colors and all manner of shapes and representations. It’s a picture in parts turbulent, ebullient, gritty, and fantastical, and once seen, it does not fade quickly. (Mingus, however, did; he succumbed to ALS at the age of 56.)
If Friday’s concert can evoke even a fraction of that legacy, you’ll get twice the price of admission.
By the way – while Mingus would have turned 90 this year, Dave Brubeck is 90, and still here. His three sons are currently on tour with their own band, which comes to Chicago Saturday night; check back here Friday for more on that.
Comments