Charles Mingus, jazz icon and ALS victim (photo: Tom Marcello)
Most of the world calls it Lou Gehrig’s Disease. The jazz community also knows it as Charles Mingus’s Disease, at least since 1979; that’s when the brilliant bassist and composer finally succumbed to ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), the mystifying and tragic degeneration of the motor neurons.
Only 56 when he died, Mingus left behind the most extensive body of compositions of any jazz artist other than Duke Ellington – and a comparable legacy as a groundbreaking bassist and bandleader. His music lives on today through the award-winning Mingus Big Band, whose repertoire has drawn exclusively from Mingus’s oeuvre to fill 10 albums thus far – including the recent Live At Jazz Standard – with no signs of stopping.
Since 2007, a group of Chicago musicians known as the Mingus Awareness Project has performed annually, to celebrate Mingus’s life and music and to raise money for the Les Turner ALS Foundation, the Chicago charity devoted to funding research into ALS. Their 2010 concert takes place tonight at the Jazz Showcase, 806 S. Plymouth, beginning at 8 PM.
The band features several of the city’s undersung improvisers, among them tenor saxistPaul Hartsaw, alto saxist Fred Jackson, soprano saxist Jon Godston, and his brother Dan Godston on trumpet. (Dan Godston is also the Chicago Experimental Arts Examiner; his excellent recent interview with pianist Jon Hey, another member of this band, can be found here.)
The set lists will include Mingus classics (“Fables Of Faubus,” “Haitian Fight Song,” “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat”) as well as several tunes by Ellington (Mingus’s idol) and by some of those who played in Mingus’s bands – reedists Eric Dolphy and Rahsaan Roland Kirk. Admission is $20, $15 for students, and Mingus-related items will be raffled off during the evening. Further donations can be made through the Mingus Awareness Project. And in case you’re still wondering about the guy who inspired this effort, take a look at this:
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