Mingus (1968)

Directed by Thomas Reichmann

The jazz film is a funny beast - from the image-heavy retro (or contemporary) cool of 'Round Midnight', to the 'dangerous' edge of the music in 'The Man with the Golden Arm', jazz is often seen as much as lifestyle as music (as the title of a French Archie Shepp film from the 80s has it, "je suis jazz, ce'st ma vie" - "I am jazz, it's my life"). That's in terms of fiction films - the jazz documentary tends to be more prosaic (like much jazz journalism), concerned with annecdotes ("yeah, Miles sure was a great cat...sure was a fine dresser...sure was a fine boxer"), sprinkled with the wisdom of a few experts (musicologists, musicians, etc) who offer some technical analysis (but keep it brief, otherwise people might get lost), and kept lively with short clips of musical performances, thrown in to spice things up (and often to illustrate something of the musicians' life, rather than just as music - the jazz as lifestyle trope, again).

'Mingus', the 58-minute documentary by Thomas Reichman, is a little different: shot in grainy, obsevational, verite-style black-and-white, it makes no claims for its artist in portentous voiceover, and simply watches Mingus one night, at a club with his working group, and one night at his Greenwich Village apartment, awaiting eviction by the City of New York the next morning. Yet, more than many of the other jazz films, with their higher production values and greater scope, it gets to the heart of its subject. The music and the life ARE connected - Mingus' music in all its contradictory beauty and ugliness, like the man, standing out, standing up, iconoclastic, tempermental, but above all human. So here, we see Mingus pick up a rifle ("same gun that killed Kennedy...you can buy these for $7") and shoot a hole in the wall. Disturbing? The actions of a disturbed man? Perhaps so - Mingus was going through a rough patch at this point, frustrated by the state of America and by the lack of recognition (outside the jazz world) for his work as composer and musician (not that I'm forgetting his ardent devotee, Gunther Schuller), and hit hard by the death of Eric Dolphy - Sue Mingus relates all this in 'Triumph of the Underdog', the 1997 documentary which utilises some of the choicest moments of this film as short clips. But to dismiss him is just another example of the way that the 'lone but tormented genius' tag is abused so that, in effect, we can dismiss those people we seem to be praising. As Amiri Baraka puts it in his essay 'Cuba Libre', "the rebels among us have become merely people like myself who grow beards and will not participate in politics. Drugs, juvenile delinquency, complete isolation from the vapid mores of the country, a few current ways out." To make Mingus this glamourised 'outsider' figure (in the same way that Clint Eastwood's 'Bird' or Bertrand Tavernier's 'Round Midnight' make Charlie Parker and the Dexter Gordon/Bud Powell figures the tragic hero-artist) always risks underplaying their role as social commentators, social critics - Bird through the criticism of his life, the tragic waste of a life and a talent in the drugs and drink which were the outlets on which a society that did not care led him to vent his energy and genius - Mingus through the searing truth of his poetry ("freedom for your mama, freedom for your daddy, but no freedom for me"), his pronouncements, his life and his music.

So, to emphasise the personal quirks that Mingus displays here is to underplay the way it shows his strenghts. Sure, he may shoot a hole in the wall. Sure, he may ramble vaguely about Jews and Kennedy, current affairs on which idly speculates (perhaps when the wine's started to flow a little more freely). But listen to him talk about the racism he encountered in the 'Nordic' countries (Swastikas on Eric Dolphy's door); listen to him accompany himself with falsetto vocals as he plays 'Peggy's Blue Skylight' on a beat-up piano, watched by his 5-year old daughter; listen to one of the many bass solos that pepper the film (Reichmann has a real feel for musical rhythm in his editing, chopping up the performances by Mingus' group in a club and the noodling in the apartment, but not in the haphazard way that jazz documentaries tend to have - the music serves as punctuation, as commentary, as interlude); watch as he goes on a peace march with Sue, while on the audio track he recites "first they came for the Communists...", or visits a diner, again with Sue, while 'Freedom' plays on the soundtrack; listen to him talk about his need for a 'soul-mate', man's need for woman ("I think most men are jealous of women..."). Reichmann's camera seems to just watch - the film's great virtue is its casual style, the way Mingus feels ready to just let spill, to talk, conversationally but with insight, the way that the camera focusses on pertinent details (a 1000 words), like Dannie Richmond's face, in the zone as he drums in the club performances, or, most poignantly, Mingus' bass, left alone on the sidewalk as he's evicted from the apartment in which he was trying to set up an artists' studio/school.

In the end, Mingus fills this documentary. The title is apt - just one word, 'Mingus'. A hero not because he was a romantic outsider (even if he was - a mixture of races and emotions, standing outside, in-between tradition and modernity, etc), but because he was willing to speak up about the injustices of what Baraka calls the "rotting carcass" of society, and was able to translate those feelings (the 'passions of a man') into the most sublime art (as Baraka continues, the "bright flowers" that grow up through the carcass). And by sublime art, I don't just mean what caused poet Jonathan Williams (http://damnthecaesars.blogspot.com/2008/03/jonathan-williams-1929-2008.html) to comment: "It is incredible that Mingus can dredge out of the contemporary slough the potency and healing grace of his music." No, I also mean the music of his daily life, creating his life as he lived it; because that's we all do - and in that sense, we are all artists, making sense of what we have, or are given, as we can - picking up what falls into our lap and making do, making new, making mend. One senses that what is seen of Mingus in this film is, perhaps, a performance, and thus I'm on dangerous ground making the kind of claims I've just made, in relation to what I'm about to say: but, performative or not, there's something there as moving and impressive as 'Fables of Faubusu' or 'Goodbye Porkpie Hat' or 'Pithecanthropus Erectus' or any of the other masterpieces. So I'll leave things with Mingus, sucking on his unlit pipe, pausing for thought, then beginning, mildly, yet with all the bitternes of an unjust society built up into a burning and passionate intellect: "I pledge allegience to the flag...just for the hell of it" - and, as he potters around the apartment, among all the unpacked possessions ("I've got my life in these boxes"), singing, to himself more than for the camera: "My country 'tis of thee, great land of slavery..."

"...popeyed with awe..."

Today is March 12th, Jack Kerouac's birthday, so I've got an excuse to post a long list of Beat generation quotes...

"angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night..."

-Allen Ginsberg
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"In this modern jazz, they heard something rebel and nameless that spoke for them, and their lives knew a gospel for the first time. It was more than a music; it became an attitude toward life, a way of walking, a language and a costume; and these introverted kids... now felt somewhere at last," while Jakc Kerouac said, "I want to be considered a jazz poet blowing a long blues in an afternoon jam session on Sunday."

- John Clellon Holmes

"[this was the] ebullient, adrenaline-laced music that Kerouac and his generation of beats, intellectuals and drop-outs lived, loved and passed out to in those intoxicating post-war years when it seemed that mesisahs really could emerge from the dark recesses of night clubs and blow everyone away with their messages, and that Young America would be out there, listening to every diamond-hard note."
- Keith Shadwick, writing with a touch of Keroucian flair, in the liner notes to the recent CD 'Jazz of the Beat Generation', which mixes recordings from the time by the likes of Monk with Kerouac reading excerpts of his work.

From Kerouac's 'Belief and Technique for Modern Prose, a list of thirty "essentials." '

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside your own house
4. Be in love with your life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yrself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Don't think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You're a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven "

From 'On the Road':
"Dean and I went to see Shearing at Birdland in the midst of the long, mad weekend. The place was deserted, we were the first customers, ten o'clock. Shearing came out, blind, led by the hand to his keyboard. He was a distinguished-looking Englishman with a stiff white collar, slightly beefy, blond, with a delicate English-summer's-night air about him that came out in the first rippling sweet number he played as the bass-player leaned to him reverently and thrummed the beat. The drummer, Denzil Best, sat motionless except for his wrists snapping the brushes. And Shearing began to rock; a smile broke over his ecstatic face; he began to rock in the piano seat, back and forth, slowly at first, then the beat went up, and he began rocking fast, his left foot jumped up with every beat, his neck began to rock crookedly, he brought his face down to the keys, he pushed his hair back, his combed hair dissolved, he began to sweat.

The music picked up. The bass-player hunched over and socked it in, faster and faster, it seemed faster and faster, that's all. Shearing began to play his chords; they rolled out of the piano in great rich showers, you'd think the man wouldn't have time to line them up. They rolled and rolled like the sea.

Folks yelled for him to "Go!" Dean was sweating; the sweat poured down his collar. "There he is! That's him! Old God! Old God Shearing! Yes! Yes! Yes!" And Shearing was conscious of the madman behind him, he could hear every one of Dean's gasps and imprecations, he could sense it though he couldn't see. "That's right!" Dean said. "Yes!" Shearing smiled, he rocked. Shearing rose from the piano, dripping with sweat; these were his great 1949 days before he became cool and commercial. When he was gone Dean pointed to the empty piano seat. "God's empty chair," he said. On the piano a horn sat; its golden shadow made a strange reflection along the desert caravan painted on the wall behind the drums.

God was gone; it was the silence of his departure. It was a rainy night. It was the myth of the rainy night. Dean was popeyed with awe. This madness would lead nowhere."

More Kerouac than you can shake a stick at here: http://www.neonalley.org/