By all accounts, including his own, Charles Mingus was a difficult man. Over a four-decade career that tracked and helped precipitate jazz’s evolution from swing through bebop and the avant-garde toward a broadly defined and omnivorous form, the virtuoso bassist and legendary bandleader talked a volatile game, played it like he walked it, and composed with an emotional immediacy that reflected no one else. Mingus transcended the simplistic timelines of popular jazz history, not only because their definitions of his role are restrictive but also because his rhetoric and sound often contradicted one another. Of all the storylines that Jazz in Detroit, a newly discovered document of a February 1973 gig, offers, how Mingus’ internal creative conflicts produced gloriously oversized music is the mightiest.
The context of this multi-set evening—recorded by Detroit’s public-radio station WDET at Strata Gallery, a short-lived and artist-owned Mecca—is essential. The club date happened a year after the pair of star-studded Lincoln Center gigs that ended Mingus’ six-year near-disappearance from the stage, illustrious affairs that mostly presented his music in a traditional big-band setting. Influenced by the death of collaborator Eric Dolphy and a decline in his mental, physical, and financial wellbeing, Mingus stayed away from making music during that span. His withdrawal coincided with (and, some say, was partly caused by) the change in jazz’s place in American society. The music’s traditional lineage was declining in commercial draw and artistic influence, making the kind of big bands Mingus often required fiscally impossible.
A more extreme modernism was overtaking the music, with its latest cutting edge—the avant-garde “new thing” epitomized by Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane’s post-1964 explorations—creating a schism. Mingus was almost always of two minds about Coleman’s innovations, saying as early as 1960 that Ornette’s music was “like organized disorganization, or playing wrong right… [but] it gets to you emotionally.” Around the time of this Detroit show, he questioned the emotionally charged improvisations of Albert Ayler: “[He] can’t enjoy that,” he told John Goodman. “It’s impossible to enjoy that.”
Yet this was the Mingus who never tired of citing Dolphy’s genius despite his involvement in seminal “out” Coleman sessions, the Mingus whose compositions had been integrating the “organized disorganization” of dissonant collective improvisation since at least 1956, and the Mingus who consistently employed young musicians like Dolphy or Paul Bley who pushed jazz away from simplicity and melodicism. After the Lincoln Center concerts and the comeback of Let My Children Hear Music, Mingus integrated jazz’s rebel faction more and more into his outlook.
Jazz in Detroit exposes this process of integration. Mingus and the members of his young, focused, experimental quintet are relatively unfamiliar with one another, adding an interpretive dimension to works that span his career. Trumpeter Joe Gardner gigged with Mingus throughout this period; tenor saxophonist John Stubblefield did not last long in the group but soon popped up on Miles Davis’ volcanic Get Up With It before becoming central to the Mingus Big Band two decades later. The sidemen who find the most possibilities in this chaos are Detroit drummer Roy Brooks and pianist Don Pullen, who’d done his share of deep “bullshitting” (the bandleader’s occasional description of avant-garde habits) with drummer Milford Graves in the late 1960s and was now launching a wildly successful stint with Mingus. They bring the juxtapositions of tradition and vanguard to life in breathtaking fashion.
All the musicians stretch for meaningful periods here, both in lead roles and combinations. Part of Mingus’ grand design was to create moments where the melodic beauty of the composition turns into a set of reference chords, so the unchained energy of re-atomization becomes the main thrill. These are certainly the instants likeliest to attract one kind of contemporary listener.
Take the set-opening, 25-minute take on “Pithecanthropus Erectus,” a classic 1956 tone poem that’s an early hallmark of Mingus writing. In this interpretation, there are explosive sections where all the musicians interlock their lines into a culmination before a more customary hard-bop lead appears. Brooks and Pullen pull each other in all directions, the pianist moving directly from Ellingtonian elegance to Cecil Taylor clusters. An exhilarating rhythm-section-only passage encompasses an entire conversation between jazz’s different directions, with Stubblefield and Gardner only resurfacing as a grounding force. This is not late-period Coltrane using “My Favorite Things” as a shell for sonic structures, so much as a whole new reading of “Erectus” by individuals who attack the piece on their own terms. Such moments appear throughout Jazz in Detroit, though one during an extended reading of Duke’s “C Jam Blues” feels especially poignant. Brooks adds sound effects and Mingus bows his bass as Pullen takes a solo piano turn, reducing the Mount Rushmore of swinging blue instrumentals into a minimalist statue, updating the classic form for current needs without destroying the original.
If there’s one canonical performance on Jazz in Detroit, it is “Noddin’ Ya Head Blues,” a 26-minute mournful number that resembles its studio-recorded version only in form. There’s a wonderful opening fanfare by Gardner before Pullen takes the piano for a ride out toward Otis Spann’s purview. Stubblefield’s circular, eminently likable lines push the register higher as the choruses pile up. When Mingus finally takes over, with only Pullen left to accompany him softly, the bass and piano fade to the background for Brooks and his musical saw. The crowd becomes alive to the moment. The saw’s melodic, breath-drawn sound is eerie when it’s playing the blues, but as Brooks enters a call-and-response with Pullen, the instrument transcends the context, invoking the circus tent and graveyard in equal measure. The ethereal moment evokes Ayler, a free jazz totem who began his career as a teenager backing the blues harmonica legend Little Walter before pushing untethered freedom and timeless folk melodies toward one another. When the band reconvenes for a free-for-all ending, with Brooks back on drums, the energy is in a different place. Or in many places at once, a decent epigraph for Mingus’ work.
“I feel sorry about jazz. The truth has been lost in the music,” Mingus told the New Yorker in 1971 during another anti-avant-garde aside. “All the different styles and factions went to war with each other, and it hasn’t done any good.” After Detroit, when Stubblefield was replaced by full-fledged avant-garde member Hamiet Bluiett, the ways that Mingus looked to affect jazz continued to stretch and recede. He even got over his intense dislike of electric instruments long enough to record with them. Jazz in Detroit feels like a document where you start hearing the lion push winter back, not just acknowledging the “war” and his part in it but imagining what peace may sound like.
