Chazz’ Mingus Story: A Composition for Jazz Orchestra and Two Speaking Voices

I write music for the 20-piece big band run by Boston’s Jazz Composers’ Alliance. The JCA Orchestra does several concerts a year (recently we’ve had some Sunday club dates at Johnny D’s, in Somerville, MA, which is really a blast), always featuring writing by all the composers in the collective. I am one among many, the seniormost being the Alliance’s founder, Darrell Katz. You can find out more about the Jazz Composers Alliance here.

In 2007 we decided to present a “tribute concert,” where we’d undertake to give our impressions of the music of three important jazz composers: Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, and Charles Mingus. After some dithering, I decided to develop a piece on Mingus. Notice the preposition. I did not want to do an arrangement of a Mingus tune; while I enjoy arranging other people’s music, I had an idea in mind.

One of my oldest friends is a sarod player, an American whom I met in the early years of my study of Indian music. His given name was Charles Rook, but he was known to one and all as “Chazz.” When I asked him how he’d gotten the name, he told me a long and amazing story about his relationship with the great bassist and composer. Since that time (in the mid-70s) I’d heard him tell it over and over, and I’d had it told to me by other mutual friends (“You know Chazz’ story about Charlie Mingus? No? Well…”). So I knew the outline pretty well.

Chazz Rook, visiting Pune in 1987

At first I thought I’d interview him, get him to tell the story into a microphone, then use the recording while the band played. But after a few exploratory attempts to integrate test recordings with music in real time, I gave it up as too contrived. I did, however, locate Chazz, who had moved to Cambodia from Thailand. We had a long telephone conversation which I recorded and transcribed; I did almost no editing beyond removing repetitions and place-markers, and what resulted was a powerful text that worked beautifully for an orchestral setting.

The piece made multiple compositional demands, and I wound up inventing many new notational approaches to accommodate them. Much of the melodic material is actually manipulations of lines from one of Mingus’ bass solos, transformed sufficiently to be unrecognizable (although still palpably Mingusian). Rebecca Shrimpton and I split the vocal recitation.

As to how much of what is described actually happened…I cannot say anything more than that I vouch for the mythological truth of the story without reservation. Whether it took place exactly as Chazz told it to me is irrelevant, for the story itself is exactly like Mingus: saturated with alienation, fulfillment, desperation, illumination, madness, hallucination, myths and heroes, all resolving with a richly pervasive sadness.

This video is of the premiere performance, in May of 2007. Subsequent performances have gotten tighter and IMO better…but I don’t have video. This gives a good sense of the piece, though.

The first video is of my spoken introduction, which I have transcribed…feel free to skip directly to the piece.

Introduction.

Whenever we do a concert that’s a tribute, or a reflection on the lives and music of people who are important to us, musically, one of the things that comes up for each of us, and certainly for me, is the…one’s first encounter with some of these musicians. And I always felt that Mingus’ music saved my life when I was a kid. I was thirteen years old when I heard Charles Mingus’ piece “The Clown.” I was in high school, I was a very young high school freshman, who was smaller, younger and smarter than anyone else in the class, and consequently subject to vigorous physical attitude correction on the part of most of my peers…

The predominant musical taste in the Western suburbs of Boston was pretty much…Led Zeppelin, the Stones, the J.Geils Band, Black Sabbath, the whole…all of that…so that was the music of the people who were engaged in “correcting” me. So I felt alienated from that…and I was moping in the office of a teacher who had taken pity on me, and I had the radio on, and lo and behold, there was Jean Shepherd improvising narration while Mingus and his band played a piece called “The Clown.”

And I said, “That’s It! That’s Everything!” And I proceeded to immediately educate myself about Mingus; I found a used record supplier who found rare records and they sent me a copy of the record…it was, you know, “My Record!” And I listened to that record a lot…

This is not an arrangement of “The Clown,” just so you know…

Anyway, so that taught me a couple of things. One thing that it taught me was that music could save your life. Another thing it taught me was that music could tell stories, and that storytellers could work with music.

And many years later after I had gotten involved in Indian classical music, which is my primary area of work, I met a guy who was…another American who was involved in Indian classical music; and he was introduced to me, and they said, “This is Chazz.” And I thought, “Chazz. That’s unusual.” So after a while we got to know one another. He played the sarod, it’s an Indian stringed instrument. So I said, “How’d you come to get a name like ‘Chazz’?” And he said, “Well, it’s a long story.” And I said, “I have nothing else to do but hear your story.”

And that was about thirty years ago, and I always remembered Chazz’ Mingus Story. So when it came time to do this concert, I remembered Chazz’ Mingus Story, and I found him. He’s now living in Cambodia, and I called him up (and incidentally, if you have opportunity to call up Cambodia, buy yourself an international telephone card, because if you do it on your ordinary home line, it’s six dollars a minute — by the time you’ve gotten through the pleasantries, that’s the grocery bills for the month, okay?). So anyway, this brings me back to the first point of my story: one part is that music can tell stories or that music can support storytelling, and the other part of it is that music can save your life.

And this is Chazz’ Mingus Story. This is the story of someone whose life was saved by Charles Mingus.

Twice.

Chazz’ Mingus Story.

There are subtitles, but if you’d like to read the story without trying to follow the teeny tiny little letters, here’s the complete text:

TEXT

I was 16 years old, living in Connecticut and very dissatisfied with empty materialism…

…no soul, no communication, no art — I was very upset; I used to write poetry.

I used to listen to a lot of jazz, and Mingus was one of my favorites…and somehow I felt that he would have a sympathetic ear and he could understand what I was feeling….

so on one of the Impulse jazz albums I found the address, so I sent my poetry to mingus.

I gave him my phone number, and…lo and behold, sometime later, I got a call at like 2 or 3 in the morning…and my mother got the call, and called me to the phone, woke me up…

and it was Mingus, calling from the village vanguard during a session he was having there, and he’d read my poetry…

it had touched him and he communicated back with me.

so, we talked, and I kept sending him poetry, and then, I guess maybe a year later when I was sixteen I actually got to go to the village vanguard where he was performing.

He had just finished a set, and I was in the bathroom, and he walked into the bathroom, and I introduced myself, and I remember the feeling that he was…

…he was huge, I mean, I was already over six feet, and I remember craning my neck backwards to look up at him, he was so big. And I listened to his set, which was incredible…

…he did a solo on the bass, and he had the whole club, I mean everybody including the waitresses, the bartenders, everybody, had ‘em all crying. Literally, there were tears; it was so sad…it was like he had captured the whole mood of the audience…

…and then he looked around and he saw that… what he had done, and he immediately went from that sad, depressing, crying blues, to turn around and play something…

…and everybody started laughing and happy and…oh, laughter and smiling, it was just a miracle how he turned the emotion… from day to night, just like that. It was real power…

…it was a great inspiration to know that somebody was listening to my inner voice. And I feel Mingus gave me a slap on the back to go ahead and live my life.

…and there was a record album on Fantasy Records, with a picture of him sitting in front of a chessboard, and the name of the album was “Chazz,” so from that point on I called myself Chazz…

The only other time I ran into mingus was a very…a very interesting time. I was seventeen, I ran away from home and lived on the lower east side, and the hippest club at that time, Slugs, was just around the corner. I was a regular at Slugs until the summer of that year when I got into some problems… I was underage, and my mother thought it was best for me to be committed to a mental hospital…

….and I had gotten out somehow, I had snuck out or gotten out on a leave, and I was suicidal. I was contemplating committing suicide, and I was actually on the Gold Star Bridge between Groton and New London, and I was going to climb over the fence and jump.

…until the summer of that year when I went back to Connecticut, got into some problems… I was underage, and my mother thought it was best for me to be committed to a mental hospital…

….and I had gotten out somehow.

I had snuck out or gotten out on a leave, and I was suicidal.

I was contemplating committing suicide.

I was on the Gold Star Bridge between Groton and New London, and I was going to climb over the fence and jump.

…and lo and behold as I’m climbing the fence, a Volkswagen stops…

…and in the Volkswagen with the sunroof down and a blonde girl driving, is Charlie Mingus…

…with his bass sticking up through the sunroof, on his way to Newport, Rhode Island…

…and he stopped and saved my life, and I got in the Volkswagen and continued on to Newport to the jazz festival…

…yeah, he recognized me, and he remembered me from New York, from the Village Vanguard…

…and he just showed up at the perfect time…

…it was just the perfect time, because without him…

…if anybody else had stopped I think I would have jumped.

…and those were the only two times I was physically near
Mingus, but I felt…

…I felt very close to him, for years…

…I was in India learning music years later and…

….I got on the plane to go back to America…

….and I saw in Newsweek that he had died.