CHAPTER 19

 

 

#82: CHARLES MINGUS

"The Chill Of Death"

from the album Let My Children Hear Music

Released: February 1972

 

 

A hornet's nest of bowed double basses buzz with barely suppressed anger as though you'd just stepped on it accidentally. Then the Richard Strauss touches - the timpani, low brass, high woodwind, harp as pulse, though Bernhard Kaun's Frankenstein theme also comes to immediate mind - before a deep, weary voice resembling an aged and bruised Isaac Hayes tells a midnight story.

Actually the voice tells the same story as had been told throughout the whole history of the blues - since this is basically a blues piece - the story of the devil woman there to end the man's life and make sure he pays for his lifelong transgressions, killing him with her embrace. We knew that anti-philosophy was always fundamentally wrongheaded, but the best blues performers, whether shouters or whisperers, can momentarily engage a deep emotional connection with the most wishful of listeners.

As the piece progresses, the voice way upfront and the large orchestra seemingly two blocks away, you can get the feeling that maybe he's enjoying this death thing. He's already scheming, looking forward to claiming the gold on that assumed pathway to Heaven. As if he'd ever imagined they'd ever let him in.

Of course the gold vapourises and he realises that he's been entombed in an inescapable Hell. One step was always too far beyond reason. But he sounds resigned to his fate, and even grateful for it. As though Hell was actually all he had ever wanted.

One sustained organ note and the piece is then repeated but with the speaker having metamorphosed into a saxophonist, already behind the barriers, unreachable and incomprehensible, but you can still sense the underlying emotion. Can't you? Help me, let me out, or, come on in, the heat is on?

* * * * * *

 

In late seventies Glasgow I was in the habit of picking up jazz albums from the discount bins or bargain basements of record shops and sometimes supermarkets, department stores and even newsagents, since these were the only places you'd find jazz albums in late seventies Glasgow. The ones you wanted, anyway. Well, some of them. The rest were located in mysterious shops in London, and initial mail order satisfaction blossomed into an urge to escape.

You'd hear Peter Clayton play these astounding things on his Jazz Record Requests show on Radio 3 at Saturday teatime, and there was Charles Fox to spin the new stuff on his Jazz Today programme on the same station, teatime on Tuesday. For the latter I used to rush off home early from our weekly school Debating Society meeting, much to the vocal disgruntlement of my classmates. But how to get those records? Many were already swiftly out of print, hence the habitual rummaging through what was then by far the least fashionable form of music because then you'd most likely find them retailing for next to nothing.

On one of those rummages I encountered Let My Children Hear Music, a then-recent relic of a brief era where somebody in Columbia Records thought that jazz might be going somewhere profitable, hence the signings of Ornette Coleman, Bill Evans, Keith Jarrett and Charles Mingus, among others. But while the post-Bitches Brew glee club of Milesian musicians - not just Miles himself but also Hancock, Mahavishnu, Weather Report and Cobham - profited comparatively enormously, the knottier types didn't, and were quickly offloaded.

I've never been quite sure what to make of Let My Children Hear Music, despite having listened to it a thousand times. Mingus thought it his best record but he said that about nearly all his records, at the time they came out. A quasi-orchestral remodelling of previously rehearsed and abandoned pieces, dating from 1939 through the sixties, several outside arrangers were engaged and may even have helped write some of the music. Moreover, a combination of contractual obligations and sloppy bookkeeping meant that we can never quite be sure who exactly is playing on what. We know that the record was based around Mingus' working small group of the period - Charles McPherson and Bobby Jones saxophones, Lonnie Hillyer trumpet, Roland Hanna and/or John Foster piano, the ever-imperturbable Dannie Richmond drums - with the enhancement of most of New York's top session players (and a few others get solo credits on the album sleeve).

But it's also true that, as compelling as this music is, the experience is like Mingus once removed; he is there, in the studio, on his bass, but others are doing most of the work for him, as though he were the main guest at his own memorial. We're hearing his music through a filter. "The Chill Of Death" was apparently written back in 1939 - I'm not sure whether he means the poem and/or the music - and to wait until one is nearly fifty before it could be performed and recorded would be enough to make anybody resentful.

Nonetheless, Mingus addresses the high school poetics with grave vim - at times ("if not, I'd have the gold") akin to Orson Welles (I guess one admirably stubborn Taurean recognises the other). After the lone(ly) organ note (probably played by Patti Bown), the piece goes into looped syndicate with an alto saxophone which hints at an uncredited Ornette but its more settled sense of key awareness probably points to the player being producer Teo Macero, who played alto in Mingus' Jazz Workshop of the early fifties. He too is left alone at the chasm of a climax, speaking more to Dolphy than to Bird.