Collection: Charles Mingus

Charles Mingus grew up in Watts, Los Angeles, the son of a retired army sergeant, raised in a household where his stepmother permitted only church music and where the first jazz Mingus ever heard was Duke Ellington coming through his father's crystal set in secret. By high school he had moved through trombone and cello to the double bass, studying with Red Callender and former New York Philharmonic bassist Herman Reinshagen, then composition with Lloyd Reese. He played with Louis Armstrong at nineteen, with Lionel Hampton, and briefly in 1953 with the idol he would spend the rest of his life measuring himself against: Duke Ellington fired him after an altercation with trombonist Juan Tizol on the bandstand. He co-founded Debut Records with his wife Celia and Max Roach in 1952 and the Jazz Workshop in 1955, and spent the following decade making records at a pace that was, as the New World Encyclopedia noted, perhaps unmatched by any musician except Ellington himself. The Atlantic albums of the late 1950s, "Pithecanthropus Erectus" (1956), "Blues and Roots" (1959) and "Mingus Ah Um" (1959), built something that sat between gospel, blues, bebop and the avant-garde without being reducible to any of them. "The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady" (Impulse!, 1963) pushed the orchestral ambition as far as it went. Eric Dolphy appeared on several of the most significant sessions. Don Pullen and George Adams led the final great quintet. Mingus was diagnosed with ALS in 1977 and died in Cuernavaca, Mexico on January 5, 1979, aged 56.