Outrageous Freedom: Charles Mingus and the Invention of the Jazz Workshop

Abstract

THE MUSIC WAS ARGUABLY BORN ON 30 JANUARY 1956, A WELL-NIGH APOCALYPTIC moment when composer Charles Mingus set in motion a novel but durable experiment in musical orchestration and simultaneously unveiled a menacing critique of modernist authority. Mingus had assembled his Jazz Workshop in the Atlantic studios to record Erectus, a jazz tone-poem that was simple in the primordial sense. An allegory of Promethean ambition and slave revolt, Pithecanthropus was intended to illustrate the rise of the first man, the bloating of his ambition, his rule over his fellow men, and then-most extendedly-his downfall at the hands of a mass insurrection. It was a ferocious version of the plot that, as sociologist Paul Gilroy has remarked, is central to African American modernism: the interrogation of the concept of progress from the standpoint of the slave, this time voiced by a 33 year-old composer and bass virtuoso whose ambitions had so far swelled larger than his commercial accomplishments. Pithecanthropus was his Workshop's major label debut as well as his most groundbreaking work to date.1 Yet it was not simply the plot that transformed Pithecanthropus into the sourcebook of postbop jazz. More strikingly, Mingus found a license for freedom in the mechanics of the tone-poem, just as his modernist model Richard Strauss had introduced new dissonances in