The sheer impossibility of encompassing jazz bassist, composer, and bandleader Charles Mingus (1922-’79) in a single film limits Don McGlynn’s ambitious 1997 documentary, Charles Mingus: Triumph of the Underdog, from the outset. Which doesn’t mean you shouldn’t see it—it’s playing at the Gene Siskel Film Center, and Mingus’s second wife, Celia Mingus Zaentz, will lead a discussion after the June 27 screening—but if you don’t already know something about the man’s music this may not be the ideal place to start. I’d recommend instead one of his best early albums—The Clown, Tijuana Moods, East Coasting, Mingus Dynasty, Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus (the best one with Eric Dolphy), or Mingus at Monterey.
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The emotional and thematic continuities between some of Mingus’s earliest and last compositions are fully apparent in Triumph of the Underdog. In all his best pieces the sound of passionate and unbridled weeping, sobbing, and sometimes wailing that’s so apparent in the solo voices of musicians such as Bessie Smith or Charlie Parker is expanded into rich and complex ensembles without any emotional loss. And it’s apparent in even fleeting snatches of his music. Yet the task of capturing the dimensions of such a man in a single descriptive work remains formidable.
The best brief description of Mingus may be the first paragraph of Coleman’s 67-page portion of Mingus/Mingus, if only because of the way it compresses Mingus’s range and mutability into what amounts to a miniature theme park or shopping mall: “I knew Charles Mingus almost twenty years, in various cities, at various weights, in canny and uncanny moments, and through various psychic and aesthetic incarnations. I bore witness to his Shotgun, Bicycle, Camera, Witchcraft, Cuban Cigar and Juice Bar periods, and was familiar with his Afro, Egyptian, English banker, Abercrombie and Fitch, Sanford and Son, and ski bunny costumes. I ate his chicken and dumplings, kidneys and brandy, popcorn and garlic, pigs, rabbits, godknows mice.” Even if I bump over the “godknows” in the final sentence, the abrupt swerves in logic and the spicing up of a stew that’s boiling over catch the quintessential Mingus.
By contrast, McGlynn’s 78-minute documentary rushes from one brilliant or telling fragment to another, yielding a meal that’s almost all hors d’oeuvres, with little of Mingus’s feeling for and mastery of larger forms. I had to wait nearly an hour to hear my favorite Mingus tune, “Peggy’s Blue Skylight,” played all the way through (in a rare up-tempo version, including its exquisite B theme). Mingus offers it only in successive bits intercut with the artist speaking to the camera in his loft or getting evicted. A better documentary might show us how the song’s opening phrase derives from bars 13 through 15 of Mingus’s lovely “Reincarnation of a Lovebird,” a demonstration of how key musical themes in his work can go through as many guises and settings as key characters in the novels of Balzac or Faulkner.
Directed by Don McGlynn.
