I don’t have a single favorite record of my father’s, but there are a few I return to more than others. Mingus Plays Piano is one of them. My love for it is layered. It carries deep memories of my sister and me playing at our father’s feet as he composed or just played—small, surrounded by sound.
My sister was older and in school, and my mother worked as a nurse, so during the days I was with my father. Sometimes he’d put me on the back rack of his bike and we would tool around Central Park—me sitting backward, facing the view he was leaving behind. I’d watch squirrels doing their catch-me-if-you-can dance across the pavement. People often talk about the crime-ridden Central Park of the 1970s. To me, it was where many of my most joyful childhood moments lived. The boathouse. Alice in Wonderland story time. Fresh snow, just after it fell. Dad would make us real snow cones—though you had to get there before the dog walkers. But my favorite time with him was always the music. I would sit and play while he played and composed. When I began learning cello—at five—he became my teacher, and those lessons went far beyond the cello.
Yes, there are stories of my father slamming the piano lid on pianists’ fingers—most famously Toshiko Akiyoshi. To be clear: he never closed the lid on any piano player’s fingers. When Gene Santoro was writing his biography on my father, Myself When I Am Real (lots of opinions about that book—Gene is the only biographer who actually spoke to many of us Mingus bloodline family members), he spoke to Toshiko, and she was horrified that such a story was circulating.
I do know he slammed the piano shut once—when Sy Johnson’s hands were out of the way—because Sy wouldn’t stop embellishing on chords my father had written. It was messing up the harmonies, textures, and emotion of the composition he wanted to convey. In many ways the back-and-forth between Sy and my father reflects the battle over his music today. Sy was more in the jazz camp; my father was in the camp of, why can’t we just call it music? Why be held back by genre or the idea of rules—especially when the lineage of the music he was part of was all about breaking rules?
I remember Sy and my father arguing about something he’d written in the tuba part. Sy said, “You can’t do that.” To which my father replied, “Howard can. Howard made it work!” And it was true—Howard Johnson could get the tuba to play in ways other players couldn’t. That was one of the many things my father drew from Duke Ellington: you wrote parts for the player, not just the instrument. If you got Cat Anderson’s trumpet book, you knew you were in trouble.
My father’s ear for the piano—how he heard it—rests very much in the way Ellington played. (We’ll talk about Jelly Roll Morton another time; he deserves his own space among my father’s influences.) Ellington was self-taught and started out playing for magicians, so there was always a touch of flair and showmanship in his approach. He also felt that if he’d gone to music school, he would have lost what made him unique. Of course, he ended up setting rules that many still lean on today.
In many ways my father’s struggles with music came down to that balance—between what he heard in his heart and soul and what the academies said couldn’t or shouldn’t be done. With the piano, and with many of the pianists he worked with, that clash would surface. Pianists would drop a note into the chord the band was playing, and it would clash with the Mingusness of the music. It might be right on paper, but it was wrong in the air. His charts were often more like sketches—written to some extent, but always demanding that the band have ears. Still, under his control. He would get tired of telling piano players to leave more space, or as I once heard him say, “Lift up a couple of them fingers off out of that!” And if the pianist didn’t know which fingers, well… next!
For a time, my father flipped the roles—he played piano and hired a bass player. Henry Grimes did many gigs with him during that stretch. My dad loved Henry’s playing, and Henry loved playing with him on piano. Henry told me that himself once, in a quiet moment at the side of a stage we shared. Henry had ears.
Jaki Byard fit my father’s music beautifully. They talked so much about music that, I’m told, some sets started late because they got so deep into conversation. I spoke to Jaki briefly on the phone—we were going to meet, and I was looking forward to diving in—but only a few days later, he was gone.
Don Pullen also had the ears my father needed. My dad never had to tell him to lift his fingers; sometimes Don used a whole cluster of them and got damn near all the notes! Don was the pianist I knew best, and it was always a joy to hear his thoughts—not just on my father’s music, but on music itself.
The key to understanding my father’s music is realizing that while he composed mostly at the piano, the music was rooted in the bass. The melodies and harmonies sprang from notes on the bass, not from the piano. That’s an important distinction. The bass in his hands was his root, and the other notes branched out from there. At times, the piano could pull the music down and out of the air if it wasn’t handled right.
In many ways, the formal jazz education system that grew alongside the innovators distorted what the creators of the music were making. It tried to pin things down in a way that could be taught, but it leaned heavily on Eurocentric systems—the very thing jazz was rebelling against. And critics, mostly white men, judged the music from that same perspective. Imagine if a Black critic of classical music had written with the same authority—nobody would have read it.
I remember my father being furious about a review. I read it and thought it was good, even flattering. But he snapped: “That motherfucker says he knows what I was thinking, what influenced me, how I got to the music. He don’t know shit.” And he was right. Time and again I hear people say he wanted to be a classical composer. That isn’t true. What he wanted was to take a classical orchestra and use it like one of his bands. He didn’t want to make classical music. He made his own music. He didn’t want to be Stravinsky; he wanted the same respect Stravinsky got.
There are so many facets to my father—as composer, bassist, creator, human, father. I could go on forever. Even here, where I meant to focus on how he heard and used the piano, the subject spills over everywhere else. But if you want to understand the music and the man that was Charles Mingus, listen to his recordings—really listen. Hear them with your ears and your heart. Not from theory, not from myth. Just listen for the air around the notes.
A side note: I’m taking a leap here. For many years I avoided speaking about my father, my life with him, and my time as his student. I felt it wasn’t anybody’s business but mine. Maybe I wanted to keep it precious, to share only with close friends over a glass of wine and a meal. But over time I’ve watched the narrative about him drift far from the man he was. As his son, I feel the need to correct that.
The myth of Charles Mingus gets recycled in memes and shallow retellings of history. In the Mingus household we call this jazz gossip and it is often 100% fiction. Maybe in the long run it won’t matter. But to me it does—because myths separate people from people.
The reality is, my father became the composer he was because he was curious, because he loved music, and because he worked relentlessly to turn his natural ears into music that still moves people all over the world. And that’s something you can do too.
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