Janet Coleman

"A double-barreled memoir from two writers who were befriended by Charles Mingus during the late 1950s. Both Coleman and Young revered the composer, who (in Coleman's words) "viewed music as an elixir, an antidote to the poison, [and] a religious calling." But they're not too reverent to overlook Mingus's eccentricities, which included hitting the streets of New York with a bow, a quiver, and a suitcase full of extra arrows. This is a funny, touching, and instructive book."

"Freelance writer Coleman and prolific author Young (Sitting Pretty, etc.), both devotees of Charles Mingus (1922-1979), here present an unconventional, nonchronological, anecdotal, impressionistic account of the personality and contributions of the great jazz bassist and composer. They met him in 1960 when they were students at the University of Michigan, and for the next 20 years, until Mingus died in Mexico, their lives and his were inextricably joined. Captivated by the violent musician–"the Marlon Brando and the Laurence Olivier of Jazz"–whose over-indulgence and self-destruction were balanced by a gentle generosity, Coleman and Young reveal a vibrant, wonderfully complex man who expanded traditional jazz forms, encouraged improvisation, established the first jazz musicians' cooperative and was an impassioned, outspoken foe of racism." (Photos not seen by PW.)

A Very Short Excerpt from Coleman section of Mingus/Mingus: Two Memoirs

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.

I met him when I was a college student in Ann Arbor. He was playing at a jazz club in Detroit, The Minor Key. He saw I was white. He guessed I was Jewish. He told his sideman, Booker Ervin, not to hit on me. Back in New York on school vacations, I came to know the various branches of the Mingus dynasty: children, stepchildren, wives, ex-wives, friends, musicians, cronies. Once when Mingus thought a friend had fed him poisoned dinner, he drank a glass of olive oil as an antidote. I missed that event. But I saw him drink a glass of cream.

He was not a person to be taken lightly, either as a musician or as a man. He was a reigning genius of jazz, an oilwell of musical accomplishment. He played with everyone from Kid Ory to Lionel Hampton to Charlie Parker. He plowed every musical root and tradition from Natchez to Salzburg and wherever the four winds every blew. On the bass he was a virtuoso. He was the molder and mastermind of the various bands and ensembles that performed under the aegis of The Charles Mingus Jazz Workshop” (or Sweatshop, according to some musicians who played in them). The final one was a quintet. He created a body of music so rich and moving, complex and original, that when Mingus was forty-eight, Whitney Balliett said his compositions “may equal anything written in Western music in the past twenty years.” As a composer, he ranks with his idol, Duke Ellington, for having stretched the canvas and palette of jazz to the point where it transforms from tunes and jamming into the realm that Rahsaan Roland Kirk called “black classical music.” (“Jazz is only a word and really has no meaning,” Duke Ellington said. “We stopped using it in 1943.”)