Mingus Music in Film and on Campus

Mingus Music in Film and on Campus
Two documentary filmmakers have relied heavily on the music of Charles Mingus’s 1959 Blues and Roots recording to augment their films. One, entitled “Venice West and the LA Scene” by director Mary Kerr, will screen at the Centre Pompidou in Paris from March 7– July 17, 2006 to coincide with the museum’s major exhibit of California artists.

The film gives a many-sided history of this particular scene of artists and poets that emerged in the early 1960s. Another film, entitled “East of Paradise” by director Lech Kowalski, can currently be seen on French-German channel Arte. The film is in two parts;
the first is about the filmmaker’s mother as a prisoner in a Russian Gulag; the second part is about the director’s experiences living in New York’s Lower East Side in the 1970s and 80s. The director is known for earlier films about the Sex Pistols and Johnny Thunders.

On TV, the popular show Cold Case used a version of “Haitian Fight Song” to accompany a scene in episode #51 entitled “Committed.” The episode first aired in October 2005, and is in reruns this spring. The same episode also used songs by Thelonious Monk and Julie
London.

A musicologist and doctoral candidate at the Graduate Center of the City University ofNew York, Jennifer Griffith, has presented a dissertation on the music of Mingus as itrelates to New Orleans jazz and to Jelly Roll Morton. Griffith makes the case that Mingus’s work represents innovations within the tradition that provide a link between early practices of collective improvisation in New Orleans and the avant-garde player sof the 1960s. Griffith traces the legacy of Morton and how his music served Mingus in“making meaning of his own experience as a musician, and a black American, as well asmaking his mark in the history of jazz.”

Also fresh off the academic press is David Yaffe’s Fascinating Rhythm: Reading Jazz In American Writing, just published by Princeton University Press. Yaffe, an English prof at Syracuse and pop culture critic, was spotted grooving to the Big Band at Iridium during IAJE week. And we didn’t count, but there were quite a few references to Mingusin the index of Fascinating Rhythm.