Mingus and the Chill of Death

In his autobiography, Beneath the Underdog, jazz musician Charles Mingus recounts his hatred of being ignored during his bass solos. When it was finally his turn to enter the foreground, suddenly musicians and audience members alike found drinks, food, conversations, and everything else more important. However, this small, and somewhat ironic, anecdote of Mingus’s relationship with the jazz community has now become a foreshadowing of his current status in sound studies–but no longer! This series–featuring myself (Earl Brooks), Brittnay Proctor, Jessica Teague, and Nichole Rustin-Paschal— re/hears, re/sounds and re/mixes the contributions of Mingus for his ingenious approach to jazz performance and composition as well as his far-reaching theorizations of sound in relation to liberation and social equality, all in honor of the 60th anniversary of Mingus’s sublimely idiosyncratic album Mingus Ah Um this month. The final installment of this series presents Nichole Rustin-Paschal and her gripping reflection on jazz, death, and mourning. Her opening line requires no introduction: “There was a time when I believed that Mingus was haunting me.” You can catch up with the full series by clicking here.–Guest Editor Earl Brooks

Image courtesy of author
There was a time when I believed that Mingus was haunting me. In the small college town where I was then living, I would occasionally see a man with Mingus’s profile, wearing a black hat, leather vest, and sunglasses, in a wheelchair out and about. He was always alone. Mingus had spent the last year of his life increasingly dependent on a wheelchair as the ALS stripped him of his motility. There is a joyous photo of him in his wheelchair, hair in a riot of curls, mouth open in uproarious laughter with Joni Mitchell embracing him from behind, her face aglow with an open-mouthed smile. I can imagine the sound, caught perhaps during a break as they were collaborating on Mingus, his last effort and the album Mitchell said killed her career. Yes, God Must Be a Boogie Man, sending me messages to write and write some more through the sight of this man looking so much like Mingus. Never did I see him with anyone, he was always a solitary figure traveling the main streets. I do not know if he was real.
Listen to Mingus, and you can eavesdrop on his 53rd birthday party (though he thought he was actually 54), his end of life plan (to be buried in India), and his Midas touch, through sound clips from events and interviews happening years earlier, interspersed among the songs. In his quick, low rumbling of voice Mingus proclaimed that he “was lucky, man. Blessed by God.” Mingus was released after his death, the sounds of celebration, funerary plans, and gratitude leading to the final performance, Goodbye Pork Pie Hat.
Mitchell’s lyrics tell both the story of Mingus’s elegy for Lester Young and his own efforts to ward off death among the healers in Cuernavaca, Mexico. It is a story about the black musician as underdog, first reviled, then celebrated with dancing in the street. It is a story about the threat of interracial love and the promise of children. “Love is never easy street,” Mitchell writes, but still, we dance, make music, hope.
The only other time I have felt the dead come to me was some years later while I was rushing through Penn Station to catch my train. The sight of a man sitting cross-legged by one of the columns, surrounded by his belongings, nearly stopped me in my tracks. Surely, that couldn’t be my father, looking at me so calmly and certainly in the crush of Penn Station? A Hoodoo Hollerin’ Ghost he was not, but he was a haint sent to calm me, I’m sure of it. My father had died not too long before. I saw him there and he saw me. Every time I hear Horace Silver’s “Song for My Father,” cliche as it may seem, I think of him, the Mayor of Bum’s Square in Harlem.
Lithe and tall, brown-skinned and handsome, my father loved music and to dance, he dreamed of Egypt and having a son, loved his three daughters and shared his wisdom with them, found a soul mate to get clean with. In a frame by my desk I keep two pictures of us; in both we mirror each other’s expressions. In the first, I may be three and he twenty-two. We are both serious. In the second, he is about the age I am now and we are sitting side by side, smiling, at my baby brother’s first birthday party. They shared a birthday month. I had already given my father is own gift, Francis Paudras’s biography of Bud Powell, his favorite jazz musician. It was the last gift I gave him.
It strikes me that with both these haunting, despite their love of music, I felt closest to them through sightings of them–the clarity with which I could imagine them in settings so seemingly out of character–Mingus in Western Mass., my father south of 125th St.–resonated with me more than any particular piece of music that I could associate with them. For each, death came with physical decline and, for two vibrantly garrulous people, the loss of speech. Each had a way of speaking in tones that were intimate and confiding, even as they reveled in having an audience. For language and voice to fail as they came closer to death, must have been as unbearable for them as it was for we who loved them, and hoped to hear them utter our names, say they loved us, one last time. Buddy Collette speaks of seeing Mingus in his final days and the difficulty of looking at his eyes, which were expressive of pain, despair, and longing. He felt Mingus was imploring him to do something, but he did not know what. Helplessness. My father spent his last weeks in the hospital and with each visit, I could see him turn inward, chasing down memories only he could see. For both, a yearning for a golden age, time past; for we who remain, their absence remolding the shape of things to come.
How do artists teach us to mourn? We are accustomed to thinking about the Second Line, a New Orleans tradition, celebrating the passing on of a loved one. Mourning is public and communal, dancers and musicians moving together to escort the dead to their rest. We think of elegies penned by close friends of other artists, such as Dizzy Gillespie’s “I Remember Clifford,” Miles Davis’ “He Loved Him Madly,” Mingus’s “Goodbye Pork-Pie Hat”—the pain becoming a standard, its changes reimagined, its melody a constant. How do hauntings give color to the music and the memories?

“Ghost in the Machine,” close-up of jazz bass, image by Flickr User RubyT (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
The death that looms so heavily over jazz of the postwar era is that of Charlie “Bird” Parker’s in 1955. Shortly after his death, graffiti was seen remarking “Bird Lives.” Parker’s death hit Mingus, like so many others, quite hard. In the liner notes to the album Reincarnation of a Lovebird, Mingus explained how the composition originated. “I wouldn’t say I started out to write a piece about Bird. I knew it was a mournful thing when I was writing it. Suddenly, I realized, it was Bird.”
It is these moments of éclat that make me love Mingus even more. The movement between the conscious and the unconscious, the openness to revelations of the spirit.
In some ways this piece isn’t like him. It’s built on long lines and most of his pieces were short lines. But it’s my feeling about Bird. I felt like crying when I wrote it. If everybody could play it the way I felt it. The altoist (Curtis Porter) did, finally.
Here we see again, Mingus’s insistence that no matter the ostensible subject of the composition, it is he himself, his own feelings that determine his satisfaction with what he has written. Satisfaction, gradually given, with its performance by others, is another story.
Bird, recalls Mingus,
encouraged me about my writing. He never mentioned whether he thought my bass playing was good or bad, but he always thought I was a good writer. In California, in the mid-40s he heard a poem-with-music I’d written, “The Chill of Death.” He heard it in the studio, they never released it. He said that was the sort of thing I should keep on doing, and that I shouldn’t be discouraged.
For Mingus, to mourn Bird was to recognize his life as “a new beginning in jazz not a suspended ending for everyone else to go on copying from.” Jean-Michel Basquiat, born years after Bird’s death, felt haunted by him as well, I think. He memorialized Bird on canvas, recognizing him as a king, Charles the First, a god, an angel, done in by society. To make a visual record of Bird meant that he still lived among us, resurrected in sound; listen, Basquiat implores us to Cherokee.

Jean Michel Basquiat’s “CPRKR” (1982) Image by Author
Long before he died in 1979, Charles Mingus imagined meeting death in his 1939 poem “The Chill of Death.” Mingus depicts Death as a beautiful woman. Like a spurned lover, Death clutches at his hands and throws her arms around him, but he resists, not yet ready to succumb to her fatal embrace. She warns that he will not cheat her this time. Mingus put “The Chill of Death” to music on his Let My Children Hear Music (1974), heard by the public at last, and a debt he still had to pay. Soon, but not yet.
The figure of Death loomed over Mingus throughout his life. He begins Beneath the Underdog with his near death and resurrection as a toddler and ends it with the death of Fats Navarro. The cover of Hal Wilner’s 1992 tribute album, Weird Nightmare, depicts a young child facing down a bull in a ghostly field. It recalls that constant flux Mingus expressed between the conscious and unconscious, his fears and his strengths. The hardback cover of Beneath the Underdog features a picture of Mingus, a Taurus, as a child and one can imagine that the knock-kneed child whom we see from the back confronting the bull is one and the same. Mingus mourned by celebrating the deaths of other musicians in his compositions like the aforementioned “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” for Lester Young and “So Long Eric” for Eric Dolphy.
He bemoaned the fate of musicians who did not receive accolades during their lifetimes and worried that the same fate would meet him. He understood his body as mortal but his music as evidence of his soul’s immortality. And here we are, celebrating his music, reflecting on the sounds he produced about the world he lived and loved in. Mingus was blessed, man. Mingus lives!
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Featured Image: Mingus Woodblock Print, Image by Housing Works Thrift Shops(CC BY-SA 2.0)
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Nichole Rustin-Paschal earned a Ph.D. in American Studies from New York University and a J.D. from the University of Virginia. She is an Assistant Professor at the Rhode Island School of Design. Nichole is working on a new book project exploring how artists use the law as their medium and how law frames art. Her book, The Kind of Man I Am: Jazzmasculinity and the World of Charles Mingus Jr. (Wesleyan 2017) is a gendered cultural history of jazz in the postwar period. She draws on archival records, published memoirs, and previously conducted interviews to explore how Mingus’s ideas about music, racial identity, and masculinity—as well as those of other individuals in his circle, like Celia Mingus, Hazel Scott, and Joni Mitchell—challenged jazz itself as a model of freedom, inclusion, creativity, and emotional expressivity. Nichole is co-editor of Big Ears: Listening for Gender in Jazz Studies(Duke 2008), the first anthology of work in jazz and gender studies. She is co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Jazz Studies (Routledge 2019), an anthology of cross-disciplinary and transnational studies in jazz. In addition, her work has been published in Critical Sociology, JazzDebates/JazzDebatten, Radical History Review, Bill Traylor, William Edmondson, and the Modernist Impulse, William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal, South Atlantic Quarterly,and Organizing Black America.She has taught at Kansas City Academy, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Williams College, and New York University. In addition to her writing and teaching, Nichole is an advocate for the underserved in her education, First Amendment, and privacy law practice.
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SO! Amplifies: Memoir Mixtapes


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“The mashup of the two things we all love to talk about: ourselves & music”
Memoir Mixtapes is a nonprofit literary magazine that is entirely volunteer-run. Created by Samantha Lampf, the idea for the magazine came about on a commute home from Santa Monica to Koreatown in 2018. At the time, Lampf’s life was rapidly changing. After marrying, moving to Los Angeles and changing her career path, she felt as if something was still missing. When “Silver Springs,” by Fleetwood Mac, came on the radio — an artist her dad used to play constantly. Lampf was immediately transported to a specific time in her childhood where she experienced insomnia and depressive thoughts, saying “the music taunted me at all hours.” Soon after, she had the thought to write an essay about this song. She then began to think that many people had their own stories about songs, and Memoir Mixtapes was officially underway.
The first call for submissions was put out that night, and Lampf was unsure if she would receive more than five pieces. However, the first volume, titled “Origin Stories,” published 34 tracks. Since then, they have published eight volumes, with topics ranging from guilty pleasures to our personal anthems. Each volume consists of creative nonfiction submissions and a song (or two) to accompany each piece. The goal of the magazine is to use music as a natural provocation of emotion and memories, using music to connect with each other while reading about some of our most personal experiences.
While Memoir Mixtapes’ primary focus is their full volume works, they also support other literature about music or memoir that might not fit into their main magazine topics. Deep Cuts, a section created for these pieces, features recordings, visual art, playlists and more. Not a writer, but still interested in the project? Consider sharing a song recommendation! All you have to do is create an account on Medium and follow the steps listed on the website for a chance to have your song featured either Monday, Wednesday, or Friday.
Memoir Mixtape’s 2019 Playlist
Memoir Mixtapes is special because it gives us a way to discuss the impact of music on our lives. Music is an integral part of birthdays, weddings, religion and many other cultural practices, yet we often understand music as a separate entity from identity — one that is universal in its message rather than individualized and personal. However, writers at Memoir Mixtapes are allowing us to listen to music as they experience and hear it, providing us with a new method of listening to songs we have our own histories with.
If music and memoir sounds appealing to you, check out the Memoir Mixtapes magazine to read, listen or submit a piece of your own — they have rolling submissions, so submit anytime! For their tenth volume, Memoir Mixtapes is ready to talk about “Ballads & Breakups,” or the whimsical, disastrous search for love. As their page states, “if you felt it in your heart, we want to read it.” Calls for submissions are open now until June 30th!
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Kaitlyn Liu is a freshman at Binghamton University majoring in English Literature with a concentration in rhetoric. Kaitlyn takes interest in writing about gender and race along with other intersectional classification systems. Kaitlyn currently writes for the opinions section for the student newspaper, Pipe Dream, as well as working as a copy editor. Outside of writing, Kaitlyn enjoys reading historical fiction and singing for Binghamton University’s oldest co-ed a cappella group, the Binghamtonics.
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Instrumental: Power, Voice, and Labor at the Airport

Welcome to Voices Carry. . . a forum meditating on the material production of human voices the social, historical, and political material freighting our voices in various contexts. What are voices? Where do they come from and how are their expressions carried? What information can voices carry? Why, how, and to what end? Artist Asa Mendelsohn opens the forum with his critical and artistic work on the voice as an instrument of power. We are also honored that he lent Voices Carry a still from his work for our icon!–Jennifer Stoever
important, critical, foundational
Can we all do something about language here, and the frames that we use? […] We need to…stop already pre-redacting ourselves so that we can be quote ‘heard’ by these jackasses! They’re never gonna listen to us! — Mariame Kaba
Instrumental is a body of work featuring a series of vocal performances by airport security workers I filmed at the San Diego International Airport. The work takes up Mariame Kaba’s provocation, that those currently in power are never going to listen. How might relations of power be reordered around a voice? If voices are instruments, operating at once through a body and as a body, what kind of instrument is a voice of authority?
T
In September 2017, my proposal to produce a version of this project is accepted as part of a yearlong program curated by and for the San Diego International Airport. In October I put out a call for participation to airport security workers, in search of singers to perform songs of their choosing in front of a camera. There are emails with curators and security managers, logistics, parameters. I film over the winter and install a version of the work as a public art project in the spring, the first year of my medical gender transition.
When we meet at the far end of Terminal 2 in January, T is a combination of nervous and enthusiastic I wasn’t expecting. He’s so jittery that I almost tell him to stop and rest. I link my sneaking feeling of shame to an assumed position of authority, having arrived like this, multiple cameras, my university affiliation.
But while nervous, T’s also brimming, lighting up. His name tag catches gold light, bouncing against his gray Air Traffic Officer uniform.
T proposes two songs. Neither are in languages that he speaks in his daily life and he keeps forgetting words.
How am I going to forget you?
T says he learned the song from a former partner. He says girlfriend. He says he always felt self-conscious he couldn’t speak more Spanish. I guess that his family are Afro-Caribbean Spanish-speakers. I’m wrong. He’s also wrong about where I’m from. San Francisco, right?
T likes to sing karaoke. A coworker heard him and the rumor started going around: T has a beautiful voice. T’s voice is a soft instrument. In the airport, it is easily swallowed by environmental noise.
I film with T a second time, again meeting the last two hours of his ten-hour shift. He starts tired, nervous: stopping and restarting a song. Slowly, he warms up, dancing a cumbia. I sing with him when he forgets a line. We allow ourselves to take up more space in this quiet zone beyond the Air Canada counters. T dances with a moving chair.
Where will your next adventure take you?
Men in construction vests come in and out of a door beneath a banner: “Go Somewhere.” Construction is in process to expand the space occupied by border security.
Working in security means exercising jurisdiction over how other people move, who can move where, and with what freedom. What kind of freedom or movement is possible between us while someone is watching (an institution, a camera)?
Artist Gregg Bordowitz writes that “posing for the camera in advance of anticipated capture by the lens is a form of self-defense in the age of surveillance. It’s an act of self-authorship.” I don’t feel I understand fully what calls someone forward to perform. Is it a feeling they have something to share, a will towards “self-authorship”? I’m interested in not knowing where a performance starts and ends, not knowing when we become performers or our own authors, when we become complicit, exploited, when we are on or off the job. Most people work and are watched most of the time, without being heard: a series of performances delivered and received with varying degrees of care.
The sterile zone
The post-9/11 commercial airport in the United States is one among other types of places designed to reinforce a culture of surveillance and fear, to remind travelers the state has a say in their freedom of movement. A place designed to instill one kind of horror while thinly concealing another.
Spending time at the airport with people who spend a lot of time at the airport, the intricacy of the place unfolds, resembling what theorist Simone Browne calls a “security theater.” At moments SAN blurs into every other airport in the U.S. I’ve moved through or seen on a screen: streams of moving walkways, escalators — travelers wheeling bags, waiting, scrolling for ticket information on smartphones, scanning, travel-themed advertisements and watery public art commissions — a fragmented, moving stage.

From Asa Mendelsohn, Instrumental (2018)
The voice of the overhead announcement is an instrument of the airport security theater, summoning the stress of being read and misread, abused, glibly entertained, and sold overpriced breakfasts, while you are also in fear of missing something: everything that makes airports ultimate theaters for the machinery of the security state. As I edit footage from the airport, I become preoccupied by moments of tension between a singer’s voice and the voice of the overhead security announcement, instructing us about checkpoint procedures, orienting us, interpellating. A singer pauses to wait, or they continue, enduring the interruption. For a security worker vocalizing in uniform, does the space of the airport become an extension of their body? (Does their uniform matter?) In these moments of tension, it becomes more clear that a security worker’s performance as an extension of the airport’s body is an uneven one.
While SAN seems like any other airport in the U.S., there are points of exceptionality. SAN is much smaller than other airports serving international commercial flights. It is located centrally, widely accessible from much of the city. Checkpoint lines are rarely very long. SAN is, of course, primarily the port of entry for travelers with valid state identification and the ability to buy an airline ticket. These factors do not make SAN an equitable place to work, but they do add up to an effect: airport as sanitized space, a clean space, that, in my subjective experience, other airports aspire to but rarely achieve. A small feat of whitewashing, eighteen miles by car from the border crossing at San Ysidro. Friends have suggested about this project: “you would not have been able to do that anywhere else.” I would not have been granted access.
As I prepare to film at SAN, I’m sent mixed messages. Initially, a curator tells me I’ll be granted access to shoot in post-checkpoint areas of the airport, areas I learn that security workers call “the sterile zone.” Shortly before my first shoot, I’m told that, actually, it’d be too much work to get me clearance. I’m restricted to what are called “public” spaces, pre-security, outside the sterile zone.

From Asa Mendelsohn, Instrumental (2018)
Throughout this process, I wonder how I’m seen by people at the airport. I do not doubt that being white, small-bodied, and soft-voiced make me seem non-threatening. I’m a patient director. I smile at my own perversity. Staff approach me cautiously while I’m setting up and ask if I have a permit to be there, but always eventually smile back. A curator overlooks or disregards my pronouns, misgendering me in email correspondences and later in the interpretive text about the work. They eventually apologize.
How are my interests as an artist read? While “speaking up,” or “using your voice,” is often understood as a political right and responsibility of democratic process, appropriating someone else’s is at particular stake in art and documentary ethics. At the airport, I am seeking a form through which to acknowledge the ways we use each other’s voices and labor, to acknowledge the multiple zones within which we work at once.
Instrumentalized: used
A voice is always a shape and product of its body, and, at the same time, something other. Theorist Freya Jarman-Ivens writes: “As my voice leaves me, it takes part of my body with it — the sound of its own production.” The voice in your head that you claim as your own is never, physically, the same voice as that which lands in the ear of another, that you also claim as your own, as when you claim on the phone “it’s me.” Jarman-Ivens names this paradoxical, “looped” quality of the voice its “queerness,” traveling between bodies and between language and non- language.
Increasingly, state terrorism marks the airport as a space in which people are alienated on the basis of identity. The anxiety that comes while waiting in line for your body to be scanned epitomizes that alienation. The invasive acts of being scanned, read and misread, are not one-way operations. Security personnel, particularly those whose classed, raced, and gendered bodies straddle multiple identifications and categories of oppression, occupy a tense space: at once agents of the security apparatus and subjects within it.
At the airport I am trying to represent realities in which a speaker’s voice changes and morphs with and through their body and environment. Through collaborations with non-professional actors — with people performing as versions of themselves — I am hoping to communicate the slip and stutter between performance and real life that José Esteban Muñoz might describe as “failure,” or an “active political refusal.” “Failure” is, as I understand Muñoz’s writing and legacy, an opening into another space of relating, a break from performative norms, from a performance of a norm, such as “real life,” or “gender.” Does the performance start when a security worker starts singing? When they become the airport? A worker? When they become a man?
Featured image still from Asa Mendelsohn’s Instrumental.
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Asa Mendelsohn is from New York. He makes performances and media projects that develop through a process of recording, writing, and collaboration. His work combines observational and narrative storytelling practices, often focusing on personal relationships and desire as ways to navigate seemingly inaccessible infrastructures, histories, and systems of power.
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“Listening to the Border: ‘”2487″: Giving Voice in Diaspora’ and the Sound Art of Luz María Sánchez”-D. Ines Casillas
On Sound and Pleasure: Meditations on the Human Voice– Yvon Bonenfant
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