Mingus: The Chaos And The Magic
In the latest New York Review of Books, Christopher Carroll writes: ‘Charles Mingus’s audiences never knew quite what they were going to get, and this kept them coming. Mingus, the bassist, composer, and bandleader who reached the height of his fame in the mid-1960s, was notoriously mercurial. He was known to fire and rehire band members over the course of a set, and was once fired himself for chasing a trombonist across the stage with an axe. His reactions to noisy crowds ranged from announcing, “Isaac Stern doesn’t have to put up with this shit,†to ordering his band to read books onstage.’ Plus this fun fact: Joni Mitchell made an album with him.
