Directed by Don McGlynn, 1997.
Reviewer: Pat Padua

When I was a kid I used to notice a piece of graffito when my parents would river through the neighborhood. Ascending Klingle Road west, I'd see one side of what looked like some rich ogre's mansion. The barest outline of a monstrous shuttered weatherbeaten house was visible from the street, the rest obscured and immersed in the woods of Rock Creek Park. The long concrete retaining wall at the bottom of this forest looked an inadequate force to keep what evil mud might slide down the city streets in just one heavy rain. A colorful multicultural mural, painted by neighborhood children, now graces this wall, but for years this eyesore in the valley was broken only by big black letters spray-painted:

I never figured out who Prout was (reading Proust didn't well up this memory), but it strikes me now that Charles Mingus, with all his rage and anger and passion, flying into fisticuffs at the drop of a note or desperate in the eternal conquest of women and the constant reassurance that is provided or remains elusive - he roared into the monster mash and scaled the mud and got dirty and brought back his volatile music, a work as vast as he was but still inot enough to keep the evil from sliding downhill in storms.

The Mingus documentary I saw at FilmFeast, Triumph of the underdog, was excellent; it didn't have that cross-cutting between interviews that Don Glynn did to distraction in his Dexter Gordon doc (young, dashing Dex would start a thought that was finished by august, ailing Dex), but I think if anything that would have suited Mingus pretty well - if there were any thoughts that could be completed that way. Funny how the more complex subject called for the simpler style. There was footage from all eras of Mingus (nice stuff of the quintet with Jack Walrath and George Adams, though you could only hear not see Don Pullen), and interviews culled over the years or freshly struck.

In an interview that dated from the 70's, Dannie Richmond about drummers. Some barrel into a room and make a lot of noise all at once; Richmond travels a more patient path: "first you say, 'hello', then, 'how are you doing'..."

Tuba player Don Butterfield (a caption identifies him as someone who's played for both Mingus and Toscanini) explains Mingus would write parts that seemed technically impossible, pushing his musicians. Frustrated with this challenge, Butterfield would go home and work the problem over and over till he got it right, and that was Mingus' way of making his musicans better than they were. Trumpet player Lew Soloff makes a similar point: if it still wasn't good enough, well, "[Mingus], like Stravinsky, liked to hear the struggle."

The second time I caught this documentary, director Don McGlynn and Sue Mingus were on hand to answer questions; among the memorable anecdotes:

Frustrated by audience chatter at one small club, Mingus at one point suggested that the band trade fours with the crowd: four bars of music, four bars of chatter with accompaniment. I'd like to have heard that!

Sue mentioned that Andrew Homzy, at one point in his research into Mingus' scores, found that the original score of Black Saint and the Sinner lady was rather different from what had been recorded. The original score was what the band had taken into a long stint at the Village Vanguard, and some weeks or months later after the personalities had developed and expanded the music, the recording was made.

Once, Sue played Jeff Beck's recording of "Goodbye Porkpie hat" for Mingus. He said: "Sounds like money."

Sue was asked if she and Charles had been harrassed for being an interracial couple. She said that she tried to ignore that kind of thing, and observed that if you at least pretend to be strong, you can usually fool people.