After his death in 1979, Sue Mingus, wife of jazz bassist, composer and bandleader Charles Mingus, fervently promoted his work and continued his legacy as one of the greatest musical minds of the 20th century. helped secure it. She died Saturday, he died in Manhattan. she was 92 years old.
Her son, Roberto Ungaro, confirmed her death at New York Presbyterian Hospital.
By the time Charles Mingus died at the age of 56 from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, his reputation as a whimsical but flamboyant performer had stabilized. Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, etc.
She formed three bands, each with different strengths, and worked on more than 300 of his works, including the posthumously discovered two-hour orchestral piece Epitaph. Although he despaired of seeing the work performed in his lifetime, hence the title, Mr. Mingus is credited with his groundbreaking performance at Lincoln Center in 1989. I succeeded in bringing this work to the stage.
Mingus had a rigorous idea of what each note of each member of the band should sound like. But his wife found that he left his work supple and open to interpretation, allowing generations of musicians to return to them again and again. . The result is a fresh and engaging texture rarely found in legacy bands playing music like Ellington or Glenn Miller.
As Mingus’s close friend, jazz critic and journalist Nat Hentoff told The Boston Globe in 2004: Mingus said, “You can’t play your own licks. I want you to play music, but please be yourself.”
Charles and Sue made an unlikely couple. She was a white Midwestern former debutante. Yet they hit it off shortly after a chance encounter in 1964 at his spot in the Lower Manhattan club, Five.
He was playing his usual gigs. She was there to soak up the city’s jazz scene, recently starring in the short film “OK End Here” by photographer Robert Frank, with music by saxophonist Ornette Coleman.
“My life has been one of order and balance, based on grammar and taste and impeccable manners,” Mingus said in their relationship memoir, Tonight Noon: A Love Story. (2002) wrote. “Yet something about the man across the room felt strangely familiar, like someone I already knew.”
By the end of the 1960s, the two were more than just lovers. She was his manager, agent, best friend, and emotional support system. She booked his shows, arranged grants and teaching positions, and helped keep him sober and relatively clean from the prescription drugs and alcohol that disrupted his previous career.
And when he was diagnosed with ALS in the mid-1970s, she sought out experimental surgery. They were in Mexico for such treatment when he died. Following his wish, she scattered his ashes in the Ganges River in India.
It was after his death that Mingus showed the true strength of her dedication. She arranged her two-day festival of Mingus music at Carnegie Hall and oversaw the founding of the Mingus dynasty soon thereafter. This is a seven-piece his band playing both old Mingus standards and songs he didn’t bring to life, often arranged by longtime Mingus collaborators. Cy Johnson passed away in July.
Mingus cataloged her husband’s work and donated it to the Library of Congress. This is her one of the greatest gifts of all time for a black musician’s work. When one of her catalogers found her 200-page, 15-pound sheet music for “Epitaph,” she asked composer and conductor Günther 31 musicians under her Schuller’s direction. asked to play.
That concert, ten years after Mingus’ death, revived his interest in music and formed two more repertoire bands.
Any week in New York, jazz fans head to Fez, an underground club on Lafayette Street, to hear the Mingus Big Band, then shuffle to Tribeca’s City Hall Restaurant to hear the Mingus Orchestra. Focusing on composition, he featured exotic instruments such as bassoons and French horns. During that time, I was able to pick up any number of her records released on her label Revenge and her Sue Mingus Music.
Releasing music that was previously only available through bootleg recordings, Revenge showed how committed Ms. Mingus was to her husband’s legacy.
By the late 1980s, she was outraged by the large number of pirated recordings of Mingus concerts. She made a habit of getting as many records as she could from the record store, and made no attempt to hide her anti-piracy vigilantism, daring the clerks to stop her.
A clerk did so during a visit to Paris in 1991. She was taken to see her by a manager who berated her before taking her phone to call her police.
“I told him to go at once,” wrote the liner notes to the 1996 concert album Charles Mingus: Revenge. “I would also suggest calling the daily papers, the evening news TV crews, and the major French jazz magazines who happen to have offices across the street so they can explain everything to everyone at once. did.”
The manager hung up and made her leave with the record in hand.
Sue Graham was born on April 2, 1930 in Chicago and raised in Milwaukee. Her family were musicians. Her father, Louis Graham, was a businessman and amateur opera singer, and her mother, Estelle (Stone) Graham, was a homemaker and harpist.
After graduating from Smith College with a degree in history in 1952, she moved to Paris to work as editor of the International Herald Tribune.
After that, I went to Rome to work as an editor for an aviation magazine called Clipper, where I met and married the artist Alberto Ungaro. They had her two children, Roberto and Susannah, and moved to New York City in 1958. She worked for her alternative weekly, New York Her Free Her Press, and in 1969 she founded the cultural magazine Changes.
She subsequently separated from Ungaro, who died in 1968. Mingus has four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren, along with her children.
Despite her decades of hard work, Mingus never fully acknowledged honing her husband’s legacy.
In 2002, she told The Boston Globe: