Abstract
His Jelly Roll Soul: Reclaiming the past, the minstrel mask, and the communal blast in Charles Mingus’s Jazz Workshop
Composer, bandleader, and bassist Charles Mingus was among the earliest modern jazz figures dialoguing with New Orleans-style jazz. His musical language included African American idioms in his construction of a history of jazz, and it also linked early practices of collective improvisation in New Orleans to the avant-garde players of the 1960s. In chapter 1, using analytical and historical methodologies, I examine how Mingus signifies on traditional jazz practices in recordings and transcriptions of “Dizzy’s Moods” (RCA, 1957), “My Jelly Roll Soul,” (Atlantic, 1959), and “Jelly Roll” (Columbia, 1959). In chapter 2, I discuss the legacies of minstrelsy in the performative styles of Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, and Fats Waller that shaped Mingus’s performer identity as he sought to re-animate the work of his predecessors within an environment not well-disposed to them. In chapter 3, I discuss Mingus as leader and teacher through interviews with Jazz Workshop members, showing the intersection of compositional and improvisational technique in his work, including his use of group interplay and collective improvisation. His reënactments of the black Pentecostal church rituals he witnessed as a youth invoke ecstatic commnal events in recordings of “Jump Monk,” “Moanin,” and “Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting.”
