This week, jazz buffs celebrate Charles Mingus, born in Nogales, Arizona on 22 April 1922. Virtuoso double bassist, keyboard player, bandleader, composer and author, he pioneered the collective improvisation approach. Sliding in and out of restrictive categories like a cat slides through spaces too narrow for it, he brought together all the strands labelled jazz, from avant grade to ragtime and back again, via blues, bebop, classical, flamenco, gospel and anything else that tickled his ear and threw it all into the mix. In his words, he wanted to make music ‘as varied as my feelings are, or the world is.’

He worked as a sideman and a bandleader, in trios, quartets, quintets and big bands, but was most at home with a group of 8 to 10 fellow musos. Over the years, he led several of these Jazz Workshops with varying personnel. (He called them Jazz Workshops; some band members called them Jazz Sweatshops.) He was at his peak in the 1950s, when he released the seminal Pithecanthropus Erectus (1956) and Ah Um (1959), among other greats; over his whole career, he released 51 albums as bandleader and featured on 34 as a sideman. He is now recognised as one of the most influential figures in 20th century music.

Towering genius though Mingus was, he was also an extremely irascible man, with a violent explosive temper, which is why they called him the Angry Man of Jazz. Knives were pulled. Fists were thrown. There were axes. Hotels were trashed. Irascible maybe too mild a word. He clashed with band members, other musos, hotel staff, audiences, whoever was around. In 1953, Duke Ellington, his idol, sacked him after one performance because of a backstage fight with Puerto Rican trombonist Juan Tizol. 

He fell out publicly on stage with fellow legend and good friend Charlie Parker, once sacked the whole band, including himself, and menaced at knife point musicians who wanted to leave his bands. He punched his trombonist Johnny Knepper so hard he broke a tooth, and Knepper was left with a ruined embouchure and lost a whole octave in his playing range.  

Mingus reacted very violently to insults and disrespect real or imagined,  and never knowingly suffered any fool gladly. He was like a Kilkenny cat fighting himself in a sack. Aside from his acknowledged musical genius, his life seemed to be one long howl of rage, occasionally justifiable. He wrote about it in his quasi-autobiography, 

Beneath the Underdog: His World as Composed by Mingus, composed during the 1960s and published in 1971.  

However, although on a very short fuse spluttering in a permeant red mist on stage or working, at home Mingus could be a pussycat. 

Well, some of the time. 

Well at least with his cat Nightlife. 

Mingus didn’t like cat litter boxes (well who does?) and decided to train Nightlife to use a people toilet. And succeeded, using all the patience, forbearance and gentle encouragement he failed to show to his fellow musos. So successful was he, that in 1954 he wrote and published a short guide to his method, The Charles Mingus Cat-alog for Toilet Training Your Cat.  You can buy a facsimile. 

Belvedere was as flabbergasted as I was when we discovered this gem, and we feared it was a prank, but it is true. When we saw the photograph of Nightlife, a handsome tuxedo cat,  it all made sense. As I have already pointed out (Blogpost for 29 November, National Tuxedo Cat Day), tuxes have brains, class, style and chutzpah they ain’t used yet. I suspect Nightlife knew what to do all along, and was just playing Mingus.  

Thinking of playing, If you have never Mingused before, listen to his album Ah Um (1959), which showcases his versatility and fusion of different jazz styles. Belvedere particularly recommends Track 8, Pussy Cat Dues.

And for more about cats and musicians, including the Nightlife story, see Musical Cats, part of the Creative Cats series.