Charles Mingus’ Town Hall Concert: one of the most disastrous live recordings ever
Not every live show goes to plan and is a roaring success. Anyone who has been in a fledgling band will understand that the first handful of shows won’t necessarily blow the audience away and can sometimes go so catastrophically wrong that it almost scares you off from ever performing in front of an audience ever again. That being said, even some of the all-time greats have gigs that they’d prefer to imagine never having happened, and on one night in October 1962, jazz bassist Charles Mingus would experience this at a show he had so meticulously planned out for years before.
Mingus had long dreamt of performing at the Town Hall in New York, accompanied by a 32-piece orchestra that comprised several trombones, trumpets, saxophones in three different registers, and multiple percussionists, among other musicians. This dream materialised in the early ‘60s when he was beginning to gain traction as a notable performer, arranger, and bandleader.
In the late 1950s, he had already been praised for his post-bop innovations on albums such as Pithecanthropus Erectus and Mingus Ah Um and was beginning to move towards his experimental big band arrangements, which would later be seen on records such as his 1963 classic The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, initially composed as a jazz ballet. Nobody can fault Mingus for his ambitious nature, but perhaps his undertaking for the Town Hall Concert took things a little too far.
His initial idea for the performance was for it to be a ‘live workshop’, showcasing new music that would be recorded and later released by United Artists, but this was far from how things turned out in actuality. His behemoth band didn’t have enough time to rehearse for the show beforehand due to the originally scheduled date being moved forward by five weeks without notice, and there were countless issues with the sound as it tried to cater to the chaos of the large ensemble. Many interruptions to the show also occurred, and not all of them were happening in the audience as one might expect.
Among the ranks of Mingus’ band was trombone player Jimmy Knepper, a performer with whom Mingus had a fraught history prior to the concert. Regularly referred to as ‘the angry man of jazz’ by his peers, Mingus was known to have violent outbursts on stage and was reported to have had an altercation with Knepper on stage on one previous occasion not long after he had attempted to crush the hands of pianist Toshiko Akiyoshi.
What Knepper did on the day of the Town Hall Concert to provoke the bandleader once more isn’t quite known, but Mingus once again lashed out at him mid-concert and broke his tooth in a way that drastically affected his embouchure and prevented him from being able to play his instrument in the same way for two years. Mingus would be charged with assault for this particular tantrum of his and served a suspended sentence.
While United Artists still released the performance later in 1962, they drastically cut the length down to 36 minutes, with the full performance lasting almost double the time, and to make matters worse, none of the performers were credited on the original release. The Complete Town Hall Concert was released by Blue Note in 1994 in an effort to clean up some of the mess of the original recording and features every part of the original show that was omitted from the first release. The conductor Gunther Schuller and Mingus’ wife Sue would also perform much of the music that was originally intended to have been performed as part of the concert in 1989, ten years after Mingus’ death.
Appropriately, one of the missing tracks that would be included in the posthumous performance and release is ‘Epitaph’, so called by the artist because he considered it to be written “for my tombstone”. The song’s entire two-hour duration would never be performed or discovered until after Mingus’ passing.
While much of this performance is considered to be a complete shambles and an example of one of the worst live shows of all time, it has somehow managed to pick up some sort of legacy in the years since the Blue Note reissue. Thom Yorke of Radiohead claims that the recording acted as one of the major influences behind the recording of their seminal 2000 album Kid A, claiming that the utter chaos and tension felt throughout was something the band tried to emulate. This is most immediately noticeable in songs such as ‘The National Anthem’ and ‘Optimistic’, which both reach frenzied climaxes much like the Mingus release.
Whether you see it now as calamitous or genius, the overall performance of the release didn’t affect Mingus’ legacy in the slightest, although his unpredictable nature and harebrained concept were certainly why the concert he had dreamt of for so long was a gigantic failure at the time.
