This is a rebroadcast from Toast of the Nation 2008-2009. The music from this session is now on the Grammy Award-winning album, Mingus Big Band Live at Jazz Standard. The person most responsible for ...

Fifty years ago this October, Charles Mingus was one of about three dozen major figures in Black American music honored during a convocation at Yale University. "The Conservatory Without Walls," as ...

In the summer of 1939, a 17-year-old bassist named Charles Mingus made a fateful trip to the Bay Area. While already possessed by extraordinary ambition—a racially ambiguous jazz artist drawn to ...

In my music, I’m trying to play the truth of what I am. The reason it’s difficult is because I’m changing all the time. Dealing and dancing you home. The Mitchell version is based on the tenor sax ...

The bassist’s reissued ‘Mingus at Monterey’ and the drummer’s previously unreleased ‘Strasbourg 82’ highlight both musicians ...

How big an impact did Charles Mingus have beyond the jazz world? And why are so many stylistically disparate artists drawn to the music of the legendary composer, bassist and band leader, who died in ...

“I’m trying to play the truth of what I am. The reason it’s difficult is because I’m changing all the time.” — Charles Mingus More than almost any other great music innovator in or out of jazz, ...

This year saw Sue Mingus starting her own record label, Sue Mingus Music, in a partnership with Sunnyside Records; its first release, I Am Three, is a remarkable—and remarkably cohesive—joint CD ...

This is FRESH AIR. In 1973, jazz composer and bass virtuoso Charles Mingus signed his last recording contract with Atlantic Records. He'd stay with the label till his death in 1979. A new box set ...

Composer Charles Mingus was a prominent jazz musician with strong ties to California and New York, but his earliest days were spent in Southern Arizona. Mingus was born in Nogales in 1922. His father, ...