Charles Mingus was rarely a happy man and yet his music possessed a power to uplift listeners unlike that of most other composer / bandleaders before or after him. It still has that power in 2021, four decades after his passing and on the eve of his hundredth anniversary in 2022. In his personal life, too, Mingus was a mass of conflicts and contradictions. He was by turns depressed and exuberant, though mostly depressed. He could be violent one moment and loving the next. He was martinet on the bandstand but could also be a nurturing leader, quick to heap praise on those musicians he felt deserved it. He blamed the white race for everything he disliked in the world, which was a great deal, yet he was part-white himself. He never used narcotics to ease his pain, but was a compulsive comfort eater whose physique fluctuated wildly between the obese and the merely big. He was the very personification of that ancient clich��, the tortured genius.

Mingus packed such an incendiary mixture of blistering and lyrical music into his career years 1945 to 1979 as to make many other musicians seem practically comatose. As a composer his peers included