Charles Mingus wrote a detailed 1954 mail-order manual for teaching a cat to use a toilet, and he was also the virtuoso bassist and composer known as “the angry man of jazz.” Born in 1922 in Nogales, Arizona, and raised in Watts with a mixed Black, white, and Chinese heritage, he grew up in a strict household that allowed only Holiness Pentecostal church music, secretly absorbed Duke Ellington on the radio, and studied cello before racism in classical orchestras pushed him to the double bass.

This deep dive covers his early work with Louis Armstrong and Lionel Hampton, walking out on the Red Norvo trio over racist club owners, the backstage fire-axe confrontation with Juan Tizol that got him fired by Ellington, co-founding Debut Records with Max Roach, and the 1953 Massey Hall concert. It explores the Jazz Workshop “sweatshops,” Pithecanthropus Erectus, Mingus Ah Um, “Fables of Faubus,” the 1960 rival Newport festival, The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, the punch that ruined trombonist Jimmy Knepper’s embouchure, his 1966 eviction, the autobiography Beneath the Underdog, his ALS diagnosis, the Joni Mitchell collaboration, his death in Mexico in 1979, and the posthumous discovery and 1989 premiere of Epitaph.

• Why he taught complex parts by ear instead of handing out sheet music
• “This is not jazz. These are sick people”: his break with bebop’s drug culture
• Double-time and mockery as a musical weapon against Governor Orville Faubus
• Having his psychotherapist write the liner notes for The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady
• Ashon Crawley’s reading of Mingus’s bandstand as a pulpit blending sacred and profane