Mingus, Nietzschean Aesthetics, and Mental Theater

Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies Vol. 16, No. 3 (2020) Music Performativity in the Album: Charles Mingus, Nietzschean Aesthetics, and Mental Theater David Landes This article analyzes a canonical jazz album through Nietzschean and performance studies concepts, illuminating the album as a case study of multiple performativities. I analyze Charles Mingus’ The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady as performing classical theater across the album’s images, texts, and music, and as a performance to be constructed in audiences’ minds as the sounds, texts, and visuals never simultaneously meet in the same space. Drawing upon Nie- tzschean aesthetics, I suggest how this performative space operates as “mental theater,” hybridizing diverse traditions and configuring distinct dynamics of aesthetic possibility. In this crossroads of jazz traditions, theater traditions, and the album format, Mingus exhibits an artistry between performing the album itself as im- agined drama stage and between crafting this space’s Apollonian/Dionysian in- terplay in a performative understanding of aesthetics, sound, and embodiment. This case study progresses several agendas in performance studies involving music performativity, the concept of performance complex, the Dionysian, and the album as a site of performative space. When Charlie Parker said “If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn” (Reisner 27), he captured a performativity inherent to jazz music: one is lim- ited to what one has lived. To perform jazz is to make yourself per (through) form (semblance, image, likeness). Improvising jazz means more than choos- ing which notes to play. It means steering through an infinity of choices to craft a self made out of sound. Like the stage actor, the jazz musician lives between who they are and who they are becoming. Each choice brings a bio- graphical person into their way of performing someone who they might be- come. Hence Charlie Parker’s next sentence was “They teach you there's a boundary line to music. But, man, there's no boundary line to art” (Reisner 27). Jazz is the art form par excellence where one casts themselves into sound David Landes (PhD in Communication, Rhetoric and Media, University of Pitts- burgh) is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Composition and the Director of the Communication Skills Program at the American University of Beirut. This essay draws upon his background as a freelance musician, film scorer, and jazz practitioner in order to provide a case study for his research into the social con- struction of attention. For more info: https://www.david-landes.com ISSN: 1557-2935 <http://liminalities.net/16-3/mingus.pdf> David Landes Music Performativity in the Album and, in the next second, lets that sound recast them. Charles Mingus captured this, saying, “In my music, I'm trying to play the truth of what I am. The rea- son it's difficult is because I'm changing all the time” (Hentoff 99; Fawcett 56). Jazz is not merely a musical style; jazz is a space of performative potential through sound. Within this space of performative potential, jazz is also ritualized spontaneity. Pianist Bill Evans said, "jazz is not so much a style as [it is] a process of making music—the process of making one minute’s music in one minute’s time, whereas when you compose, you can make one minute’s music in 3 months.” While people mistake jazz as merely a stylistic genre, “jazz is more of a certain creative process of spontaneity than a style” (Cavrell). Charles Mingus considered jazz to be improvisational theater (Ertegun; Porter 118; Saul 154; Santoro 18). Performer and audience come together on the premise of an artistic act occurring live, fresh, and unforeknown within a given frame- work (e.g., a popular song, dance stage, poetry setting). Never performed the same way twice, jazz’s “process aesthetic” imbues meaning into every aspect of the jazz performance, potentiating each part to affect something else. Thus the musicians and audience together participate in this art of continuous refor- mation, forged through a heightened drama of uncertainty, paralleling one of our own performances in social life: the search for the right response to the moment. What to do? How to do it? What not to do? Jazz has long permeated the margins of performance studies. The field’s interest in jazz has focused mostly on theater, dance, and music, exploring how jazz aesthetics enrich various aspects of performance (J. L. Jones; Rog- ers; McRae, “Listening to a Brick”). Many scholarly performance pieces have drawn inspiration from jazz (S. L. H. Jones; McRae, “Miles Away from ‘The Cool’”; Shoemaker; McRae, “Listening, Playing, and Learning”). Jazz has proven to be a helpful thematic for performance studies’ interest in transcend- ing textual epistemologies and in continually refreshing our reflexive practices of knowing and doing (DeChaine). Conversely, performance studies can ar- ticulate tacit aspects of jazz (Davidson). The jazz approach to any medium (e.g., sound, dance, poetry) comprises a rich, fluid set of social practices of general interest to performance studies, as jazz artists, humanities scholars, and social actors alike share related performance problematics. Pairing jazz with performance studies can contribute much to the nature of social embodiment, identity, sound, stagecraft, cultural process, performance phenomenol- ogy, and more. Capable of broadly informing our scholarly and performative practices, the jazz legacy is best understood capaciously, not merely as a craft or style, but as “a mode of social action that musicians selectively employ in their process of communicating” (Monson). Monson’s idea of jazz as a gener- alized method of approach bridges the two fields in a shared vocabulary: jazz brims with performativities, performativity brims with jazz-like dynamics. One of jazz’s canonical works makes a compelling, suggestive case study for performance studies. Charles Mingus’ 1963 long-form jazz album, The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady (BSSL), reflexively explores many cross-rela- tions between jazz and performance. The BSSL portrays a self-depiction of 2 David Landes Music Performativity in the Album Mingus himself in an album where Mingus “reconceived jazz as performance art” and “called his outfits Jazz Workshops… in the same sense as drama workshops” (Santoro 18). The album casts Mingus’ into the role of protago- nist of a performed monument of mythic martyrdom. The album has extensive liner notes functioning as a 4000-word playbill containing commentary from Mingus’ psychiatrist as well as Mingus’ own commentaries, confessions, advi- sories, philosophies, and impassioned musings. The album comprises a prodi- gious breadth of performance traditions, filling up every space of the album’s resources with elements of theatre (dramatic narrative), visual art (album images), text (liner notes), music (composed for ballet dancers), and performs them with coherence and force. These elements loosely hang together as an open text, comprised of a patchwork of allegory, partially-veiled references, and thematic fragments. The album configures the performance across all these constituting elements. As a result, the album demands that the performance be constructed by the audience, to be read and reread for how the disparate elements work together at different times with the music. The audience has to deliberately make choices to bring the text together in their minds since the sounds, texts, and visuals never simultaneously meet in the same space—a kind of “mental theater” emerging from the aesthetics and performativities in this album. Performative analysis of the BSSL contributes to performance studies and scholarly conversations about the BSSL. Commentaries have addressed its compositional aspects (Rustin-Paschal 92), orchestration (Huey), and technological innovation in overdubbing in jazz (Huey; Kirchner 430). Inter- pretations have understood the BSSL as a cultural movement (Heisler 190; Rustin-Paschal 90), a political strategy (Saul 182), a psychologizing of the au- thor (Saul), a sexual concourse for the listener (Saul 196), and as Mingus’ search for a language (Rustin-Paschal 10). Such interpretations of the BSSL—and of jazz and music generally—are predominantly based on artist interviews and musical form, which overlook a critical site of aesthetic action: how do the BSSL’s forms amount to its effects? What about this album con- stitutes its aesthetic power? This question pervades philosophy1 but is also paradigmatic to performance studies. The concept of performance focuses upon the mediations between form and form’s deployment, which transforms meaning and impact. Emphasizing the per- of per-formance directs attention to the through-ness occurring upon form, as any formal structure is always en- acting something in a concrete context, embodiment, and temporality. Thus, using performance as a hermeneutic rehabilitates our aesthetic analyses to in- clude the tacit process-knowledges excised from logocentric aesthetics (Con- quergood). Doing so inclines aesthetic analysis toward what is traditionally “mysterious” about aesthetics (though only mysterious by virtue of 1 Nietzsche argues that “Almost all the problems of philosophy once again pose the same form of question as they did two thousand years ago: how can something origi- nate in its opposite, for example rationality in irrationality, the sentient in the dead, logic in unlogic, disinterested contemplation in covetous desire, living for others in

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