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| Mingus, Eric |
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| It does not take a jazz connoisseur to associate the name Mingus with one of the greatest bassists and most socially committed musicians in the history of jazz. Eric Jr. shares more with his father, Charles Mingus, than just his physical stature. He also inherited his father’s devotion to music, massive passion, profound connection to the spirit of tradition, disarming sincerity, and a genuine grounding. Musically, however, he goes in a completely different direction.
Eric Mingus is a blues singer, but his blues does not evoke the spirit of the cotton fields. Eric Mingus is an urban singer, who unites in his enormous body the entire power and contradictoriness of New York. In his music the Mississippi flows right into the Hudson River.
Naturally someone like Eric Mingus is born to a musical career. But Mingus never made it easy on himself. He didn’t slip into his father’s shoes but pulled on his own boots. He first came to attention in Karen Mantler’s project My Cat Arnold. On his two solo records, "Um . . . Er . . . Uh . . ." (2000) and "Too Many Bullets . . . Not Enough Soul" (2002) he explored a mixture of blues and avant-garde jazz. Yet he was always a storyteller. With the casualness of an earthquake he tells about everyday emotions. Sometimes his short stories are accompanied only by bass. An echo of the glowing core of the earth, inviolable and eternal. His songs are frequently interspersed with spoken word pieces in which Mingus’s vocal cry is manifested so urgently that he sends chills down his listeners’ backs.
In recent years he has been touring primarily as the singer in Elliott Sharp’s blues guerilla group Terraplane, and its goal-oriented power no doubt left its traces on Eric`s first intuition-CD "Healin‘ Howl" as well. |
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