Charles Mingus Childhood — Watts, Los Angeles

Charles Mingus grew up in the Watts neighbourhood of South Los Angeles — then a mixed community, decades before the 1965 uprising that made the name Watts synonymous with racial injustice — and received his musical education in the Fremont High School and through private bass lessons funded by his stepmother. He was a prodigious talent who studied with Red Callender and H. Reinschagen, and his early musical world encompassed both the church gospel his father favoured and the jazz and classical music he was absorbing on his own. The tension between the sacred and the secular, between community and individual genius, runs through his entire career.

Mingus became one of the most significant composers and bandleaders in jazz history — his Mingus Ah Um (1959), The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady (1963), and Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus are among the most ambitious and emotionally complex albums in the idiom. His music engaged directly with civil rights — 'Fables of Faubus' was a satirical attack on the Arkansas governor who resisted school desegregation — and his memoir Beneath the Underdog (1971) is one of the strangest and most revealing documents in jazz literature.

Watts in South Los Angeles has no specific Mingus museum or landmark. The broader South LA music heritage — Central Avenue jazz, the clubs of the 1940s and 1950s — is commemorated in various neighbourhood initiatives. Mingus died in Cuernavaca, Mexico, in 1980; his ashes were scattered in the Ganges River at his wife Sue's direction.