In the opening sequence of Scorsese's Taxi Driver, Travis Bickle drives through torrential Manhattan in restless circles as his windshield wipers flap away at the deceptions of his blurry, neon world. The accompanying score is jazz—ominous and persuasive—slinking through the credits and catching in Bickle's cagey glances at the rearview mirror.
Like many musicians, Charles Mingus was writing and performing in New York City in 1963 when he composed his paradoxical six-part jazz ballet, "The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady." Expressive of the perilous inner turmoil edging around every urban corner, "The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady" is distressingly ambivalent and even violent at times. Like Bickle, “TBSATSL” reveals the irreconcilable self, lured and tortured by an even more inscrutable place.
What is compelling about “TBSATSL” is its revelation of pathos through the tension of twos. You can hear it in the friction between the two characters of the piece—the black saint and the sinner lady. And even within each of them, a struggling binary of their own schizophrenic identities figuring virtue and shame. Surrounding all of that is the tension of the acoustic framework pulling tautly between sound and fury. We find binaries in the performance structure, comprised of the opposition between the ensemble and the soloist, between the planned and the improvised, between the self and, well, the selves. And all of it works together as a whole and amazing composition.
The album slopes in with the fat tune off the saxophone. To the urging of the spark of the ride slipping in and out of meter, the gait speeds to a tumbling lope. The insidious curves of the horns dip down low, the trumpet growls. Each by each it builds, pacing and cluttering to a neurotic frenzy of multitudinous voices. Then the break to welcome respite: the pacing slows to a slothful slink, the sloping movements of a fatigued seduction. To hysteria and back again, with a bunch of splendor in between. Mingus levels his compositional, free-jazz density with a plainly divulging musicality that is accessible enough to communicate to a novice like me because when it comes down to it, I just really love this album.
On the cover Mingus cups a lit cigarette close to his face, while above him an epigraph reads: "Touch my beloved's thought while her world's affluence crumbles at my feet."
The most tender touch yields force to weakness and “TBSATSL” is this exchange between the physical and the mental—it takes both somnolent strokes and bruising grips at an interiority that is fiercely neurotic and sensually exhausted. It reveals dysfunction of all sides, inside and outside and aside from the self through that viscerally cracked dialogue between these disparate selves. And lastly it breaks (oh, how it shatters!) with the elegance of feathers, filled with grace and rhythm.
Bickle spills blood, rescues a child prostitute, and the camera pans upwards, overlooking the bloodshed and crime in a consuming wash of red. With liner notes published by his psychiatrist and released the year before Mingus checked himself into a hospital, “TBSATSL” is an artful glimpse of Mingus reeling through all the parts of his fractured and recurring self, driving in the rain and restlessly waiting for sense and resolution.
More on Charles Mingus: www.mingusmingusmingus.com
