Rebels and Volkswagens: Charles Mingus and the commodification of dissent

For most of its history, the relationship between jazz and commerce has frequently been characterized as fundamentally oppositional. This stance can be seen in Stanley Crouch's acerbic criticisms of Miles Davis for his "pernicious effect on the music scene since he went rapaciously commercial" (quoted in Porter 2002,302); in Amiri Baraka's furious characterization of the mainstream white (and middle-class black) American commercial aesthetic of "social blandness" that threatened to efface jazz's black cultural roots (Baraka 1963,181); and in the assertions of jazz historians such as Grover Sales (1984), Lewis Porter (1997), and Mark Gridley (2006) that jazz does not belong to the category of popular music and, as such, is not beholden to the vicissitudes of the marketplace. While a number of musicologists and sociologists have published compelling work in the last fifteen years debunking this binary, (1) the notion of an opposition between music (jazz particularly) and commerce has proved remarkably durable, both in jazz musicians' own understanding of their relationship to the culture industries and in the way that relationship is represented in the popular media.

In some respects, Charles Mingus, the bassist, composer, bandleader, and sometime author, was the equal of Crouch, Baraka, Sales, Porter, Gridley, and other historians in his adamant views that the encroachment of commercial concerns had an enormously deleterious impact on artistic production. Along with Baraka, Mingus was vociferously critical of the destructive impact that the white-controlled culture industries had on the music of black Americans. Over the course of his career, Mingus became famous for his anticommercial rants--both in person and in print. In 1953, for instance, Mingus publicly railed against white promoters who marketed musicians whom he deemed to be artistically deficient: "impresarios bill these circus artists as jazzmen because 'jazz' has become a commodity to sell, like apples or, more accurately, com" (quoted in Saul 2001,398).

The discursive tension between art and commerce continues to be a defining theme in the popular life of jazz music in our own day. While it is certainly manifest in numerous valences of twentieth- and twenty-first-century jazz discourse--from specialized criticism to the popular press to the public and private discussions of musicians--this tension is seldom articulated more clearly than in television advertising. When corporate marketing departments and advertising agencies enlist the music to help build a brand identity, they inevitably hone in on jazz's long-standing anticommercial status to burnish the commodity with a countercultural veneer. In the late 1990s, for example, Volkswagen was seeking to reconnect with what had become its primary North American demographic: young drivers. In 1997, working with Boston-based advertising agency Arnold Worldwide, the company launched a new campaign based around the slogan "Drivers Wanted." Arnold's chief creative officer Ron Lawner described the character of the brand that the campaign was aiming to develop in an interview with Adweek magazine in 2000. He used humanizing, humorous terms, which recall the Doyle Dane Bembach campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s, as if the Volkswagen brand were an individual Volkswagen driver: "Approachable, honest, with a sense of humor; the kind of people you like to be around.... They are passionate, they have a lust for living and a lust for driving ... but don't take themselves too seriously" (Parpis 2000). Based on the extended version of the slogan, the ideal Volkswagen driver is also clearly someone who takes charge, who is in control, and who refuses to bend to social or institutional pressure: "On the road of life, there are passengers and there are drivers. Drivers wanted."

In 1999, Arnold produced a series of television ads on the "Driver's Wanted" theme that developed this brand personality. In fact, as Adweek writer Eleftheria Parpis explained, the advertisements in the series were not intended to sell cars based on specific technical attributes, per se, but rather to attract consumers by introducing them to the new, distinctive, appealing brand identity. Hence, Lawner's profile of the ideal Volkswagen driver is key to understanding any of the 1999 advertisements. Seven of these spots were named Best Spot of the Month by Adweek, one of the American advertising industry's most prominent periodicals, making it one of the most successful and influential television campaigns in the last several decades.

Among the first of the "magnificent seven" ads (as Adweek called them) was a spot for the Jetta released in March 1999 called "Great Escape." As was true of nearly every spot in the campaign, the real star of "Great Escape" was the soundtrack: in this case, the music of Charles Mingus. The ad featured a heavily edited rendition of Mingus's classic composition "II B.S." taken from his 1963 album, Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus. (2) As Nicholas Cook has observed, "Musical styles and genres offer unsurpassed opportunities for communicating complex social or attitudinal messages practically instantaneously. One or two notes in a distinctive musical style are sufficient to target a specific social and demographic group, and to associate a whole nexus of social and cultural values with the product" (Cook 1994,35). In a car ad where the car itself is secondary in importance to the personality of the brand, "II B.S." and its attendant "nexus of social and cultural values" becomes the mortar that holds the psychographic layers of the Jetta advertisement together.

This article explores the unexpected relationship between three seemingly unrelated subjects: (1) anticommercial music and art criticism from the 1920s through the 1960s in the United States; (2) the music and discourse of Charles Mingus, particularly during the late 1950s and early 1960s; and (3) Arnold's advertising campaign for Volkswagen in 1999. I propose that "II B.S." generates meaning in the Volkswagen Jetta spot by drawing out three primary, integrated discursive themes: (1) rebellion against institutional oppression, (2) individual agency and self-determination, and (3) an implicit sense of political opposition to the ideologies of commercialization and consumption that sustain American capitalism. I suggest that it is through the interplay of these themes over the course of the spot that the consumer comes to understand the character of the Volkswagen brand that Lawner described. These same themes are also central to the critical discourse of Mingus in terms of his music, his prose, and his activism. Since "II B.S." is unquestionably embedded in Mingus's own biography and his ideas about the politics and economics of music making, I argue that the Jetta ad depends on Mingus himself--almost as if he were an unseen character in the spot. Finally, I assert that it is also important to understand that although Mingus is unquestionably a colossal figure in jazz history, he certainly did not stand apart from the broader flows of American sociocultural, aesthetic, and economic discourse. In this sense, Mingus is both a participant in and a representative of the interrelated aesthetic and sociopolitical debates that held sway in the jazz field throughout the twentieth century. These ideas and events framed his own music and discourse, and, in turn, through Mingus, jazz history and discourse knit together the disparate elements of the Volkswagen psychographic profile. In short, then, this article explores how twentieth-century aesthetic debates about jazz, individual agency, and the culture industries coalesce through the music and discourse of Mingus during the late 1950s and early 1960s in order to sell Volkswagen Jettas in 1999.

"You've Taken My Blues and Gone:" Jazz, Commerce, and the Culture Industries, 1920-1960

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, jazz was the subject of numerous critical attacks from many sectors of the American press. (3) Jazz's emergence as a national phenomenon resulted from the sweeping racial demographic changes in northern U.S. cities (commonly known as the Great Migration), together with the parallel development of the tools and technologies of mass mediation. Meanwhile, the newly pervasive automobile afforded young people a theretofore unimaginable mobility (both social and physical) that seemed to threaten the very fabric of the American family. In the face of such dramatic social, cultural, and economic shifts, it is hardly surprising that negative critical responses to jazz would suture together modern anxieties about race, sex, gender, and industrial capitalism. Newspapers and magazines such as the New Orleans Picayune, Musical America, the New Republic, and Ladies' Home Journal directed their assault at jazz's perceived lowbrow lasciviousness and the pursuant danger of miscegenation. In an article printed in Ladies' Home Journal in December 1921 titled "Unspeakable Jazz Must Go!," Journal contributor John McMahon interviewed Fenton T. Bott, director of dance reform in the American National Association Masters of Dancing. In Bott's view, "Don Juan never had such a potent instrument of downfall as the ultra dance supplies to every evil-purposed male to-day. The road to hell is too often paved with jazz steps" (McMahon [1921] 2002, 163). Imbricated with Bott's fears of the threat jazz posed to sexual propriety was his moral outrage against the music's perceived status as mere crass commercialism. For commentators like Bott, jazz had no intrinsic aesthetic value; its sole social value lay in its status as a commodity for commercial exchange. Bott therefore focused his fury at American music publishers for putting profit ahead of their moral duty: "Now, at the 1920 convention of our association we appealed to the music publishers to eliminate jazz music. A representative of the publishers came before us and replied that personally he was against the indecent stuff, being himself a church elder or deacon, but the publishers had to give the public what they wanted and they also had to reckon with stockholders calling for dividends. That's a fine argument!" (162). Other critics connected jazz directly to the trappings of commercial mass production--especially the automobile. In Harcourt Farmer's June 1920 Musical America article, "The Marche Funebre of 'Jazz'," the author explicitly linked jazz to the Ford company: "If we recall that the persons immediately interested in the survival of Jazz unmusic are the sellers of it, we are spared a deal of conjecture as to the reason of its continued existence even so far as this. But Jazz, like cheese and Fords, has to be pushed, else would there be no gorgeous dividends to split up" (Farmer [1920] 2002, 144).

Farmer extended the metaphor through the article, referring to jazz musicians as "jazz mechanics" and their performance process as "building jazz times" (146). Like Bott, Farmer proposed that jazz is the offspring of the processes of industrial mass-production, and therefore does not even qualify as music. Hence, the only comprehensible rationale for producing this "unmusic" was money: "they rightly decided that the more ugly and noisy their stuff was the more it would sell. And it has sold. More Jazz sold last month than Beethoven" (146).

Theodor Adorno's 1936 article, "On Jazz," (4) is among the most trenchant articulations of this anti-jazz position. Adorno writes, "Jazz is a commodity in the strict sense: its suitability for use permeates its production in terms none other than its marketability, in the most extreme contradiction to the immediacy of its use not merely in addition to but also within the work process itself. It is subordinate to the laws and also to the arbitrary nature of the market, as well as the distribution of its competition or even its followers" ([1936] 2002, 473).

Like the American critics, Adorno argues that jazz has no value outside its status as a commodity and no social function other than its marketability. Adorno also echoes (and in some respects clarifies) the perceived relationship between jazz, commerce, and the supposed loosening of sexual mores among American youth--especially young women. "The pace of the gait itself--language bears witness to this--has an immediate reference to coitus; the rhythm of the gait is similar to the rhythm of sexual intercourse; and if the new dances have demystified the erotic magic the old ones, they have also--and therein at least they are more advanced than one might expect--replaced it with the drastic innuendo of sexual consummation" (Adorno 2002, 486). It is worth noting that Adorno's writing does not evince the same moral hysteria that characterizes much of the contemporary American criticism; nevertheless, by connecting jazz, sex, commerce, and social decay (and implicitly, race), Adorno reiterates the commonplace American ideological viewpoint, merely within a different moral framework.

Given that jazz's most vehement critics focused their rhetoric on what they argued was a causal relationship between jazz's perceived crass commercialism and the moral turpitude of American youth, it is unsurprising that commerce would have been a similarly central theme in the commentary of the music's most ardent defenders. In his 1942 book, Le Vrai Jazz, French jazz writer Hugues Panassie became one of a number of key commentators who positioned jazz as an anticommodity that, far from being a crassly commercial driver of American moral and aesthetic decadence, was in fact a victim of a monolithic, singular culture industry, hungry for profit at any cost. Panassie was especially vitriolic in his lamentation that black jazz musicians "must submit to the corruption of an outrageous commercialism, as well as to the conventional musical notions of the white man and the current theories about necessary progress" (quoted in DeVeaux 1991, 536). He wrote with romantic passion and flair about informal jam sessions, spaces where he thought musicians were at liberty to make "the real jazz" without interference from the commercial realm: "This is the music they are not permitted to play in the large commercial orchestras which they have been forced to join to earn their living. The jam session overflows and [allows] the musicians [to] play out of a love of music ... simply because the music makes them feel intensely alive" (quoted in DeVeaux 1989, 11-12).

Of course, underlying Panassie's discussion of jazz authenticity was a palpable sense of racialized primitivism. The commodification of art was, in his view, one of many odious consequences of "civilization" in general--particularly in its contemporary industrial capitalist formation. Panassie explains, "Primitive man generally has greater talent than civilized man. An excess of culture atrophies inspiration, and men crammed with culture tend to play tricks, to replace inspiration by lush technique under which one finds music stripped of real vitality" (quoted in Gennari 1991,466). Indeed, Jeffrey H. Jackson has shown that this primitivist theme undergirded much French jazz criticism of the era (2003, 100). With this in mind, Panassie's jazz concept is actually strikingly similar to the anti-jazz literature that it ostensibly opposed: both positioned jazz as primitive, and both manifested a pervasive anxiety about the ways in which (masculinized) subjects were falling increasingly into the thrall of (feminized) capitalism and mass culture. The signal difference between Panassie and the dissonant voices from the American press was that for jazz's opponents, the music was a symptom of the growing industrialization, massification, and homogenization of Western society, whereas for Panassie it was the cure. Clearly, jazz's discursive opposition to commerce and commodification has always been about much more than money.

Curiously, the handful of prominent black writers and critics who were active during this period--particularly those associated with the Harlem Renaissance movement--remained conspicuously ambivalent in their stance on jazz. According to Nathan Irvin Huggins, although many Harlem intellectuals frequented the New York jazz clubs through the 1920s and 1930s, surprisingly few of them wrote about it in any detail (2007, 11). During his years as editor of the NAACP journal, The Crisis, W. E. B. Du Bois penned numerous articles about black music, but pointedly ignored jazz (as well as blues) music, suggesting only that it should be generally disregarded until such time as it had developed into a "serious" form of art (Drop Me Off in Harlem 2010). Those few Harlem intellectuals who did address jazz--notably Alain Locke and Langston Hughes--often reiterated the same kind of anticommercial idealism that predominated in Panassie's writing. According to Hughes--the author of a regular column in the widely read black newspaper, The Chicago Defender, where jazz was a regular focus--the music's very existence spoke to the enormous innate creativity of lower-class African Americans:

In Hughes's view, jazz developed through the pleasure and play of a people who had been largely excluded from American capitalism; indeed, the music was precisely enabled by their exclusion. While middle-class urban white Americans were subject to the standardization and rationalization of American life, marginalized lower-class blacks were left to choose to "work a little today, rest a little tomorrow, play a while, sing a while." Hence, for Hughes--as for Panassie--jazz was a folk art: an art whose development was permitted by the physical and conceptual distance of its creators from American industrialization and commercialization. (5)

When the commercial system began to intrude upon the traditional life-ways of these purportedly simple folk and their music, the effects were seen to be decidedly negative. In his 1936 book, The Negro and His Music, Alain Locke suggests that the process of commercialization was highly damaging: "The common enemy is the ever-present danger of commercialization which, until quite recently, has borne with ever-increasing blight upon the healthy growth of this music" (Locke 1968,82). In Locke's view, it was the aesthetic and moral duty of jazz musicians to resist commercialization in all its forms.

Resonances of Locke's opinions on commercialization can be found in both the poetry and prose of Hughes. In his 1940 poem, "Note on Commercial Theater," for instance, Hughes accuses a host of white-dominated culture industry institutions of co-opting black music (the blues and spirituals in particular), and rendering it both culturally and politically anemic: "You've taken my blues and gone--/ You sing 'em on Broadway / And you sing 'em in Hollywood Bowl / And you mixed 'em up with symphonies / And you fixed 'em / So they don't sound like me. / Yep, you done taken my blues and gone" (Hughes 1994). (6) In Hughes's view, by "mixing" black music up with Euro-American pop and classical music and by performing it in commercial venues intended for Euro-American music, the unnamed white culture industry doyens ("You") effectively cut the blues and spirituals (and by extension, jazz) loose from their specifically black folk-cultural origins (1970, 190).

Of course, this distrust of the white-dominated culture industries was by no means isolated in 1920s Harlem. It continued to be a pervasive frame for aesthetic commentary with respect to virtually all artistic media in virtually every comer of the English-speaking world through the 1950s, 1960s, and beyond, including the Black Power movement, in which Charles Mingus was indirectly implicated. Amiri Baraka was among the most visible, prolific, and unequivocally strident commentators to take up the Black Power cause, arguing passionately--and often violently--against the appropriation of black cultural practices by the white-controlled culture industries. Baraka targeted much of his most heated criticism at the black middle class: a group whom he accused of betraying their heritage because they recognized that it was socially and economically disadvantageous to act black in a society that largely repudiated blackness. In his 1963 critical history of jazz and blues music, Blues People: Negro Music in White America, Baraka wrote,

In Baraka's estimation, the black middle classes willfully favored industrial cultural commodities because they wished to ingratiate themselves to the dominant race and to distance themselves from the lower classes. Thus, when Baraka asserted that swing music, for instance, "submerged all the most impressive acquisitions from Afro-American musical tradition beneath a mass of 'popular' commercialism," and that "swing sought to involve the black culture in a platonic social blandness that would erase it forever, replacing it with the socio-cultural compromise of the "jazzed-up" popular song," he was impugning both the white-controlled culture industries and their black middle-class consumers.

While there is considerable ideological distance between Baraka's work and that of Hugues Panassie, Alain Locke, and Langston Hughes, not to mention the writers associated with Ladies' Home Journal and the other various 1920s newspapers, we do nevertheless see key common discursive threads. Despite their many differences, these writers and critics share a pervasive distaste for the workings of leviathan culture industries, a severe distrust of the bourgeoisie, and a profound contempt for the perceived ignorance of the culture industries' consumer base. These threads form the discursive-rhetorical groundwork that undergirds American anticommercial aesthetic commentary throughout the twentieth century, and into the twenty-first.

"You My Audience...": Charles Mingus, Dissent, and Commodification

In his 1966 essay, "The Changing Same: R&B and New Black Music," Amiri Baraka identified black American bassist and composer Charles Mingus as one of the leaders of an activist, anticommercial movement he saw taking shape within avant-garde jazz:

Baraka clearly positioned Mingus in opposition to mainstream (white) American capitalism--what he elsewhere referred to as the American aesthetic of "social blandness" (1963, 181). For Baraka, whereas the commercial mainstream represents a "strait jacket," typified by "popular song," and "American white cocktail droop, tinkle, etc.," Mingus's music has a screaming, yearning, pleading "life" (1968, 209).

Mingus's music is inextricable from his politics. From the mid-1950s, he was composing and recording music with explicitly politicized titles such as "Work Song" and "Haitian Fight Song" (later rerecorded as "II B.S.," the version used in the Volkswagen spot)--both written in 1955. His 1960 album, Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus, stands as a particularly uncompromising musical exposition of his views on the American culture industries. The record takes the form of a staged live performance (in actuality, recorded in studio), with Mingus posing as master of ceremonies. In his MC monologues, Mingus continually baits his imaginary audience. In his introductory remarks prior to the first song of the "set," Mingus outlines the venue's performance policy: "Good evening ladies and gentlemen. We'd like to remind you that we don't applaud here at the Show Place ... so restrain your applause, and, if you must applaud, wait 'til the end of the set, and it won't even matter then. The reason is that we are interrupted by your noise. In fact, don't even take any drinks or no cash register ringing, etcetera" (Mingus 1960).

Mingus demands that he and his group be the exclusive focal point of the performance paradigm; the venue should be utterly silent except for the music. He even regards the audience's applause--presumably a marker of their appreciation of the music--as meaningless "noise" that would be best stifled. His instructions about drinks and the cash register (which he repeats in subsequent introductory monologues on the recording) are especially important: the constant clinking of glasses and ringing of the cash register are sure signs that the bar--the financial engine of any club--is doing brisk business. In Mingus's imagined club, however, the commerce at the bar and its attendant sounds must take a back seat to the music.

A prolific writer, Mingus was just as outspoken about the ravages of commercialism in his prose as he was in his music. More than almost any of his contemporaries, Mingus became noted for the degree to which he controlled his own public discourse. Whether through his close friendships with prominent journalists and jazz critics such as Ralph Gleason and Nat Hentoff, (7) through his frequent letters to major jazz periodicals like Down Beat, or through his collaborative and individual book projects, one was almost as likely to encounter Mingus as a reader in the 1960s as much as a listener.

One of Mingus's most infamous rants against commercialism occurred in 1955 at the Five Spot, a club in New York. The rant was recorded, transcribed, and eventually published in 1960 in the collection The Jazz Word as an essay called "Mingus ..." by Diane Dorr-Dorynek, a professional and romantic partner:

You, my audience, are all a bunch of poppaloppers. A bunch of tumbling weeds tumbling 'round, running from your subconscious ... minds. Minds? Minds that won't let you stop to listen to a word of artistic or meaningful truth. You don't want to see your ugly selves, the untruths, the lies you give to life ... So you come to me, you sit in the front row, as noisy as can be. I listen to your millions of conversations, sometimes pulling them all up and putting them together and writing a symphony. But you never hear that symphony ... All of you sit there, digging yourselves and each other, looking around hoping to be seen and observed as hip. You become the object you came to see, and you think you're important and digging jazz when all the time all you're doing is digging a blind, deaf scene that has nothing to do with any kind of music at all. (Quoted in Saul 2001, 400)

In this remarkable passage, Mingus inverts the performer-audience paradigm. Mingus, the supposed artist in the conventional paradigm, becomes the observer: he watches audience members performing their own hipness for each other and he responds to their performance with his music. In this new paradigm, however, Mingus loses control over the meaning of his art: because his pointedly satirical "symphony" is ignored by the audience--its collective target--he is reduced to an authenticating presence, a veneer of hipness that serves exclusively to reflect the audience's own hip performance back at them. Since his music has become commodified and circulated in the world of commercial exchange that was largely outside of his control, Mingus can no longer dictate the terms under which his music will be received and understood.

Despite the apparently absolute anticommercialism presented in Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus and the Five Spot rant, elsewhere the bassist evinced a considerably more nuanced approach in his engagement with the culture industries. His insistence that commerce be subservient to art certainly did not preclude him from insisting with equal vigor that he and his collaborators and colleagues be paid well. Indeed, throughout his career, Mingus worked actively to change the racist economics of the music industry, fighting for improved wages for himself and his collaborators. In a 1964 roundtable interview conducted by Playboy magazine, he contrasted his own perspective on money with that of free jazz pianist, Cecil Taylor: "[Cecil Taylor] told me one time, "Charlie, I don't want to make any money. I don't expect to. I'm an artist." Who told people that artists aren't supposed to feed their families beans and greens? I mean, just because somebody didn't make money hundreds of years ago because he was an artist doesn't mean that a musician should not be able to make money today and still be an artist" ("The Playboy Panel" 1999,273).

Mingus exhibited this point of view publicly in his dealings with Newport Jazz Festival organizer George Wein in 1960: in response to Wein's lowball offer of $700 for his band, Mingus refused to appear for anything less than $5,000 (Gennari 2006, 181). When Wein refused, Mingus and Max Roach undertook to organize a counterevent in Newport, the Newport Rebel Festival. Scott Saul describes it as, "an anti-festival where the musicians seized the means of production: Mingus, Roach, and Eric Dolphy slept in tents along the beach, constructed the stage themselves, and solicited contributions from the audiences by walking around with can-in-hand" (2001,400).

Indeed, according to Mingus's widow, Sue Mingus, the vast majority of the bassist's more notoriously violent outbursts were precipitated by disputes over money. I discussed this issue with her in June 2010 in a midtown Manhattan apartment that doubles as her home and the offices of Jazz Workshop, Inc., the organization (run by Ms. Mingus) that oversees her late husband's musical and business affairs. During the interview, I asked her about a story that had been related to me by Jed Eisenmen, one of the comanagers of the Village Vanguard, a jazz club in Greenwich Village that had often hosted Charles Mingus's groups from the 1950s on:

MARK LAVER: I was at the Vanguard the other night, and Jed, the manager ... told me his favorite story about one time Charles, I guess, tore the door off the hinges and threw it at Max Gordon [the late owner of the club].

SUE MINGUS: No, he didn't throw it at Max, he just threw it down the stairs. He didn't throw it at Max. He wrenched it off the door and threw it down the stairs. Yes, he did that.... But he wasn't ... Charles took action, maybe more violently than some, but if he wasn't getting paid ... It was over something where he wasn't paid. Normally he would either say that he would walk off with the cash register, or [laughs] ...

MARK LAYER: I guess you called it creative violence or something?

SUE MINGUS: Creative violence, yeah. Creative opposition, he would call it. Creative opposition. (Mingus 2010)

In her autobiography, Tonight At Noon: A Love Story, Sue Mingus describes other instances of "creative opposition" or "creative anger," including a visit Charles Mingus paid to executives at Columbia Records to discuss overdue royalty payments in the late 1950s. He arrived at the meeting wearing a khaki suit and pith helmet and carrying a shotgun, and he left the meeting with his royalty check (2002, 38). Mingus consistently responded to the inequitable working and wage conditions of the white-run music industry by finding creative ways to protest.

Fair wages were all the more important given the racial dynamics of the music industry at the time (dynamics that persist to a considerable extent in the present day). As many contemporary black and progressive white commentators observed, while the vast majority of jazz musicians were black, virtually every power broker in the music industry--promoter, club owner, manager, publisher, critic, and record producer--was white. In his 1976 book, Jazz Is, the Jewish-American critic Nat Hentoff quotes black trumpeter Rex Stewart's remarks on the issue: "Where the control is, the money is. Do you see any of us running any record companies, booking agencies, radio stations, music magazines?" (1976, 276). Mingus, too, was acutely aware of this imbalance. In the Playboy roundtable discussion, responding to accusations that his characterization of jazz as "Negro music" constituted reverse racism (so-called "Crow Jim"), Mingus declared, "Until we own Bethlehem Steel and RCA Victor, plus Columbia Records and several other industries, the term Crow Jim has no meaning. And to use that term about those of us who say that this music is essentially Negro is inaccurate and unfeeling. Aren't you white men asking too much when you ask me to stop saying this is my music? Especially when you don't give me anything else?" ("The Playboy Panel" 1999, 289).

Mingus's statement further underscores the significance of fair wages: the demand for a fair wage becomes a way for the black musician to assert her or his ownership of the product itself, even as that product is disseminated through a white-run system of exchange over which the musician had little direct control. If, as Mingus asserts, jazz is "[his] music," he should be entitled to fair monetary compensation for his musical labor.

It is important to note that Mingus was not alone in these views. Speaking candidly to A. B. Spellman in the mid-1960s, avant-garde saxophonist Ornette Coleman said,

[The] problem in this business is that you don't own your own product.... This has been my greatest problem--being shortchanged because I'm a Negro, not because I can't produce. Here I am being used as a Negro who can play jazz, and all the people I recorded for act as if they own me and my product. They have been guilty of making me believe I shouldn't have the profits from my product simply because they own the channels of production.... They act like I owe them something for letting me express myself with my music, like the artist is supposed to suffer and not to live in clean, comfortable situations, (quoted in Kofsky 1998,20)

Echoing Rex Stewart, Coleman concludes, "The insanity of living in America is that ownership is really strength. It's who owns who's strongest in America" (20).

Mingus also worked with great determination to change the terms of engagement between black jazz musicians and the white Americans who primarily controlled the production and dissemination of the music. In 1952, Mingus and drummer Max Roach founded one of the first record labels run by black artists, Debut Records, together with an affiliated publishing company called Chazz-Mar, Inc. (Porter 2002, 112). While the two companies operated actively for only about five years, they did release music by a number of prominent artists--most notably the so-called "Greatest Jazz Concert Ever" featuring Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Mingus, and Roach, recorded live at Massey Hall in Toronto, Canada, in 1953. Following the dissolution of Debut and Chazz-Mar in 1957, Mingus founded a second publishing company, Jazz Workshop, Inc. (133), the aforementioned company now owned and operated by Sue Mingus. In 1960, emerging in part from the dispute with Newport Festival organizer George Wein, Charles Mingus, Roach, and Count Basie's longtime drummer Jo Jones established the (very short-lived) Jazz Artists Guild, an organization mandated to "promote economic and artistic self-sufficiency" (135). In 1963, Mingus and Roach began working with the dancer Katherine Dunham, drummer Willie Jones, and saxophonist Buddy Collette to establish the School of Arts, Music, and Gymnastics, a Harlem-based community education initiative. While Mingus's school never opened, the concept presaged the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School (BARTS) that Amiri Baraka and other artists active in the Black Arts Movement would open in Harlem in 1965. Indeed, Mingus's abortive school and the short-lived BARTS project were both part of a larger trend toward artist-run collectives all across the United States that emerged at the height of the Black Power movement. These initiatives focused variously on recording (such as Nat Hentoff's Candid record label), publishing (e.g., saxophonist Gigi Gryce's Melotone, Inc.), concertizing (e.g., trumpeter Bill Dixon's Jazz Composers Guild), and education, or in many cases, all of the above (e.g., the still-thriving Association for the Advancement of Creative Music in Chicago and the collectives associated with Sim Ra in Philadelphia and Horace Tapscott in Los Angeles). (8) In all of these cases, musicians sought to move from critiquing the culture industries to actively changing them.

In spite of the deep antipathy toward the white-controlled culture industries that is clearly evident in these examples, Mingus was unquestionably heavily engaged in them not only as an outspoken socioeconomic activist but also as an entrepreneur with a paradoxically savvy approach to self-promotion. Scott Saul has convincingly argued that Mingus's anticommercial rants were not only aesthetic statements; collectively, Saul proposes, Mingus's rants and other outrageous actions on stage--including physically throwing a football linebacker out of a club and destroying his bass on stage--became a kind of idiosyncratic tool to generate publicity. Referencing the audience response at the conclusion of the rant in the version composed by Mingus and Diane Dorr-Dorynek, Saul writes,

Saul's point is amplified by the way that the Five Spot rant has circulated--as an article in a book. Hence, quite soon after the actual event in New York, the rant was reified, published, and sold. Moreover, as Saul has observed, Mingus had a hand in editing his own rant for publication in the first edition of The Jazz Word. Far from objecting to its circulation as a commodity, Mingus contributed to its commodification and mythologization. In this way, he invites buyers and readers of the book to join in his inner circle of non-poppaloppers--"the few that do want to listen." The same is true of Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus: from its very inception, the album was conceived of as a product that would be mass-produced and sold. Both the book and the album, therefore, become paradoxical countercultural, anticommercial commodities. (9) In sum, recognizing the popularity and salability of his rebellious behavior, Mingus essentially monetized it as part of his engagement with capitalism and the American culture industries. Mingus therefore occupies a number of discursive positions that are ostensibly contradictory, but fundamentally interrelated. He was an artist with an intense skepticism for commerce and commodification; he was a political activist who campaigned vigorously for equal access not only to wages for black musicians, but also to the systems of industrial production and dissemination that determine those wages; and he was a savvy and dogged entrepreneur who used the controversy he generated to improve his finances and to enhance his personal mythology. While his entrepreneurship in no way negates his other activities, those other discursive positions unquestionably enabled his entrepreneurial ambitions.

Selling Jettas: Improvisation and the Open Road

Charles Mingus's already vexed relationship with the culture industries is further complicated by the fact that in recent years, his music has been featured in a significant number of television advertisements, including ads for fashion houses Dolce & Gabbana and Calvin Klein, furniture designer Hermann Miller, Canadian newspaper the National Post, and automakers Nissan and (of course) Volkswagen. While numerous ads have used jazz soundtracks over the years, throughout the 2000s a casual television viewer was more likely to encounter Mingus's music during the commercial breaks than music by any other jazz musician. Renowned commercial stars of the genre like Miles Davis, Diana Krall, and Norah Jones appear in one or two major TV spots. By contrast, no fewer than six advertisements that were in regular rotation in the United States and Canada between 1997 and 2013 feature Mingus's music.

Since its arrival in North America in the years immediately following the Second World War--and particularly since it hired innovative ad agency Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB) in the late 1950s--Volkswagen has positioned itself as a brand apart. With now legendary print ads like "Think Small" and "Lemon," the German carmaker purported to eschew American mass consumption and crass commercialism. Rather than designing new cars that stayed at the cutting edge of automotive fashion, DDB's ads claimed that Volkswagen was solely interested in manufacturing products that were simple and reliable, even if that meant that it did not sell as many cars as its big American industry rivals. Using a combination of humor and irony, DDB's ads engaged potential drivers who were savvy and intellectual and who had developed a critical distaste for the fashion trends of a bloated American automotive industry. As Thomas Frank has noted, "By far the most powerful feature of the Volkswagen ads ... is their awareness of and deep sympathy with the mass society critique" (1997, 64).

Released in March 1999 as part of Arnold Worldwide's celebrated "Drivers Wanted" Volkswagen campaign, the Volkswagen Jetta ad with the Mingus soundtrack, "Great Escape," is set in a nursing home. (10) The spot opens in a cramped room. We see an elderly black man wearing a black suit checking himself out in a mirror, accompanied by Mingus's solo double bass playing a bluesy pentatonic melody. The elderly man takes one last critical look, slides his fingers along the brim of his pork pie hat, grabs his cane, checks his watch, and ambles out the door. The scene shifts quickly, and we join him in the hallway. An industrial fire extinguisher and glowing red exit sign cue us that we are in some kind of institutional space. The man glances furtively from left to right before moving out into the hallway.

Another quick cut, and we see a young woman--also black--in pink nursing scrubs moving down the hall. The man gives her a nod and a tip of his hat, then casts a long look at her swaying hips as she walks by. She notices his gaze and glares at him, playfully scolding him for his presumption. Two elderly white men seated nearby are absorbed in conversation and ignoring the exchange, letting us know that we are in a geriatric facility. This is confirmed in the next frame, when after another abrupt shift we see an aerobics class in a large common area full of old people in mismatched sweat suits gingerly swaying their arms and rolling their shoulders. The camera cuts back to the man, who looks aghast at the scene and makes a hasty move to escape the notice of the class instructor. The scene changes again with the elderly man moving into a nursing station, where he attempts to slink past a pink-clad, spectacled, middle-aged white nurse with a telephone pinned between her ear and shoulder, supervising what seems to be a tray full of medication while also keeping a vigilant watch over the back entrance to the facility. The man moves toward the exit (marked "Please Use Front Entrance") as steadily as his cane and limping gait will permit. The nurse raises her eyebrows and notices him at the last moment, but by then he has already pushed open the door, letting sunshine stream into the antiseptic nursing station. With one final abrupt scene shift, we are outside. The man squints as his eyes gradually adjust to the sun. A Volkswagen Jetta suddenly reverses into the picture, screeching to a stop in front of the door. The camera moves in on a younger black man behind the wheel. The older man eases himself into the passenger seat. "Grandpop," says the younger man with a slight nod. "Hey, Booboo," comes the reply, "I'm glad you're on time." The camera zooms out, and the car peels out of the parking lot and heads for the open road. We follow the car for awhile through a desert highway, watching the two men--grandfather and grandson--chatting and laughing. The grandfather rolls back the sunroof and tosses his head back in the ecstasy of his newly won freedom. The camera cuts to a highway sign, letting us know that the car is 134 miles from Las Vegas.

In the first place, the song plays a crucial role in structuring the narrative of the advertisement. The nursing-home sequence is all set to the opening solo bass introduction--Mingus's own rubato improvised chorus over a twelve-bar minor blues progression in G minor (albeit with some significant editing to keep the spot within the industry standard sixty-second time limit, particularly in the last four-bar phrase). Each of the three four-bar phrases of the progression corresponds roughly to a setting in the nursing home. The brief scene in the grandfather's room is set to the first phrase, with the cadence back to the tonic sounding as the old man peeks out into the hallway. When the black nurse appears, we hear the percussive sound of Mingus's fingers striking the ribbing of his bass and sporadic interpolations from the drums that introduce the second phrase--a surprising musical moment that mirrors the abrupt camera cut and the nurse's sudden arrival. The remainder of the episode in the hallway (from the grandfather's exchange with the nurse to his evasion of the aerobics class) is heard against the second phrase--moving from the minor subdominant back to the minor tonic. The third phrase of the progression begins as the grandfather moves into the space near the nursing station. As he slips through the back door, there is a moment of silence. The instant when "Booboo" shows up in his Jetta, the drums enter with a swing groove and Mingus begins the memorable "II B.S." eight-bar ostinato bass line--edited down to four bars to stay within the prescribed time limit. (11)

In addition to its role in structuring the narrative, the soundtrack also acts to underscore the dramatic arc of the spot as it moves through increasing tension to resolution. The flexible pulse and phrasing of Mingus's solo echoes the grandfather's stealthy approach--perhaps even his halting limp--as he creeps through the halls past the nurse and the aerobics class. When he comes upon the nursing station, we suddenly hear a new sound: a Hammond organ playing a sequence of diminished seventh chords. Of course, there was no organ on the 1963 recording, nor on any other recording of "II B.S." or "Haitian Fight Song." (12) The somewhat cartoonish addition of the Hammond was evidently the result of decisions made in the sound editing process, almost assuredly with the aim of further drawing out the feeling of tension and unease during the nursing station encounter. A later edit serves the same purpose: whereas the original recording of the solo concludes on a tonic G, the version in the advertisement ends on the penultimate pitch, a Neapolitan A [flat] (accompanied by an A [flat]-diminished seventh chord on the added Hammond organ). This unresolved dissonant dominant substitution is extended by three seconds of silence as the grandfather exits the nursing home and waits for his grandson. Only when the silver Jetta reverses into view do we hear the cadential payoff, as Mingus enters with the bass line in time, supported by drummer Danny Richmond's hi-hat cymbal. The bass ostinato builds momentum and the band digs into the groove as the Jetta turns out onto the highway, and we know that the grandfather has made good on his escape.

Of particular interest, however, and of greatest significance to this discussion, is the complex way in which Arnold Worldwide and Volkswagen's marketing team use Mingus's music to target the key characteristics of the consumer described in the psychographic profile. While Mingus's music is not necessarily literally humorous or light-hearted--at least not in the specific ways that Ron Lawner intended in his list--the "II B.S." soundtrack represents a nexus of discourses about jazz in general and Mingus's music (13) in particular that allows Arnold and Volkswagen to make the Jetta more appealing to their target demographic.

Just as the out-of-time bass solo helps to structure the pacing and narrative of the ad, so too does it anchor the discursive scaffolding that supports the ad's implicit psychographic message. The uneven pulse as Mingus glides lithely from one melodic phrase to another emphasizes to the listener that the introductory bass solo is improvised--as clearly distinct from the riff-based composition that follows. The solo therefore not only mirrors the halting motion of the grandfather's escape; it also underscores the fact that his escape is similarly improvisatory. While the old man knows where the exit is, we can tell from his furtive movements and his palpable surprise that he is unsure of what obstacles he will encounter or what he will do when he encounters them. It is only when he steps outside, the Jetta arrives, and he escapes that the sound track shifts to the more predictable, riff-based composed material of "II B.S." Even then, the composed material quickly gives way to Booker Ervin's improvised tenor saxophone solo, reminding us of the exhilarating uncertainty of the open road. (14)

The freely irregular pulse of the improvised bass solo and the unpredictability of the elderly man's movements pose a vivid counterpoint to the hyper-rationalization of time that would most certainly be a defining element of his quotidian experience in the nursing home. Indeed, as he sneaks through the halls, each new scene that he finds reminds him (and the audience) of the strict schedule in the home. The schedule is marked by the black nurse, no doubt on her regular rounds; the afternoon aerobics class; and, most obviously, the wall clock, tray of daily medications, and scheduling bulletin board that he passes in the nursing station on his way out the door. Unlike Mingus's solo and the old man's escape, there is nothing remotely improvisatory about this representation of the nursing home's rigid routine.

There is clearly a tangible distinction between the way the old man wishes to structure (or more accurately, not structure) time, and the temporality imposed on him by the nursing-home routine. Significantly, according to E. P. Thompson, this kind of temporal dissonance is a common experience under the late-capitalist regime of industrialized labor. As Thompson explains in his seminal 1967 article, "Time, Work-discipline, and Industrial Capitalism:" "Those who are employed experience a distinction between their employer's time and their 'own' time. And the employer must use the time of his labour, and see it is not wasted: not the task but the value of time when reduced to money is dominant. Time is now currency: it is not passed but spent" (1967, 61).

When time is essentially reducible to money, there is significantly greater pressure to track it and structure it in ever smaller and more rigid increments. In this way, while most viewers of the Volkswagen spot will not directly connect with the idea of living in a nursing home, the vast majority will certainly sympathize with the fracturing of temporal experience that is equally a part of nursing-home life and life in the capitalist labor force. Indeed, temporal dissonance is a common thematic trope in advertising. Gail Stein, communications director at communications agency OMD, explains how this trope works, especially in advertisements directed at a predominantly female demographic: "We like to say, 'Hey, take a moment.' Because, you know, women are so busy, because they're moms, and they're going to work, and they're cooks, and they're cleaners and so, we know that, like when we do focus groups with women, often what comes out is, 'Geez, if I only had a few more moments to myself.' So we often like to take that concept of the moment and spice it up a little bit" (Stein 2010).

The experience of temporal dissonance is not unique to women, of course (although marketing research indicates that women tend to feel that they have a greater number of conflicting demands on their time). Accordingly, the nursing-home scenario implicitly invites viewers to imagine their own improvisatory escape from their own routine; to dream of their own open road, with or without a particular destination, and of the Jetta that will take them there.

In this way, the message of the ad hinges on an intriguing paradox: the viewers are encouraged to enact their own escape from the industrial capitalist workaday world, but they are advised to do so by purchasing a Jetta--the industrial commodity par excellence. The central trick of the ad, then, is to transform the product of an arduous industrialized process into a mode of escape from that process--to somehow turn a commodity into an anticommodity. We would do well to remember that Volkswagen has been pulling off this trick since the brand's arrival in North America. Writing of the iconic "Think Small" campaign for Volkswagen by Doyle Dane Bembach (DDB) in the early 1960s, Thomas Frank explains, "The genius of the Volkswagen campaign ... is that they took [the mass society critique] into account and made it part of their ads' discursive apparatus. They spoke to consumers as canny beings capable of seeing through the great heaps of puffery cranked out by Madison Avenue" (1997,63). Where DDB satirized the advertising industry to achieve the decommodifying maneuver for Volkswagen in the early 1960s, in 1999, Arnold did it in large part by using countercultural musical icons like Mingus. (15) As we have now seen, while in reality Mingus had a decidedly vexed relationship with commercialism and the culture industries, for the most part he chose to represent himself as a paragon of anticommercial artistry. By using his music in the ad, Arnold sought to hitch the Jetta to Mingus's larger-than-life persona, positioning the car as an anticommercial commodity.

Naturally, there is no doubt that the majority of viewers would not be specifically aware of the rich detail of Mingus's long history of sociopolitical and economic activism, nor would they likely identify him as the composer of the sound track, nor would they necessarily even know the name Charles Mingus. Nevertheless, for that majority of viewers the jazz genre itself has come to stand as an intuitive marker for anticommercialism. In an interview printed in SHOOT, another advertising industry magazine, the spot's director Nick Lewin references the aura of "authenticity" that he saw in the actor who played the grandfather, Sunny Jim Jaines. In Lewin's estimation, Jaines's authenticity inheres in his direct connection to 1950s jazz greats. SHOOT writer Jeremy Lehrer writes, "Lewin added that Jaines had spent some time hanging out with Thelonius Monk, which gave his portrayal authenticity. Lewin added that Jaines had oodles of character and knew plenty of other jazz greats. 'You couldn't mention a name he didn't actually know/ Lewin recalled" (1999,10). While he may or may not have ever read Hugues Panassie, Alain Locke, Langston Hughes, or Amiri Baraka, when Lewin identifies Jaines as "authentic" because of his connection with Monk, he is signifying on a century of discourse that has concretized jazz as an anticommercial art form, and he is confidently expecting that his audience will do the same. (16)

In order to solidify the Jetta's anticommercial credibility, however, Arnold's copywriters needed to show the viewers a more serious subtext--especially for the majority who would not readily map Mingus's anticommercial pedigree onto the car. To develop that subtext, therefore, the ad purposefully (albeit subtly) recalls another escape from rigidly constraining systemic institutional pressures: the civil rights movement. Lewin takes credit for this additional layer, explaining that while the spot was mostly shot as the Arnold writers had scripted it, he and his directorial team added certain "aesthetic influences ... such as still photographs from the '60s and the civil rights era" (as quoted in Lehrer 1999, 10). Lewin's touches seem to have included 1960s-specific furniture in the old man's room, such as a plush orange sweepback armchair, a small, gray television, and a large turntable cabinet. There is only one black-and-white photograph in the room, framed atop the cabinet. While the picture is out of focus, given Lewin's comments and the blurry profile of the seated man in the picture, we might be vaguely reminded of an iconic photo of Martin Luther King Jr.

While Lewin's small additions act to draw it out, the civil rights theme would already have been embedded in the version of the script he received from Arnold. The narrative, after all, follows an elderly black man escaping from an institution that seems to be controlled primarily by white people--the nurse at her station and the aerobics instructor being the most obvious examples. It is worth noting that the smiling black nurse seems to be considerably more sympathetic and does not cause nearly as much alarm as the second nurse or the aerobics class. The key anchor for the civil rights theme, however, is once again the soundtrack. Even listeners who were not aware of Mingus's own political activism or of the original politicized title of the featured song ("Haitian Fight Song") would at the very least have likely connected "II B.S." to the period in question, especially in conjunction with the man's age and the vintage furniture. The civil rights underpinning brings an element of seriousness and pathos to an otherwise comical situation, and an element of heroism to an old man who might otherwise be merely ridiculous both in his lurching attempt at stealth and his obvious, failed attempt at lechery. It also further universalizes the theme of escape: the ad is not simply about a geriatric man sneaking out of his nursing home, nor is it only about the broader story of weary, overworked Americans fleeing the rigidity of the capitalist working day. This "Great Escape" is about a ubiquitous utopian human drive to escape the perennial disappointment of the mundane and the status quo in search of transcendent joy and freedom.

The nursing home, then, represents several layers of meaning. It is what it appears to be, a rigidly anodyne geriatric residence; it is what North American viewers likely perceive it to be, an industrialized institution operating on a severely rationalized capitalist temporal regimen. Concomitantly, it is the generalized stultifying consumerist, hypercommercialized capitalist regime against which Volkswagen drivers ostensibly want to rebel; and, perhaps most remarkably, it stands indirectly for the Jim Crow-era American state against which the black grandfather may have protested in his youth. By connecting the elderly hero with the jazz music and rhetorics that Charles Mingus represents, and by contextualizing his heroism in a complex of overlapping discourses of anti-institutional, antiestablishment dissent, the Volkswagen spot successfully positions the Jetta as an anticommodity. Drivers can escape all manner of social, political, and economic oppression, improvising their way along the free, open highway to whatever utopia--or Las Vegas--they can imagine.

Conclusion

It is important to understand that neither the Volkswagen ad nor any of the other collection of advertisements that have featured Mingus music constitute the kind of singular industrial appropriation of black art against which Mingus so fervently protested. Since his death in 1979, the bassist's widow, Sue Mingus, has overseen her late husband's professional affairs as the director of Jazz Workshop, Inc. In that role, she has established three repertory bands to play Mingus's music, the Mingus Big Band, Mingus Dynasty, and the Mingus Orchestra; founded Revenge! Records to release pirated concert recordings that had previously been sold illegally; and published a number of books, including Charles Mingus: More Than a Take Book (Mingus 1991), several editions of Charles Mingus: More Than a Play Along (Mingus 2000), and her own autobiography, Tonight at Noon: A Love Story (Mingus 2002). Recognizing that music licensing fees could go a long way to financing less profitable ventures like the repertory bands and other educational initiatives, she has also been using Jazz Workshop, Inc., and the official website, www.mingusmingusmingus.com, to promote Mingus's music specifically to advertisers (Mingus 2010). Her efforts have resulted in all of the notable television advertisements with Mingus soundtracks, including "Great Escape."

Similarly, despite numerous protestations to the contrary, it is also important to understand that Charles Mingus was quintessentially entrepreneurial--albeit, an entrepreneur who engaged the culture industries with a passionately activist bent, often using the language of anticommercialism. I asked Sue Mingus how she thought her late husband would respond to seeing his music being used to sell perfume and cars. Her thoughtful response confirms Mingus's vexed relationship with the culture industries, but also his fundamentally pragmatic outlook: "Oh, I think Charles was a realist.... If you can't pay the rent with what you're creating, you're in trouble" (2010). Later, discussing his socioeconomic activism, she said,

For Sue Mingus, the fees recouped from licensing her husband's music for advertisements more than makes up for any ethical or political concerns around helping to sustain a culture industry (advertising) and an ideology (consumption) that Mingus criticized so passionately during his lifetime. She is also fully convinced that her ever-pragmatic husband--the anticommercial entrepreneur--would be entirely supportive of the idea, especially when he saw the artistic and educational initiatives enabled by advertising dollars.

There is, therefore, an ironic synergy between Charles Mingus's own entrepreneurship and the Volkswagen messaging. Mingus deployed the fifty-year-old discourse of jazz anticommercialism as a rhetorical tool to help promote himself and his music in the 1960s--as well as to work to help seize greater market control for black musicians. Similarly, Arnold Worldwide uses Mingus's "II B.S." as a conduit to access the same anticommercial discourse in order to rhetorically position the Jetta as an anticommodity. In this way, drawing on Scott Saul's reading of the Five Spot rant, Arnold invites Volkswagen drivers to join an elite group of hip insiders, "[flattering] them with the exceptional possibility that they were among 'the few that do'" get it (Saul 2001, 401). These insiders are the kinds of "drivers wanted"; no "poppaloppers" need apply.

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to Sue Mingus for welcoming me into her home and sharing her insight. Thanks also to Alex Coleman for his assistance in identifying Charles Mingus's extended bass techniques on "II B.S."

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DISCOGRAPHY

Mingus, Charles. Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus. Candid CGC CD720 (1960). Compact disc.

MARK LAVER is an assistant professor of music at Grinnell College who researches intersections between improvisation and neoliberal capitalism. His work has been published in journals including Popular Music and Society, Popular Music, Critical Studies in Improvisation, and SAGAR: A South Asia Research Journal. His current book project, Jazz Sells: Music and Marketing (Routledge, forthcoming) focuses on the use of jazz in advertising, marketing, and branding. Mark is also a professional saxophonist and has performed with leading jazz and improvising musicians such as Lee Konitz, Kurt Elling, Phil Nimmons, NEXUS, Dong-Won Kim, William Parker, and Eddie Prevost.

(1.) See for example Negus (1999) and Toynbee (2000).

(2.) The tune was originally entitled "Haitian Fight Song" and first released in 1957 on The Clown on Atlantic Records, but it was renamed for the 1963 album on the Impulse imprint.

(3.) John Gennari (1991; 2006), Bernard Gendron (2002), and Kristin McGee (2009) have discussed these early critical responses to jazz music in greater detail. I draw heavily on their work in this section. I am also indebted to Karl Koenig and Robert Walser, whose respective books Jazz in Print (1856-1929): An Anthology of Selected Early Readings in Jazz History (2002) and Keeping Time: Readings in Jazz History (1999) together constitute a thorough, wide-ranging collection of the seminal critical writings on jazz music from the time period.

(4.) This article has been widely and justifiably disparaged in our own time, primarily for Adorno's fundamental ignorance about American jazz. Nevertheless, Adorno's article is a valuable document, in that it articulates the jazz-as-fetishized-commodity position thoroughly and with typical erudition (albeit, with a number of crucial factual errors and oversights), without resorting to the hysterical moralizing that characterized most American versions of this argument.

(5.) To some degree, Hughes also reiterates Panassie's primitivist discourse. In Hughes's concept, however, jazz's primitivism is tied to class rather than race. Sharon L. Jones has traced the bourgeois subjectivity of the Harlem Renaissance movement in Rereading the Harlem Renaissance: Race, Class, and Gender in the Fiction of Jessie Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, and Dorothy West (2002).

(6.) Significantly, Charles Mingus and Hughes included this poem in their collaborative 1958 recording of Hughes's work, Weary Blues.

(7.) It was on Hentoff's politically edgy Candid record label that Mingus released several of his most provocative albums in the early 1960s, including Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus and the Newport Rebels recording that was made shortly after the i960 "rebel festival."

(8.) See Anderson (2007).

(9.) It is important to note that Candid was a smaller label and had significantly diminished capacity for distribution and sales as compared to Columbia--the label that released Mingus's other work during the late 1950s and early 1960s.

(10.) You can watch the ad in full on the official Charles Mingus website, along with several other advertisements and film clips that use his music: http://mingusmingusmingus.com/film/filmtv.

(11.) Through the final thirty seconds of the spot, the bass line becomes a clear indicator of where the music team made cuts and splices to the original track. We never hear the cadential arpeggio from the original rendition, and the regular eight-bar ostinato appears in edited versions ranging from two to six bars as various spliced melodic phrases from the first ninety seconds of the 1963 recording spill into one another.

(12.) Mingus very seldom recorded with organists. See, for example, http://www.jazzdisco.org/charles-mingus/catalog/.

(13.) Mingus frequently objected to the word "jazz" as a restrictive genre descriptor, preferring the phrase "Mingus music" (Mingus 2010).

(14.) The solo appears much sooner in the ad than in the original recording, a result of extensive editing to the 1963 track.

(15.) Another iconic ad from the 1999 "magnificent seven" series, "Milky Way," featured the song "Pink Moon" by bohemian folk icon Nick Drake. See https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=BIOW9fLT9eY.

(16.) It is worth remembering that while the anticommercial discourse is a dominant one, it is by no means the only framework according to which jazz has been understood. Indeed, as we have seen, the anticommercial discourse is predicated to a considerable extent on parallel discourses that situate jazz squarely within the commercial culture industries--whether responses in the black press to popular and academic writing from the Ladies' Home Journal or the Frankfurt School critics in the 1920s and 1930s, fervent critiques of popular swing music in the 1960s by Amiri Baraka, Frank Kofsky, and Nat Hentoff, or critical responses to the "swing revival" in the 1990s.