Abstract
Chapter 6 explores Charles Mingus’s relationship with audio production during the 1950s. Throughout the decade, Mingus reimagined the economics and cultural politics of jazz through his concern for sound on record, where control over that sound also meant control over the form, content, and representation of his music. The chapter focuses on Mingus Ah Um, his 1959 LP that contains at least seventeen splices that removed over eleven minutes of music from the initial performances. Listening historically through the splice exposes Mingus’s larger network of musical entrepreneurs who actively used record making to disrupt how the jazz industry conventionally valued Black labor and Black artistry. This chapter uses activities that appear technological—splicing and overdubbing—to place Mingus’s record making within his larger cultural practice and political activism.