Charles Mingus was born April 22, 1922, in Nogales, Arizona, and studied music as a child in Los Angeles, taking up bass at sixteen. He settled in New York, where he played and recorded with the leading musicians of the 1950s, including Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Bud Powell, and Duke Ellington himself. By the mid-1950s he had formed his own publishing and recording companies to protect and document his growing body of original music, and founded the Jazz Workshop, a collective that gave young composers a platform to have new works performed in concert and on record.

His catalog integrated loosely composed passages with fully improvised solos in a way that both shaped and transcended the jazz trends of the 1950s, '60s, and '70s, spanning recordings including Pithecanthropus Erectus, The Clown, Tijuana Moods, Mingus Ah Um, The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, Cumbia and Jazz Fusion, and Let My Children Hear Music.

Mingus toured extensively through Europe, Japan, Canada, South America, and the United States until late 1977, when he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Confined to a wheelchair and unable to write music on paper or compose at the piano, he sang his final compositions into a tape recorder. He died January 5, 1979, in Cuernavaca, Mexico, at age 56.

Mingus's compositional approach, blending gospel, blues, free improvisation, and orchestral ambition within a single piece, made him one of jazz's most singular composer-bandleaders, a figure whose influence runs through virtually every subsequent generation of jazz composition.