Spontaneous Composition and Charles Mingus’s “Scenes in the City”

Abstract: This essay examines Charles Mingus’s concept of “spontaneous composition” through a close analysis of Scenes in the City (1957/1959), a hybrid work combining spoken narration and jazz performance. Situating the piece within the cultural landscape of late-1950s New York, the essay traces Mingus’s engagement with overlapping musical and literary scenes, including the jazz poetry boom associated with the Beat Generation and contemporaneous debates about composition within experimental music circles. Against a backdrop of racialized genre hierarchies and primitivist discourse in jazz criticism, Mingus’s approach to composition (grounded in orality, improvisation, and extended form) emerges as both an aesthetic and political intervention. By rejecting “pencil composition” while maintaining tight formal control, Mingus challenged prevailing assumptions about authorship, notation, and musical seriousness.

Through comparative listening and structural analysis of Scenes in the City and its earlier iteration A Colloquial Dream, the essay demonstrates how Mingus’s extended form creates responsive musical environments in which narration and improvisation unfold collaboratively. Rather than treating music as accompaniment to text, Mingus integrates the narrator into the ensemble, using sectional flexibility, cueing, and dynamic contrast to negotiate the temporal and semantic demands of spoken language. The essay argues that Scenes in the City represents a rare success within the jazz–poetry experiments of the period and serves as a key example of Mingus’s broader project of self-historization. Ultimately, the article suggests that attending to Mingus’s spontaneous composition requires listening across boundaries—between improvisation and composition, music and language, and the multiple cultural scenes that shaped jazz in midcentury America.

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