Charles Mingus, Comic Strip Writer

CHARLIE MINGUS FINGERS THE RECORD HIJACKERS

Bootleg records have been a part of the music business almost since recorded music began, and every record shop has had to deal with the dreaded issue of "pirate" pressings. Fans of everyone from Bob Dylan to The Grateful Dead, from the most obscure jazz, punk, and even classical musicians, have long coveted live recording or illicit copies of rare records by their favourite performers. Just like the fight against illegal downloading, once upon a time musicians used to be very involved in policing pirated recordings. Jazz legend Charles Mingus was one of these pirate-fighters. In the 1960s Mingus started his own mail-order label to sell live recordings he made and saw the bootleggers as competition. As part of his marketing campaign, he offered cash rewards to fans in ads for his own records. Mingus even created a comic strip where he hires a woman detective to buy some bootlegs from a jazz record shop!

The strip was drawn by Gene Bilbrew, a black cartoonist with a very interesting bio. Bilbrew was the lead singer of a jazz vocal group (The Mellow-Tones/The Basin Street Boys) who also worked as a cartoonist. Legend has it Bilbrew created the first black superhero, the Bronze Bomber, in 1949, before moving to New York and taking over "Clifford", a comic strip created by Jules Feiffer. Bilbrew moved on to drawing underground fetish comics and book covers for porn publisher Irving Klaw, the man who discovered Bettie Page and, being both a jazzman and a heroin addict, somehow hooked up with Charles Mingus!

The comic strip appeared in The Village Voice in December 1966, and includes an order form for Mingus at Monterey, “the latest Mingus Town Hall 1964 album,” and/or Music Written for Monterey. Mingus placed another ad in The Village Voice, a “Legal Notice” offering a “$500.00 Reward for evidence which secures conviction of any person selling these records.”