When driving a band with his upright bass, Charles Mingus looked--and was--gigantic, in more ways than one. He had huge creative appetites (as well as being hot tempered), creating his own combination of hard bop, blues, and avant-garde jazz. There was no one more multi-faceted than Mingus between the 1950s and 1970s and of his many albums, Mingus Ah Um (1959) is considered to be a jazz classic.
