DIED. Charles Mingus, 56, virtuoso bassist and composer whose emotional, free-floating music helped shape modern jazz; of a heart attack after suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's disease); in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Raised in the Watts district of Los Angeles, Mingus began studying bass in high school, later played with Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Charlie Parker before forming his own combo in New York in the mid-'50s. Influenced strongly by blues and gospel, he began writing music that highlighted the bass as a solo instrument and featured contorted harmonies and quick-changing rhythms with sudden breaks and howls. Of burly build and mercurial temper, the bearded Mingus sometimes grew violent onstage when faced by inattentive audiences and became increasingly angered over treatment of blacks in the U.S., especially musicians. "Don't call me a jazz musician," he once complained. "The word jazz means nigger, discrimination, second-class citizenship, the back-of-the-bus bit!" Too crippled by disease to perform during his final year, Mingus nevertheless composed the music for an album by Joni Mitchell.

DIED. William Yandell Elliott, 82, courtly professor of history and political science at Harvard (1925-63); in Haywood, Va. A nonpartisan presidential adviser who served as vice chairman of the War Production Board during World War II, Elliott lectured a generation of undergraduates in Government I on the evils of totalitarianism and the need for a strongly armed America, as well as supervised the dissertations of Canada's Pierre Trudeau and Henry Kissinger, among others. "Whatever I have achieved," wrote the yet-to-be Secretary of State in 1963, "I owe importantly to his inspiration."

DIED. Pier Luigi Nervi, 87, Italian builder and architect famed for his graceful, dramatic structures of reinforced concrete; of a heart attack; in Rome. Originally trained in civil engineering, Nervi first began experimenting with concrete design when he constructed an all-concrete theater in Naples in 1927. He went on to create a strong, light blend of mortar and steel mesh called ferrocemento and, by casting major structural pieces at construction sites, managed to mold concrete into soaring, tilted buttresses and high, swooping ceilings. His finest buildings, critics agree, are the vast Exhibition Hall in Turin, Rome's sunburst-domed Palazzetto dello Sport and the oystershell-shaped, ribbed-concrete Pope Paul VI Audience Hall in the Vatican. In the U.S., his works include San Francisco Cathedral and New York City's George Washington Bridge Bus Station. Modest and hardworking, Nervi always considered himself an engineer rather than an architect; yet his work, once described as "poetry in concrete," earned him the 1964 gold medal of the American Institute of Architects.

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