Charles Mingus = Volume. Let’s get that straight. Volume is a function of three factors, and so let’s metaphor this. Mingus was the heaviest bass player around; he could be as nimble as Ron Carter or Charlie Haden, but he also put so much force into each note that his bass playing often felt like an attack. Let this be the width.
Mingus was also a jazz composer. His great love was Duke Ellington—you might say, He Loved Him Madly—applying Ellington’s grasp of sonic texture (colour) to longer song structures. (Bryan Priestley writes in Mingus: A Critical Biography, which is essential reading, that Mingus was the only post-Ellington jazz composer that really cared about orchestrating the trombone because the trombone was Mingus’ first-ever instrument.) Let this be the length.
And finally, he just loved playing loud: even with a small band, you can tell he’s trying to stack the sounds as if he were conducting a big band. Let this be the height. Now, Volume = (l)(w)(h), which can be written as Volume = lwh. Substitute the variables and we get Volume = MingusMingusMingus.
Because of these three factors, if a rock listener asked you to introduce them to jazz, Charles Mingus’ albums would be a good bet if you didn’t want to do the obvious thing of pointing them to jazz fusion: the mass of sound via big band, the love of blues and the shifting song structures are all part of rock’s DNA. Thus, consider Mingus the jazz version of Igor Stravinsky; his Black Saint and the Sinner Lady the jazz version of Rite of Spring.
A negative: for me, the best parts of Charles Mingus albums (especially the more experimental, popular ones from ‘59-onwards) aren’t the solos, it’s ‘zooming out’ and getting lost in the mix with the other players and/or overdubs and/or shifting song structures. This also means that sometimes, the music can be dense and at worst, overbearing, a point that tenor saxophonist J.R. Monterose made as early as Pithecanthropus Erectus: “it could have been much more soulful.” For all his love of Duke Ellington, Mingus never ever came close to a “Black and Tan Fantasy” or “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo.” (Of course, no one did. Those are two of the greatest songs of all time.) He did, however, make a life-time’s worth of “Jack the Bear”’s.
I know it's the cliché of clichés to list all the people a jazz artist has played with while talking about them—just because someone has played with Miles Davis or whatever doesn’t mean their music as a bandleader is automatically worthy—but Charles Mingus really had an interesting history: no other jazz artist I can think of has played with Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Charles Parker, Max Roach, Eric Dolphy and Miles Davis. Charles Mingus, his bass-lines link early jazz tradition with the avant-garde!
My scorching hot take of Charles Mingus, and one that I’ve been absolutely sure of for several years now, solidified while revisiting all of these albums in the past month, is that The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady is assuredly not close to his best album - or, at least, should not be considered some magnum so opus that people don’t check out the rest of his discography. A magnum opus among magna opera, then. What is, then? Well, stick around and I’ll rank them all at the very end after I’m done.
A note here that this probably falls short of a truly complete guide insofar as I ignore the pre-album singles and the majority of the live albums (I only cover a few of ‘em, the ones I’ve heard), and I can’t find some of his early albums released on small labels like Strings and Keys. That said, there’s no ‘complete guide’ anywhere online - most articles only cover his Atlantic, Columbia and Impulse! records, i.e. a top 10 or 20, and in turn, often aren’t accurate for a top 10 or 20. As complete a guide as I can make it, then. Let’s go:
An essential live jazz album, though not the greatest jazz concert ever that it’s often billed as. I pity anyone in Toronto who missed this to watch the big Rocky Marciano-Jersey Joe Walcott boxing match that night - do what Dizzy Gillespie did, which was allegedly running backstage to catch the show! One negative: the show was not recorded for the intent of release, hence why everything sounds so flat despite being so dynamic. Max Roach, in particular, sounds like he’s hitting out these beats on damp drums, and Charles Mingus had to overdub his bass-lines so we can hear him (albeit a little too loudly on the ballad “All the Things You Are”; let me hear Powell, damnit!). And there’s a glaring mistake on “Salt Peanuts” that makes me think there was some overdubbing there as well (at the 1:15 mark; “Salt peanuts, salt peanuts, the name of this suh— salt peanuts”). Despite all that, the solos are generally magnifique, especially the one that opens “Perdido,” and it’s impossible not to get suckered into “Salt Peanuts.” Facetiously, the best Canadian album I can think of until ‘69.
Before Charles Mingus ever touched the bass, his first instrument was actually the trombone (which is why the trombone is often orchestrated well in his ensembles), and then the cello, which he played because his father’s love for classical music but abandoned because there were it was then-unheard of for a black musician to play the cello. Jazzical Moods (originally released as two short albums, most of which was reissued as The Jazz Experiments of Charlie Mingus in 1957), an obvious portmanteau of jazz and classical (and, I think, the first-ever use of the term) showcases his love for the cello by having Jackson Wiley play on some of these songs. But the results don't go far enough into any classical territory beyond that one string instrument being somewhere in there; you can tell Mingus is a great bass player but not yet a great composer, which makes Pithecanthropus Erectus that much more of an achievement by comparison which came one year later.
This album should be recognized as ground zero for ‘post-bop’ - I think it’s insane that a four-track album that contains songs as radically different from anyone else’s and each other came out in 1956. To put it into perspective, Charles Mingus was asking his band to try to improvise by ear instead of giving them charts, a relatively novel idea that quietly inserts this particular album into the free jazz canon between Lennie Tristano’s one-off experiment and Ornette Coleman’s debut. The title track is a tone poem whose shifting song structures will practically be the norm going forward. “A Foggy Day” features novel ways of playing the saxophone before Rahsaan Roland Kirk (soon to work with Mingus, a kindred madman) put out his debut record, creating a rich scene of different sounds - it makes me think of a busy harbourfront on a summer day. (Well, an idealized version of it with the streetcars and bikes and clear skies; I lived by the Toronto harbourfront for a short period and it was not “A Foggy Day.” It was never “A Foggy Day.”) “Love Chant” (the weakest song here) mixes in gospel chords and tambourine for good measure. Given this context, the short, lovely track “Profile for Jackie” functions in the same way that “Bessie’s Blues” did on John Coltrane’s Crescent, which is a short breather on an extraordinary album. Like The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, the pianist (in this case, Mal Waldron) gets the best solo in “Love Chant.” Unlike The Black Saint though, you can hear Mingus.
The reason why I don’t rank this higher in my rankings of Charles Mingus albums isn’t the oft-maligned “The Clown” (which is basically akin to the Velvet Underground’s “The Gift” in that there’s a sense of ‘I get it’ that doesn’t invite replays; I like both songs, and Jean Sheppard’s colour imagery is smart for a song about clowns), but that the middle two tracks just don’t compare to the bookends. Both still good mind you, and the introduction of “Reincarnation Of A Lovebird” is particularly riveting with the interplay between pianist Wade Legge and the rest of the band. (Legge was an underrated pianist who would’ve played on more interesting records if he didn’t die young at 29 from a bleeding stomach ulcer.) “Haitian Fight Song” is many things: fight music in pre-fusion jazz (Mingus thought of naming it “Afro-American Fight Song”), a recording of one of the greatest bass solos ever, but also a new model for Charles Mingus - a lot of his faster-tempo songs afterwards sound similar to “Haitian Fight Song” in the breathless swing of the horns (“West Coast Ghost,” “Hog Callin’ Blues”; “Better Get Hit in Yo’ Soul,” “Slop” and “Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting” to a lesser extent). This is drummer Dannie Richmond’s first major outing who’ll become the go-to drummer for Mingus going forward, and he’s already comfortable in his role: bringing down the thunder at the 3:18 mark of “Haitian Fight Song” for example, or when he adds to Shafi Hadi's melody during Hadi’s solo.
Some people’ll try to pass this off as some underrated gem. Me, I think it’s better off forgotten. There’s no drive! It feels like Charles Mingus got his usual band together and knocked out this collection on an easy Sunday afternoon—hold on, let me check if August 16, 1957 was a Sunday *checks* guess not—to collect an easy paycheck. “East Coasting” sounds like a draft for “Haitian Fight Song” and “West Coast Ghost” just meanders forever. “Conversation” is the main highlight when Clarence Shaw (trumpet) and Shafi Hadi (alto sax) start having a musical conversation with one another that's charming and even humorous in their back-and-forth, although no one needs to stick around for Bill Evans’ piano solo.
Another hard bop record for Mingus, this one even more striking because it’s the rare Mingus recording as a trio - with drummer Dannie Richmond and pianist Hampton Hawes. Most of the songs are standards (only two are Mingus originals, and the last is credited to Hawes), and so you would think this was another tossed-off session like East Coasting, but I like it more: there's more snap in the rhythm and Hampton Hawes solos better here than Bill Evans there. Hear, for example, his impressive runs on opener “Yesterdays” or his playful solo on closer “Laura.” On that last note, I love when Charles Mingus comes in heavy during Hawes’ solo, making it seem like the tempo has changed when it actually hasn't. A few quibbles: “Summertime” is a really good take on the song—including a droning tambourine solo with what sounds like bell horns overdubbed on top—but the transition to Richmond's solo is handled poorly. (Of course, the best take on the song will be done by someone who played with Mingus in just two years’ time.) And the Hawes-penned song is basically just an excuse to hear him and Richmond play off each other.
Recorded in 1957, Charles Mingus’ only album cut for RCA wasn’t released until five years later by which point it was late to the Spanish-influenced jazz party (i.e. John Coltrane’s Olé Coltrane was recorded and released in 1961). The liner notes of the CD reissue note that none of these takes were finished and the seams are visible particularly on “Ysabel’s Table Dance”: you can hear the splicing together of two different takes when the volume drops out at the 1:27 mark, but with Mingus, these stitched-together parts play like he’s up to his usual tricks of shifting song structures and not totally unnatural editing from the producer. “Dizzy Moods” and “Tijuana Gift Shop”—the two shortest, non-ballad songs here—are on regular rotation for me; the latter absolutely percolates throughout its 4-minute run-time and should not be missed simply because it’s short, and both songs in general are among Mingus’ most playful. Ysabel Morel’s castanets turn the second track into exactly its title, and “Los Mariachis” might be Charles Mingus’ happiest song until the 70s thanks to the horn melody at the 3:23 mark and then Bill Triglia’s solo in the second half. Closer “Flamingo” is a beautiful ballad full of counterpoint between the three leads (Clarence Shaw, Jimmy Knepper, Shafi Hadi), although it’ll be further refined on “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” - the random intrusions in the second half feel like Mingus didn’t trust the leads as much as he should have to keep the audience engaged. Had the two long songs been more tightly arranged (or simply better edited), this would have easily been among Mingus’ top 5 instead of ‘merely’ top 10. Someone get Teo Macero on the line!
There’s a slightness about this album stemming from the fact that the bulk of its material will be consolidated into “Open Letter to Duke” on the forthcoming Mingus Ah Um and the longest song here—the only one with the promised ‘Music and Poetry’—doesn’t compare to the last song with narration. Not helping is that Horace Parlan’s piano sounds so muddy on “New York Sketchbook.” I like “Slippers” a lot, a quickie that reminds me of Miles Davis’ “Airegin” in its ‘full steam ahead’ energy, both unbelievable marvels for ‘56-57 (although this song isn’t nearly as great). It’s funny that Charles Mingus threatened to kill Clarence Shaw after Shaw was sick and couldn’t make a recording session (hence why Shaw doesn’t play on “Nouroog”) since I’d say Shaw was vital to this album: it’s his trumpet that carries “Duke’s Choice” and it’s him that really makes “Scenes in the City” for me when his trumpet sells narrator Melvin Stewart’s depression before ultimately strengthening his resolve; I wonder if the direction given to Shaw from Mingus was to play like Miles would.
The most essential live Mingus that I’ve heard. Only four cuts performed by a quintet, but with the average song length being 11 minutes, that means it’s solo city, and the solos from John Handy (alto sax) and Mingus on “I Can’t Get Started” are some of the best solos to appear on any Mingus album. I think it was wise of Booker Ervin to sit this one out, in the same way I feel John Coltrane wasn’t needed on Miles Davis’ “My Funny Valentine”; in fact, basically everyone functionally sits out for Handy’s solo, as if careful not to disrupt the flow. Handy’s handling of the opening phrase on its own just sends me over the moon and straight to heartbreak territory, and he proceeds to solo for 4 minutes unbrokenly (love when he breaches heaven on that high note at the 1:12 mark and gracefully comers back down) before abruptly handing it off to Mingus who gets in a bass solo of equivalent length. Elsewhere, there’s plenty of contrapuntal playing between the two saxes—par for the course on a Mingus album—but even with twin saxes, it never reaches the heights of “I Can’t Get Started.” Opener “Nostalgia in Times Square” features an extended ‘conversation’ between Mingus and Richmond that takes up half the song and is only a tad too long (pretty sure that’s Mingus making those percussive sounds with his bass at the 10:50 mark); generally underutilized pianist Richard Wyands gets in a wonderful-albeit-way-too-short solo on “Alice’s Wonderland.”
Mingus’ first album for Columbia, so he makes sure to give ‘em something extra: Mingus Ah Um contains nine songs instead of the 4-6 of his other canon albums from Atlantic. The first two songs are Mingus classic songs; I’d argue some of his most classic ‘tunes,’ and something that Mingus knew since he would re-record them again and again with different bands. “Better Get Hit in Yo’ Soul” has a dizzying hook of harmonized horns at high velocity that might be his catchiest song; “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” his most tender ballad (a side-note: Mingus loved his absurd titles: not only was he Stravinsky, but he was Satie too). As if knowing “Better Get Hit” was too dense, Mingus lightens it up for Booker Ervin’s solo, backing Ervin with nothing except handclaps and encouraging shouts. “Boogie Stop Shuffle” is kindred in spirit; dig the punchy trombones during the sax solo around 90 seconds in, and note how pianist Horace Parlan is able to riff on the theme so effortlessly. “Open Letter to Duke” contains one of my favourite Mingus shifts for its last minute or so; the last 30 seconds seem beamed straight out of Sonny Rollins’ masterful “St. Thomas” (in fact, I’d say the melody is almost lifted directly from it). And whereas “Open Letter to Duke” sounds like Rollins, “Bird Calls” sounds like early Ornette Coleman (here’s Mingus on Coleman’s arrival: “when [DJ] Symphony Sid played [Ornette Coleman’s] record, it made everything else he was playing, even my own record that he played, sound terrible. I’m not saying everybody’s going to have [to] play like Coleman. But they’re going to have to stop playing Bird”). And “Fables of Faubus” is Mingus’ most scathing political songs even though (presumably) Columbia asked that the lyrics be removed. Here’s a game: play this song once without knowing any historical context. Then play it again after learning that the Faubus of the title refers to Arkansas governor Orval Faubus, responsible for the Little Rock Crisis when he brought in the national guard to prevent black children from entering Little Rock Central High School. In that context, “Pussy Cat Dues” and “Jelly Roll” form too much of a comedown; I’d don’t listen to either much, and would re-arrange this album such that Ellington-ish “Self-Portrait in Three Colors” ended the album instead.
Charles Mingus and Jackie McLean had a falling out when they recorded Pithecanthropus Erectus which ended with McLean almost stabbing Mingus, but they reconnected for Mingus’ third album for Atlantic, Blues & Roots, “an entire album in the style of ‘Haitian Fight Song,’” and true to his word, “Tension” starts very similarly. I think it’s the album that one of jazz’s best jazz bass players does his best jazz bass playing so I think it’s a shame that the album isn’t as highly recognized as some of Mingus’ others even if it is still highly regarded. “Moanin’” (not a cover of the Bobby Timmins song made famous by Art Blakey the year before) swings hard and fast; note Mingus’ revving up his bass during the saxophone solo, like he’s starting up some machine (“BWAHHHHHHH”) and note when the whole band returns, how the chords have thickened and feel like the tempo has doubled. “E’s Flat Ah’s Flat Too” has one of the most inventive choruses ever written by Mingus, just jumping between octaves like a kid playing hopscotch at a crazy tempo. Elsewhere, Mingus gets so much emotional weight during “Cryin’ Blues” that he earns the name. Sure, “Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting” is probably a warm-up for “Better Get Hit in Yo’ Soul” since it pre-dates it but since Atlantic sat on this album for a year after it was recorded (as possible retaliation for Mingus signing a contract with Columbia), now, released later, it plays like a refinement (it even has another Booker Ervin solo completely unaccompanied except, again, by claps and shouts). Horace Parlan’s solo is insane! Every repetition gets me more and more hype up for what’s to come. This album is Mingus Ah Um boiled down to its essentials.
The title and cover allude to Charles Mingus’ east Asian descent (his grandmother was from Hong Kong), but the music is more Mingus Ah Um; there’s no “Oriental Folk Song” attempted here which is a shame because I would think Charles Mingus in 1960 would have done something better riffing on east Asian folk music than Wayne Shorter in 1964 (even if Night Dreamer was Wayne Shorter’s first great album). A humble suggestion: skip “Slop,” the 6/8 opener with an excellent name which was created in request by a TV program for something similar to “Better Get Hit in Yo’ Soul.” The song is fine, but that’s its ceiling, pulsing with a similar gospel energy (very similar shouting throughout), and Dannie Richmond works up some mean fills around the 3:45 mark (as he will later on the album), but it’s not nearly as good as “Better Get Hit” or “Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting.”
The rest of the album is great, although it sucks that clearly the album is constructed from two different recording sessions. I certainly don’t need the extra saxophones or trumpets on the two Ellington covers (both great), but Ted Charles on vibes (who played with Mingus on the Miles Davis album Blue Moods) is doing so much for “Gunslinging Bird” and “Far Wells, Mill Valley” that you wish he showed up for straight-forward bop song “New Now, Know How” (skip this one as well). In a similar vein, I wish that the brooding cellos that open “Diane” and add to the contrapuntal moodiness of short-don’t-skip closer “Put Me in That Dungeon” were used elsewhere too. My favourite moment is on “Far Wells, Mill Valley” when the song switches into a pulsing ‘riff’ and Jerome Richardson switches from baritone sax to a dizzying flute solo and you realize that, despite the fact that Mingus worked with Dolphy and Kirk, he didn’t incorporate that instrument nearly as much as I would have liked. One other point of note: Jaki Byard will quote Roland Hanna’s piano intro of “Things Ain’t What They Used to Be” for “Duet Solo Dancers.”
More on this in the blurb of the upcoming album, but Mingus was playing with a much tighter band at this point (a quintet with no piano), and so these versions of crowd-pleasing “Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting” and “Better Get Hit” aren’t essential because part of the charm of their originals is just how much is going on. (I like how they’re placed at opposite ends of the set so it’s not obvious how they’re essentially the same song: same tempo, same time signature, same chords, same handclapped-backed sax solo.) Antibes has two songs that’ll show up in their studio forms, and while this version of “Folk Forms, No. 1” is less convincing, “What Love?” has Mingus thumping his bass louder when you expect the song to burst (at the 8:40) compared to the version on Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus. Bud Powell shows up as a guest for “I’ll Remember April,” which serves as the most ‘conventional’ song and a nice break after the long “What’s Love?” but the mix doesn’t favour Carson for his brief solo; the best song is the expanded version of “Prayer for Passive Resistance.”
Despite leading the charge with his bass-lines and the dense layering of horns and saxophones, much of my love for Mingus is the brilliant pianists he always worked with; clearly he loved that instrument too since he would soon try his own hand at it. For this album, he reduced his band even further to a core quartet consisting of himself, Dolphy, Dannie Richmond and Ted Carson on trumpet, documented here on Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus: no piano at all. The first thought that comes to mind is Ornette Coleman: with no piano setting the rules of what chords are being played, it frees Mingus, Dolphy and Carson up; add to this that there’s less harmonic density (no trombones either), and the improvisation much shine on their own - which they do! All four songs aren’t merely great, but downright essential to the Mingus experience which is why I rank this one slightly higher than The Clown; the only criticism I can offer here is that I wish Mingus didn’t bother pretending this obvious studio album was a live album, which he does by hastily introducing each song.
“Folk Forms, No. 1” starts with an insanely tricky bass-line from Mingus that you don’t expect Dolphy and Carson to so easily stand on; Richmond trusts these men so much that he barely makes his presence known until just about halfway through where he finally bursts in, eager for his own solo. “Original Faubus Fables” contains the lyrics that Columbia opted to remove from the version on Mingus Ah Um: “Name me someone ridiculous, Dannie! GOVERNOR FAUBUS! Why is he sick and ridiculous? HE WON’T PERMIT INTEGRATED SCHOOLS! Then he’s a fool!” “What Love” is the highlight, a slow burn with the expectation that Richmond will finally start bashing his kit like on “Folk Forms, No. 1,” but he never does; instead, they expect listeners to follow along to the conversation between the bass and the horns. And then “All the Things You Could Be by Now If Sigmund Freud's Wife Was Your Mother” perks things up after such intense compositions with a barnstomper. Worth stating here is that “What Love” and parts of “Sigmund Freud’s Wife” were both partially written in the 1940s (Mingus says in his autobiography Beneath the Underdog that “What Love” was written in 1942 which he played with Buddy Collette and Britt Woodman but they said “it couldn’t be played—too freaky, too hard”), and “What Love” might have been shelved forever if Eric Dolphy didn’t urge Mingus to play it because it reminded him of Ornette Coleman, which shows just how ahead of the game Mingus was.
So named because Charles Mingus helped organize an anti-festival in protest of Newport’s increasing un-jazz official festival, Newport Rebels features some of the musicians who were part of it. Don’t believe the cover though, which lists Max Roach second but only appears on one song; a fun game is sampling every song for 1 or 2 seconds because the difference between Jo Jones (in his only date with Mingus) and Roach is universes apart: Jones swings, sure, but is polite; Roach starts a fire. In a similar vein, it’s easy to tell when Charles Mingus is the bassist here and when he’s replaced by Peck Morrison; at least for one of the two songs. In other words, there’s no continuity between the songs here, so don’t take this as an Album, take this as Charles Mingus presents a festival of incredible musicians. I don’t much care for Roy Eldridge’s soloing on both ”Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams” and “Me and You”—a lot of scratching and writhing—and the short former track is essentially a solo spot for him; the piano generally sounds undermiced regardless if it’s Kenny Dorham or Tommy Flanagan behind it. But I do get an Abbey Lincoln song backed by Eric Dolphy!
A mixed bag, this one: two Ellington covers (“Take the ‘A’ Train” and “Do Nothin' Till You Hear From Me”), both good but not as good as the last batch of Ellington covers, two vocal jazz songs with someone named Lorraine Cousins that the internet has no information on (“Eclipse” and “Weird Nightmare”), and the rest of the songs are split between a big band for Mingus (nine players) and an actual big band. So it’s hard to get a read on this album beyond the fact that the songs were conceived before Charles Mingus heard Charlie Parker; literally before Bird. My favourite tracks are actually the two vocal ones even though Cousins sticks to the high register without ever landing, as in, they’re my favourites not because of her. “Eclipse” starts and ends with uneasy male vocals from Booker Ervin and Paul Bley that convey the sense of unease even before Bley does those anxious fills, who then proceeds to get in one of the best solos on the album. “Weird Nightmare” sounds exactly like that thanks to the flute from Eric Dolphy and Yusef Lateef, although one wishes that the intro was more well-integrated with the actual song portion.
This short album—only three songs, the shortest number of tracks that appears on a Mingus album pre-hiatus)—is mostly for Mingus to experiment expanding his core band to eleven members and has too much of a ‘jam session’ feel even if I don’t think that was the case. (If six people is a ‘sextet’, is eleven people an ‘undecutet’?) I think the sole highlight is the only song that’s performed by a quartet, a new take on “Stormy Weather” (first attempted on Jazzical Moods) that has great solos from Eric Dolphy and Charles Mingus, and then Ted Curson joins in near the end and the song sounds very much like Ornette Coleman again. Opener “MDM” is based on three different compositions by Monk, Duke and Mingus, and my mind wanders during its 19-minute run-time. Closer “Lock ‘Em Up (Hellview Of Bellevue)” is set to an insane tempo as Mingus sonically details—ghostly wrong harmonies—what it was like when he (ill-advisedly) checked himself into a mental ward because he couldn’t sleep (“If you have a toothache you got to a dentist and I thought if you have head problems you come down here”).
Oh Yeah ends Charles Mingus’ run on Atlantic with, not a whimper per se, but certainly not a bang: of these four albums, it is clearly the weakest because Charles Mingus plays piano and sings instead of playing bass, delegating those duties to Doug Watkins (Saxophone Colossus). When Harvey Pekar via DownBeat famously criticized Mingus’ singing on this album, Mingus responded by threatening to punch him in the face (“No one could sing my blues but me […] just as no one could holler for you if I decide to punch you in your mouth. So don’t come near me ever in this life”), and it is in the threat of extreme violence that I say that his singing isn’t good. It’s not really singing (which Mingus admits to), it’s more like a boring bluesy holler that isn’t able to communicate as clearly as his bass playing, let alone other blues singers; the blues parody of “Oh Lord Don't Let Them Drop That Atomic Bomb On Me” gets half a laugh at best. I’ll elaborate more on the review of his piano album, but he’s also a limited pianist, doing these bluesy vamps underneath everyone else’s solos that feel telegraphed and not responding to what the other players are doing. One exception: the end of “Wham Bam Thank You Ma’am” where his chords thicken as Rahsaan Roland Kirk finishes up his solo and they reach the maddeningly catchy chorus together. “Hog Callin’ Blues” has a chorus that sounds like “Haitian Fight Song,” noteworthy for the screech-drone of Kirk’s invented instruments; “Ecclusiastics” has one that sounds “Tennesse Waltz”; “Passions of a Man” is his “Revolution #9,” except not as scary or brilliant. His worst pre-hiatus ‘canon’ album.
Tonight at Noon is an archival release combines session tracks from The Clown and Oh Yeah! that didn’t make it onto those albums and can be skipped - in fact, if you have the expanded reissues of those albums, then you already have these five songs anyway. The title track is the best of the bunch although it’s obvious why it wasn’t included on The Clown: it’s ‘just another rowdy Mingus song,’ although I love the big band circus that’s propelled forward by Mingus’ fast bass-line, an element that’s sorely missing on the next three songs which are all from Oh Yeah! when he switched to piano and vocals. No vocals here, but his piano is undermiced which is a problem when the spotlight is on him on “‘Old’ Blues for Walt's Torin” and “Peggy's Blue Skylight.”
Considering Duke Ellington gets top billing here (and larger font on the cover), and considering that Ellington’s angular chords are front and center despite how loud the rhythm section often is, this would make more sense to cover in ‘The Complete Guide to Duke Ellington’, but since who knows if/when I’ll get around to that, I’ll talk about this incredible album here instead. Because it’s, ah, very special indeed.
Mingus = one of the greatest bassists. Max Roach = one of the greatest drummers. Ellington = one of the greatest jazz composers. And even though Mingus and Ellington aren’t known for their work in a trio (this being Mingus’ second album in a trio setting) and even though there’s a generational gap between Ellington and the rhythm section here, it’s like everyone was willing to really challenge and listen to one another. It’s also delightfully modern; forget other piano-led trio albums from the early-60s, it makes a lot of the avant-garde records that came after feel stiff by comparison - I’d sincerely rather hear this than any Matthew Shipp or Andrew Hill record even though the piano playing isn’t as challenging. I love how the first note we hear on the record is basically a warning shot, like ‘get ready for this,’ and still nothing could have braced me for “Money Jungle,” least of all what Mingus does to his bass (he violates it) in the final minute. And despite the fact that Mingus was reportedly upset from the sessions (“Man, I can’t play with that drummer”) and had to be coaxed back into the studio by Ellington to finish, I personally can’t hear it: without him, “Very Special” wouldn’t be that at all as it’s his counterpoint against Ellington that practically defines it, and not like he’s phoning it in on the ballads either (phoning it in was very much not in Mingus’ language for ballads). Ellington apparently handed everyone a visual cue for each song, i.e. “crawling around on the streets are serpents who have their heads up; these are agents and people who have exploited artists” which is very Satie of him. I wonder what the image was for “Fleurette Africaine” (I get the same image as Ellington’s “In a Sentimental Mood” with John Coltrane, which is to say, pure evening bliss, although that mistake on Ellington’s part at the 0:38 mark irks me but the song was completed in a single take so I’m forgiving), and I wonder if Ellington just gave Roach a drawing of a machine gun for “Caravan.” Also, can we take a moment to appreciate Max Roach’s style on the cover?
See you next week for the rest of his discography, for the review of The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady and then the rankings that I promised. If you enjoyed reading this issue of Free City Rhymes, then I’d love it if you subscribed and shared!