Charles Mingus - The Essential Charles Mingus: The Columbia & RCA Years '2013

Tracks list

Tracklist:

01. Better Git It in Your Soul
02. Goodbye Pork Pie Hat
03. Fables of Faubus
04. Boogie Stop Shuffle
05. Far Wells, Mill Valley
06. Mood Indigo
07. Song with Orange
08. Strollin
09. Ysabels Table Dance (1957/62 Master Takes)
10. Flamingo (1957/62 Master Takes)
11. A Colloquial Dream
12. Revelations (First Movement)
13. The Shoes of the Fishermans Wife Are Some Jive Ass Slippers
14. Adagio Ma Non Troppo
15. The I of Hurricane Sue
16. Ecclusiastics (Live)
17. Jumpy Monk (Live)
18. Mingus Blues (Live)
19. Peggys Blue Skylight
20. Ballad (In Other Words, I Am Three)


 Read MoreBorn in a Nogales Army camp, Mingus moved to the Watts district of
Los Angeles, where he grew up. The first music he heard was that of the church
-- the only music his stepmother allowed around the house -- but one day,
despite the threat of punishment, he tuned in to Duke Ellingtons East St. Louis
Toodle-Oo on his fathers crystal set, his first exposure to jazz. He tried to
learn the trombone at six and then the cello, but became fed up with incompetent
teachers and ended up on the double bass by the time he reached high school. His
early teachers were Red Callender and an ex-New York Philharmonic bassist named
Herman Reinshagen, and he studied composition with Lloyd Reese. A proto-third
stream composition written by Mingus in 1940-1941, Half-Mast Inhibition
(recorded in 1960), reveals an extraordinary timbral imagination for a teenager.

As a bass prodigy, Mingus performed with Kid Ory in Barney Bigards group in 1942
and went on the road with Louis Armstrong the following year. He would gravitate
toward the R&B side of the road later in the 40s, working with the Lionel
Hampton band in 1947-1948, backing R&B and jazz performers, and leading
ensembles in various idioms under the name Baron Von Mingus. He began to attract
real national attention as a bassist for Red Norvos trio with Tal Farlow in
1950-1951, and after leaving that group, he moved to New York and began working
with several stellar jazz performers, including Billy Taylor, Stan Getz, and Art
Tatum. He was the bassist in the famous 1953 Massey Hall concert in Toronto with
Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, and Max Roach, and he briefly
joined his idol Ellington: he had the dubious distinction of being the only man
Duke ever personally fired from his band.

Around this time, Mingus tried to make himself a rallying point for the jazz
community. He founded Debut Records in partnership with his then-wife Celia and
Max Roach in 1952, seeing to it that the label recorded a wide variety of jazz,
from bebop to experimental music, until its demise in 1957. Among Debuts most
notable releases were the Massey Hall concert, an album by Miles Davis, and
several of his own sessions that traced the development of his ideas. He also
contributed composed works to the Jazz Composers Workshop from 1953 to 1955, and
in 1955, he founded his own Jazz Workshop repertory group that found him moving
away from strict notation toward a looser, dictated manner of composing.

Tijuana MoodsBy 1956, with the release of Pithecanthropus Erectus (Atlantic),
Mingus had clearly found himself as a composer and leader, creating pulsating,
ever-shifting compendiums of jazzs past and present, feeling his way into the
free jazz of the future. For the next decade, he would pour forth an
extraordinary body of work for several labels, including key albums like The
Clown, New Tijuana Moods, Mingus Ah Um, Blues and Roots and Oh Yeah; standards
like Goodbye Pork Pie Hat, Better Git It in Your Soul, Haitian Fight Song, and
Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting, and extended works like Meditations on
Integration and Epitaph. Through ensembles ranging in size from a quartet to an
11-piece big band, a procession of noted sidemen like Eric Dolphy, Jackie
McLean, J.R. Monterose, Jimmy Knepper, Roland Kirk, Booker Ervin, and John Handy
would pass, with Mingus commanding bass and volatile personality pushing his
musicians further than some of them might have liked to go. The groups with the
great Dolphy (heard live on Mingus at Antibes) in the early 60s might have been
his most dynamic, and The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady (1963), is an extended
ballet for big band that captures the anguished/joyful split of Mingus
personality in full, and his passionately wild cry.

Mingus felt the lash of racial prejudice intensely -- which, combined with the
frustrations of making it in the music business on his own terms, found its
outlet in his music; some of his more unique titles were political in nature,
such as Fables of Faubus (referring to the Arkansas governor who tried to keep
Little Rock schools segregated), Oh Lord, Dont Let Them Drop That Atomic Bomb on
Me, and Remember Rockefeller at Attica. But he could also be wildly humorous,
the most notorious example being If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, Thered Be a
Whole Lot of Dead Copycats (later shortened to Gunslinging Bird).

Mingus was almost obsessive in his efforts to free himself from the economic
hazards of the music business; so much so that it nearly undermined his sanity
during the 60s (some of the liner notes for The Black Saint album were written
by his psychologist, Dr. Edmund Pollock). He tried to compete with the Newport
festivals by organizing his own Jazz Artists Guild in 1960 that purported to
give musicians more control over their work, but that collapsed due to the
by-then routine rancor that accompanied so many Mingus ventures, like his
calamitous, self-presented New York Town Hall concert in 1962; a shorter-lived
recording venture, Charles Mingus Records, in 1964-1965; his failure to find a
publisher for his autobiography Beneath the Underdog, and other setbacks that
broke his bank account and ultimately his spirit. He quit music almost entirely
from 1966 until 1969, resuming performances in June 1969 only because he
desperately needed money.

Let My Children Hear MusicFinancial angels in the forms of a Guggenheim
Fellowship in composition, the publication of Beneath the Underdog in 1971, and
the purchase of his Debut masters by Fantasy boosted Mingus spirits, and a
stimulating new Columbia album, Let My Children Hear Music, thrust him back into
public view. By 1974, he had formed a new young quintet anchored by his loyal
drummer Dannie Richmond and featuring Jack Walrath, Don Pullen, and George
Adams, and more compositions came forth, including the massive, kaleidoscopic,
Colombian-based Cumbia and Jazz Fusion that began its life as a film score.

Respect for him was growing, but time was running out. In the fall of 1977,
Mingus was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrigs disease),
and by the following year, he was unable to play the bass. Though confined to a
wheelchair, he nevertheless carried on, leading recording sessions and receiving
honors at a White House concert on June 18, 1978. His last project was a
collaboration with folk-rock singer Joni Mitchell, who wrote lyrics to Mingus
music and included samples of Mingus voice on the record.

Since his death, Mingus importance and fame have increased exponentially, thanks
in large part to the determined efforts of Sue Mingus, his widow. A posthumous
repertory group, Mingus Dynasty, was formed almost immediately after his death,
and that concept expanded in 1991 into the exciting Mingus Big Band, which
resurrected many of Mingus most challenging scores. Epitaph was finally
reconstructed, performed, and recorded in 1989 to general acclaim, and several
box sets of portions of Mingus output have been issued by Rhino/Atlantic,
Mosaic, and Fantasy. Beyond re-creations, the Mingus influence can be heard on
Branford Marsalis early Scenes in the City album, and especially in the big-band
writing of his brother Wynton. The Mingus blend of wildly colorful eclecticism
solidly rooted in jazz history serves his legacy well in a future increasingly
populated by young conservatives who want to pay their respects to tradition and
try something different.

Jazz in Detroit / Strata Concert Gallery / 46 SeldonIn the fall of 2018, BBE
released the previously unissued archival, multi-disc recording Jazz in
Detroit/Strata Concert Gallery/46 Selden. Curator, DJ, and producer Amir
Abdullah discovered five two-track master tapes in the care of Hermione Brooks
--­ widow of innovative Detroit drummer Roy Brooks, from his time as a member
of the Charles Mingus Quintet -- that were recorded live during Mingus week-long
residency in February of 1973. They were broadcast live by drummer/producer and
broadcaster Robert Bud Spangler on Detroits public radio station, WDET FM. The
Strata Gallery was housed in pianist Kenny and Barbara Coxs multi-purpose home
for Strata Records at 46 Selden in what was then known as Cass Corridor. ~
Richard S. Ginell

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