#Charles mingus free#

Along with a couple of alternate takes, the second disc contains Mingus Dynasty, an uneven and far less interesting album recorded later in 1959 and issued early in 1960. The remaster is the same one performed by Mark Wilder in the late 1990s and still in print. Regarding the product at hand: a 2xCD 50th anniversary 'Legacy Edition' with a list price of $25. Harmonies invoke modern classical music almost as often as blues, and his chosen instrumentalists spend as much effort adding color to the ensemble as personality to their brief solos. Kite') play alongside factory-pressed bop- and swing-style songs like 'Boogie Stop Shuffle' and the mournful, reverent balladry of 'Goodbye Pork Pie Hat'. And while 'Better Git' is as good a definition of Mingus there is, the album is remarkably diverse: Set pieces like 'Fables of Faubus' or 'Jelly Roll' (which are a jazz analog to the Beatles's warped, fruity variations on early British pop, like 'For the Benefit of Mr. The song never struck me as primitive or rootsy, but a comic-book version of primitive, rootsy music- a form reduced to its most basic shapes and traits a form almost abstracted. Mingus, born to a black father and Chinese-American mother who allowed only church music in the house, embraced blues and gospel in the complex way one embraces a friend they've fallen out of touch with, or their hometown- cautiously with a burdened and deep-buried love. 'Better Git It in Your Soul'- if Mingus had his own sound, Mingus Ah Um's opener was it: a warm, striding, Sunday-morning tune carried on moaning horns a friendly, convivial atmosphere punctuated by hollers Mingus didn't bother suppressing in the studio. In an era where big bands were left behind for small combos or reimagined entirely (as with, say, John Coltrane's late albums), Mingus was a Duke Ellington acolyte who approached his pieces with the formality of an orchestral composer.

#Charles mingus free#

At the dawn of both modal and free jazz, he kept solos short and music composed (even if, as with 1959's Atlantic recording Blues and Roots, the players didn't see the charts before the studio date).

Then again, Mingus' music never seemed comfortable outside its own world, either. They're too spirited for cocktail hour, too rough and moody for listeners who revel in crafstmanship, and not radical enough for daredevils. While routinely placed on best-of-genre lists and talked about as one of the preeminent bassists and bandleaders in jazz, his best albums never clump comfortably with anyone else's, or with any particular subset of casual jazz listeners. Poor big-bellied, cigar-loving, temperamental, insecure, misogynistic Charles Mingus. Chuckle a pitying chuckle over 's guide '1959: The Most Creative Year in Jazz.' Miles Davis's Kind of Blue: 'the quintessential jazz album' Coltrane's Giant Steps: 'a major landmark in jazz history' Brubeck's 'Take Five': 'one of the most popular tunes in jazz' Ornette Coleman's The Shape of Jazz to Come: 'the essential free jazz album.' Mingus Ah Um? 'Essential to Mingus fans and jazz aficionados' (emphasis mine).