CD Review: Music Written for Monterey 1965, Not Heard… Played in its Entirety At UCLA (Charles Mingus)

Music Written for Monterey 1965
Not Heard… Played in its Entirety At UCLA
Charles Mingus
Sue Mingus Music
2006
11 tracks

This is big music, not just in the size of the band but in the music’s emotional power. This is music with movements, like Mozart or Beethoven or any of the finest classical composers, music that moves you like the best jazz combos, music that draws your emotions to the surface like the most sultry torch-songs, music that lives on outside time and touches everyone who listens. If classical music had not ossified at the end of the Nineteenth Century, leaving only a few so-called modern composers to move it forward, this is what that music would have become.

In 1965, I was listening to new music by Charles Mingus on long-playing vinyl records released by specialized jazz labels. For me, the music was new and wonderful. I revelled in this innovative, powerful jazz that seemed to be moving the music forward. This new release of music written by Mingus and recorded in a live 1965 concert takes me back to that time but also allows me the perspective of hindsight. It’s through this prism of time that I’m now hearing this music.

After forty some years, I can hear the influence of Mingus in the music of so many other great artists, not just in jazz but across the spectrum of popular and more academic styles. More exciting is that today the music sounds just as fresh and exciting as ever, and every bit as innovative as it did so long ago. This refreshing music may continue to influence composers and performers for many decades to come, not just in America but around the world.

Although this release includes only 11 tracks of music, 19 total tracks if you count the bits of speech between the music, it gives the listener almost 90 minutes of music by one of America’s finest composers and his band. To listen is to be entranced by the beauty and power of this music as it carries the listener through highs and lows and from mood to mood. It’s electrifying and it’s elequent and it speaks to the world with the voice of America.

Like Ellington, Copland, Grofé, and only a few others, Charles Mingus has discovered the heart of America and set it to music that transcends time and space. This is the new music of the American spirit, the transition through the Twentieth Century, into the Twenty-First, and into the future. Jazz music will never be the same again.

While much and perhaps all of this music has a large, almost classical feel behind the jazz surface, two numbers near the end of the set stand out as different from the rest. Amid all the contemporary Mingus compositions, with “Muskrat Ramble,” written in 1926 by Ray Gilbert and Edward “Kid” Ory, the band swings into Dixieland mode as it shuffles toward the end of the set. Like a flashback in a movie, “Muskrat Ramble” fits right in and brings added depth and history to this otherwise modern set. The final song is a spoken word adaptation of “First they came…,” a poem attributed to Pastor Martin Niemöller (1892–1984) about the failure of German intellectuals to oppose the Nazis. Mingus adapts this poem to address racism and other problems Americans face, giving a heartfelt spoken performance of “Don’t Let It Happen Here” over appropriately moving musical backing.

Besides Charles Mingus on bass and piano, this concert features Hobart Dotson and Lonnie Hilyer on trumpet, Jimmy Owens on flugelhorn and trumpet, Charles McPherson on alto saxophone, Julius Watkins on french horn, Howard Johnson on tuba, and Danny Richmond on drums. Among them all, there’s not a performance that is less than excellent.

Anyone who would like to travel to the epicentre of modern jazz music, to the point where American music’s past takes on a new polish and becomes its own future, should definitely give this concert a listen. Without this recording, no collection of jazz music is complete.

This album’s jewel-case insert includes delightful, very informative forward notes by Sue Mingus, further notes by Fred Cohen and Sue Mingus, and various other notes, illustrations and commentaries, including an excerpt from the autobiographical book Beneath the Underdog, written by Mingus. More than just an interesting read, these notes bring a certain historical perspective to the life and music of Charles Mingus.

You can find out more about the late Charles Mingus(1922–1979), at Charles Mingus: The Official Site or at Wikipedia.

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CD Review: Live at the Blue Note in Tokyo (Mingus Big Band)

Live at the Blue Note in Tokyo
Mingus Big Band
Sue Mingus Music
2006
8 tracks

Under the artistic direction of Sue Mingus, wife of the late Charles Mingus (1922 – 1979), the fourteen piece Mingus Big Band is unique in many respects. Since 1991, the band has performed the music of Jazz composer and bassist Charles Mingus in new York City, first at the Fez under Time Cafe and, since 2004, at the Iridium Jazz Club and tours extensively in the United States and abroad. With almost fifty repertory members, the band operates like a formalized pick-up band, its membership made up of whichever fourteen members are available for a particular gig. This variegation of players has helped the Mingus Big Band keep its performances fresh and vital over the years.

In December of 2005, the Mingus Big Band played a week of concerts at the Blue Note Club in Tokyo. The final concert of that series, on New Year’s Eve, resulted in the recording of this exciting big band Jazz set. For that not to have happened would have been a great loss to the world of Jazz music and to American music in general. On this CD is some of the finest Jazz composition to come out of America, performed by fourteen of America’s finest Jazz musicians.

In turns, this music swings and swirls, jitters and jives, rocks and rolls, races and slows, and does it all over again. At times, it’s pure New York, with all the sense of traffic’s rush and ramble, stop and start, motors revving and car horns shouting out. At other times, it sweeps through the Orient, the Far-East and the Middle-East, becoming at once distant and exotic. There is praise here too, sometimes ecstatic and sometimes pure Gospel, to rock the listener’s soul. There are sound effects (a horse whinnies, birds sing), implicit visuals, and pure, wonderful music. It’s a marvelous cascade of sound that fills the room and washes the listener away into some jazz fantasy. It’s pure magic!

This is big music, symphonic in scale yet with all the heart and soul of American culture at its deepest and most powerful. The music of Charles Mingus speaks of and to the American people, and the players of the Mingus Big Band give his music a powerful, evocative voice that speaks not just to America but to the world.

Even though each song on this release is as wonderful as the rest, I do have some favourites. “Ecclusiastics” is the only song in this set with words and it’s also the longest at 10:33. A number with a certain Christian flavour and fervour, “Ecclusiastics” opens and closes with a Gospel-shouted spoken piece – you might even say sermon – featuring words from Ecclesiastes. The Preacher, Ku-umba Frank Lacy, brings to these ancient words all the energy needed to raise them up from a lovely poem to a power-packed exhortation to action. “Amen!” he says. Yes sir, amen!

Equal in every way to the exhortations of The Preacher, the music of “Ecclusiastics” is full, rich and dramatic and reaches into the corners of American music, echoing Ellington, Charles, Copland, Grofé, and a dozen others, yet always speaking in a single voice and always in the voice of Mingus. It’s something very special to hear.

“Prayer for Passive Resistance” is my other favourite. This song rocks with a drive that stirs the heart and moves the feet. It’s as much Rock & Roll as it is Jazz, shouting out of rebellion and resistance as it grabs at the listener’s soul. This is tough music, the kind you heard in The Blackboard Jungle or in Fifties detective movies. It’s big and symphonic in scope, shifting in tempo and swinging from mood to mood as it carries the listener through the imagined dusky city streets of America.

While I mention two songs that especially appeal to me, every performance on this release is of the same superior calibre. Each listener may have different favourites, but there’s unlikely to be a big difference between the favourite and the next song down the list. In my opinion, no collector of great American Jazz should be without a copy of this CD in his or her collection.

This album’s jewel-case insert includes interesting and informative liner notes by producer Sue Mingus. Reading these notes brings a certain historical perspective to this music and the Mingus Big Band.

You can find out more about the Mingus Big Band at Charles Mingus: The Official Site, the Iridium Jazz Club website, or at Wikipedia. You may also find it worthwhile and interesting to look up Charles Mingus and Sue Mingus.

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CD Review: Black Talk! (Charles Earland)

Black Talk!
Charles Earland
Prestige Records
2006
5 tracks

Groovy! That about covers it, but there’s more to this album than that. When this music was originally released, the word “groovy” had not yet become cliché. Especially when spoken or written in reference to music, to be referred to as groovy was a very special thing. Charles Earland is groovy not just for this music but because he was a pioneer. Even now, nearly forty years after this album was first released, this music sounds fresh, alive, and up-to-date. There’s a creativity here and a power that simply can’t be replicated.

Long ago and far away, or so it seems now, a number of progressive musicians ventured into unknown territory somewhere between Jazz, popular music forms, and Rock & Roll, bringing with them a massive dose of soul. These musical innovators included artists as diverse as Isaac Hayes, Bill Cosby [yes, The Cos in his alternate persona as bandleader Badfoot Brown], and Charles Earland. Earland’s Black Talk, with its highly successful translation of contemporary hit music into a creative new style of jazz, was early and influential in the development of this new sound.

Although there are only five tracks on this CD, they bring the listener more than forty minutes of the finest jazz performance to be heard any time, any place. Any one of these songs makes this album well worth the price of admission.

“Black Talk” took the essential shape of the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby” and ran with it, taking the music in an entirely new and innovative direction. With its rhythmic breaks, groovin’ organ, and interplay of sax and trumpet, this song sounds very much of the Sixties, yet there’s also something there that even now sounds fresh and new.

“The Mighty Burner” is a nice little jump jive blues number that would as easily have pleased an audience ten or twenty years earlier. Written for WHAT Radio DJ Sonny Hopson, this song straddles the line between great Jazz and great Rock and Roll.

“Here Comes Charlie” takes a more standard direction, with a feel much like many of the better contemporary jazz intrumentals of the day. Like each song on this release, the song leaves lots of room for the players to strut their stuff, and strut they do.

Before or since, you’ve never heard “Aquarius” played like this. Here’s a long [well over eight minutes], lush, opulent version of this new age pop song. The sound is big and lively with a full-bodied flavour available only in the finest jazz performances.

It may have been a hit record, but I got real tired of hearing the Spiral Starecase song “More today Than Yesterday” repeatedly on the radio so long ago. This was a sickenly saccharine love song that, in my opinion at the time, could have been relegated to the remainders bin. Here I am listening to eleven and one-quarter minutes [I've typed the whole thing out just to give a sense of how really long that is] of this song, over and over again. It’s wonderful. It’s jazzy. It’s, well… groovy.

Players on this set included Charles Earland, organ; Virgil Jones, trumpet; Houston Person, tenor saxophone; Melvin Sparks, guitar; Idris Muhammad, drums; and Buddy Caldwell, congas. Together, these highly talented artists make a joyful noise.

Did I tell you that I like this set a lot or that the music is just wonderful. It’s true. This music is so creative and innovative that, if it came out today, it would still be setting standards for young artists to aspire toward. Now that’s groovy.

This CD includes both Bob Porter’s original liner notes from the 1969 album and new liner notes written by Porter in 2006 plus a brief note from sound engineer Rudy Van Gelder, who made the masters for both releases. These notes give the reader an interesting historical perspective on this artist and the music he created.

Those who my be interested will find a concise biography of the late Charles Earland (1941-1999) on the SoulWalking website. You can find all that and more at Fuller Up, The Dead Musicians Directory.

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