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: Leonard Cohen – I’m Your Man (Motion Picture Soundtrack: Various Artists)

Leonard Cohen – I’m Your Man
Motion Picture Soundtrack: Various Artists
Verve Forecast
2006
16 tracks

I have to admit that I come to this CD with more than a little bias. For more than forty years, I’ve been a fan of Leonard Cohen the poet, the man, the musician, the artist. In 1964, while I was sitting in a high-school class not doing much of anything, a friend loaned me Cohen’s book A Spice Box of Earth, published less than a decade earlier. At the time, the only singing Cohen was doing was with his little Country and Western band in Montreal. I was hooked.

When I was a young poet, my greatest living influence was Leonard Cohen. I read all of his poetry. I studied and revered it like some Holy writ. As soon as Beautiful Losers was published, I bought and read it and discovered the prose of Leonard Cohen. When his first album, The Songs of Leonard Cohen, was released, I rushed to buy a copy. As Cohen evolved as an artist, so on some lower plateau did I evolve.

I remember, somewhere around 1970, an influential publication [I think it was Rolling Stone but can't remember for sure] had on its cover an illustration of all the great music stars of the day, stacked like a pyramid. The illustration was titled “The Rock Pile.” At the time, Cohen was still pretty much considered a folk artist, but there he was, Leonard Cohen, a Canadian poet, right at the top of the rock pile. Ask me if I was impressed.

The people I spend the most time with are writers, musicians, painters, actors and other artists. In this community, Leonard Cohen is more than simply an icon, more than a towering idol. Cohen is the ideal toward which we each aspire. It’s not that any of us wants to actually become Cohen, but that we want to achieve the depth and beauty and power in our own work that we find in Cohen’s.

This CD, like the motion picture from which these soundtrack recordings were drawn, is a loving tribute to the man and to his words and music. Listening to the performances, you can feel the love, the deep and enduring respect that these artists have for Leonard Cohen. There is a tangible beauty here that goes beyond simply the performances and should touch any listener, even one unfamiliar with the works of this Canadian poet.

Originally conceived by the Canadian Consulate in New York as a live outdoor concert in Brooklyn titled Came So Far For Beauty: An Evening Of Leonard Cohen Songs Under The Stars, the concept soon grew. Performances were mounted in Brighton, England and Sydney, Australia and ultimately film of these concerts became Leonard Cohen – I’m Your Man. In the end, concert producer Hal Willner and film director Lian Linson have created an unique and lasting tribute to the artistry of Leonard Cohen.

The selection of artists on this release is outstanding, both for its diversity and for the very high quality of the performances these artists deliver. Fronting the band are Martha Wainwright, Teddy Thompson, Nick Cave, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, Beth Orton, Rufus Wainright, Anthony, Jarvis Cocker, The Handsome Family, Perla Batalla, Julie Christensen, U2, and Leonard Cohen himself. The backing band includes Batalla and Christensen, Steven Bernstein, Rob Burger,Charlie Burnham, Dave Coulter, Don Falzone, Smokey Hormel, Briggan Krauss, Maxim Moston, Chris Spedding, Joan Wasser, and Kenny Wolleson.

Each of these new interpretations of Cohen songs is excellent. There are some powerful treatments here of Cohen’s words and music and, while the theme is unified, each performance is unique and stands on its own. Without writing a small book, it would be impossible to comment on each of these songs, and to comment on only one or two would be unfair to the others. The excellence of the work presented here is a fitting tribute to Leonard Cohen, the artist and the man.

If I’m disappointed in this release at all, it’s only that there isn’t more. There were many more performances in the film, enough that a double CD set could have been created without much difficulty. What I’ve heard here has been tasty, but it’s only made me hungry for the rest of it.

This CD belongs in the collection of every Leonard Cohen fan. It should also be added to the collection of anyone who wants to learn more about the work of Leonard Cohen. I would definitely recommend this soundtrack recording to anyone.

You can find everything you could want to know about the film Leonard Cohen – I’m Your Man at it’s own website. The site looks like a poster for the film but most of the credits in gold at the bottom are links to other pages. Click on the “soundtrack” link and you’ll find a full track listing for this CD plus a player on which you can listen to clips of the songs. If you want to know more about Leonard Cohen, just type his name into your search engine. There’s a lot out there.

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