Mingus

REVINYLIZATION

- FRED KAPLAN

In the annals of jazz, Charles Mingus—bassist, pianist, composer, bandleader, unique, headstrong, and deeply influential in every category—occupies the transit point between Duke Ellington and the post-’60s avant-garde, a station he carved out deliberately. He venerated Ellington—his sophisticated rhythms and tonal colors, but also his attention to melody, harmony, and structure—and went beyond him (careened down a different path) in expressing emotion, chaos, and anger; it’s these elements that the avant-gardists took from him, while abandoning (to a degree that intrigued but also discomforted Mingus) Ellingtonian form. Critic Gary Giddins described Mingus as the “most persistently apocalyptic voice” in jazz—“the best example we have of disciplined turmoil.”

As part of its collaborative series with Chad Kassem’s Analogue Productions, the Universal Music Group has released fine vinyl pressings of two classic Mingus albums from the Impulse! Label: Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus and Black Saint and the Sinner Lady. Both feature 11-piece bands, but otherwise they’re different: Mingus Mingus consists of variants on six Mingus compositions first played on earlier albums (sometimes under different titles) plus Mingus’s bass-heavy cover of Ellington’s “Mood Indigo.” Black Saint consists entirely of new compositions, which Mingus conceived as a seamless suite for ballet. Remarkably, all of Black Saint and two of the seven tracks on