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Blues & Roots
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To buy this recording from Amazon.com, click here: Blues & Roots
_________________________________________________________________
Blues and Roots
Charles Mingus
_________________________________________________________________
1. Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting (5:40)
(By Charles Mingus, Jazz Worship, BMI)
Charles Mingus – Bass
Jackie McLean & John Handy – Alto Saxes
Booker Ervin – Tenor Sax
Pepper Adams – Baritone Sax
Jimmy Knepper & Willie Dennis – Trombones
Horace Parlan - Piano
Dannie Richmond – Drums
2. Cryin’ Blues (4:59)
(By Charles Mingus, Jazz Worship, BMI)
Charles Mingus – Bass
Jackie McLean & John Handy – Alto Saxes
Booker Ervin – Tenor Sax
Pepper Adams – Baritone Sax
Jimmy Knepper & Willie Dennis – Trombones
Horace Parlan - Piano
Dannie Richmond – Drums
3. Moanin’ (7:59)
(By Charles Mingus, Jazz Worship, BMI)
Charles Mingus – Bass
Jackie McLean & John Handy – Alto Saxes
Booker Ervin – Tenor Sax
Pepper Adams – Baritone Sax
Horace Parlan - Piano
Jimmy Knepper & Willie Dennis – Trombones
Dannie Richmond – Drums
4. Tensions (6:26)
(By Charles Mingus, Jazz Worship, BMI)
Charles Mingus – Bass
Jackie McLean & John Handy – Alto Saxes
Booker Ervin – Tenor Sax
Pepper Adams – Baritone Sax
Horace Parlan - Piano
Jimmy Knepper & Willie Dennis – Trombones
Dannie Richmond – Drums
5. My Jelly Roll Soul (6:47)
(By Charles Mingus, Jazz Worship, BMI)
Charles Mingus – Bass
Jackie McLean & John Handy – Alto Saxes
Booker Ervin – Tenor Sax
Pepper Adams – Baritone Sax
Jimmy Knepper & Willie Dennis – Trombones
Dannie Richmond – Drums
Horace Parlan - Piano
6. E’s Flat Ah’s Flat Too (6:42)
(By Charles Mingus, Jazz Worship, BMI)
Charles Mingus – Bass
Jackie McLean & John Handy – Alto Saxes
Booker Ervin – Tenor Sax
Pepper Adams – Baritone Sax
Jimmy Knepper & Willie Dennis – Trombones
Dannie Richmond – Drums
Mal Waldron – Piano
7. Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting
(Alternate Take) (6:54)
(By Charles Mingus, Jazz Worship, BMI)
8. Tensions (Alternate Take) (5:14)
(By Charles Mingus, Jazz Worship, BMI)
9. My Jelly Roll Soul (11:20)
(By Charles Mingus, Jazz Worship, BMI)
10. E’s Flat Ah’s Flat Too (Alternate Take) (6:47)
(By Charles Mingus, Jazz Worship, BMI)
Recorded at Atlantic Studios, New York City, February 4, 1959
Recording Engineer: Tom Dowd
Cover Photo: Lee Friedlander
Supervision: Nesuhi Ertegun
__________________________________________________
This is a high fidelity recording. Atlantic uses Electro-Voice 667, Capps and Telefunken U-47 microphones, and Ampex Model 300-8R tape recorder for its recording sessions. Individual microphone equalization is not permitted. The sound created by musicians and singers is represented as faithfully as possible, and special care is taken to preserve the frequency range as well as the dynamic range of each performance.
Original Album Released as Atlantic SD-1305, March 1960.
__________________________________________________
Reissue Supervision: Bob Carlton and Patrick Milligan
Reissue Liner Notes: Nat Hentoff
Editorial Supervision: Steven Cehan
Editorial Coordination: Ted Meyers, Elizabeth Pavone
Editorial Research: Daniel Goldmark
Reissue Art Direction: Hugh Brown and Rachel Gutek
Reissue Design: Geoff Gans and Rachel Gutek
Color Photos: Geoff Gans
Illustration: John Seabury
Remastering: Bill Inglot and Dan Hersch / Digiprep
Project Assistance: Rick Brodey, Lori Carfora, David Dorn, Peter Pasternak, Brian Schuman, Thane Tierney
Special Thanks: Sue Mingus, Leon Leavitt, Vincent Pelote / Institute of Jazz Studies
__________________________________________________
I recently had the honor of co-producing Rhino's Charles Mingus box set, Passions Of A Man: The Complete Atlantic Recordings, 1956-1961. After an extensive vault search for extra material to include in the set, the tape gurus at Atlantic (Joey Hillguera and Mike Kull) made an amazing find by turning up the original tapes for the Blues & Roots sessions. We were able to acquire fascinating alternate takes of four songs from the album for inclusion on the box that we've also included on this deluxe reissue. Studying these session tapes under a microscope gave me some revealing insight into the incredible ensemble work and genius that went into the making of this album. Hopefully, you'll walk away with some of that insight too. Including these new alternate takes, restoring the original album artwork, and offering new notes by one of jazz's greatest writers, Nat Hentoff, it has been our goal to create the definitive version of Blues & Roots. We hope you enjoy it.
- Patrick Milligan
Rhino A&R
__________________________________________________
Charles Mingus was like a mythological creature.
As he once said of himself, there were many Minguses. He could be fiercely antagonistic, confidentially gentle, extraordinarily naïve, bitterly cynical, playful, and depressed.
He was also of different sizes. I’ve seen Mingus huge, Mingus shrunken, Mingus in between. His weight would vary so adventurously that he had different-sized clothes to fit each new body.
Most of all, Mingus was simultaneously singular and diverse in his music. “I don’t get caught in any one groove,” he used to say. “Everything I do is Mingus.” He didn’t like to use the word jazz. Everything he did was “Mingus music.” And that ranged from long symphoniclike compositions to blues to musical portraits to harsh evocations of racism.
He had a remarkably sustained skill at melodic writing and improvisation. A characteristic Mingus piece began with long, boldly arching melodies with a tenor swelling, deeply textured designs of an ensemble whose various sections were also engaged in sinewy interplay.
One of Mingus’ strengths as a musician was his ability to do what he described Charlie Parker as doing – “he made the whole room feel as he did.” And with Mingus, those were strong, often clashing feelings.
But then there was the Mingus who saw beyond the bitter feelings that divisions often arouse. “It’s not only a question of color anymore,” he told me. “It’s getting deeper than that. I mean it’s getting more and more difficult for a man or woman to just
love. People are getting so fragmented, and part of that is fewer and fewer people are making a real effort anymore to find exactly who they are."
Mingus thought about more than music. He kept up on economics and the lies people told in and out of politics. And as for getting to know who he was, he said one morning, "I'm going to keep on getting through and finding out the kind of man I am through my music. That's the one place I can be free."
I greatly miss Mingus and his music. One thing I particularly miss is hearing the phone ring, picking it up, and hearing music. Mingus music. He would often call and play a new piece without identifying himself so that I could concentrate on the music. And then, after five minutes or so, his voice would come on: "What do you think of that one?"
One of the pieces that made my morning had the call and the textures of the blues, although - as with the music on this album - much more went into it.
Mingus sure knew and felt his roots. He had played, after all, with the whole range of jazz - from Kid Ory to Charlie Parker. He knew the entire language - from the inside.
It was all the more ironic that one night, in a New York club, Charles was confronted by a very black visitor standing at the bar. Mingus, who was of a lighter complexion, was accused by the angry man of being "not black enough to play the blues."
The man advanced on Mingus, who was about to end the discussion with his fists. But suddenly, Mingus picked up his bass and roared into a solo that plunged into the deepest rivers of black blues. Mingus’ tormentor acted as if Mingus’ bass had turned into a cross before an oncoming vampire. The very black man slunk away into the night.
Mingus was a natural challenger. “Music,” he once told me, “is, or was, a language of the emotions. If someone has been escaping reality, I don’t expect him to dig my music … My music is alive and it’s about the living and the dead, abut good and evil. It’s angry, yet it’s real because it knows it’s angry.”
His music was always angry. It often was so achingly lyrical as to bring back one’s own memories of loss and mistaken priorities in love.
You never quite knew what was coming in Mingus’ music. This was also true of his dealings with people. He was unpredictable because people are. If you made any attempt at honest communication with him, Mingus returned the honesty with love. He was the most open human being I’ve ever known. But if he felt his love had been betrayed or exploited or misunderstood, his initial instinct was to strike from his hurt, sometimes physically, sometimes verbally, very often in his music.
I’ve seen Mingus at his most buoyant. It was after he and his group had played Mingus music for kids in Harlem. “A lot of what the kids get to hear,” Mingus told me, “is noise, with rock music all over the place. Rock is so limited in what it expresses, and it’s limited in how it expresses what little it has to say.
“But kids are able to hear more, much more than rock. So with my band, I went and played free concerts in the streets for Harlem kids during the summer. First, we were in Central Harlem and one of the guys in my band said, ‘Mingus, you can’t play what you usually do for these kids. They don’t dig it.’”
Mingus smiled in telling the end of the story. “But I did play what I usually play. And I did more. I took the music as far out as I could, and they still liked it. All those kids, following the truck, were wanting more. Of course, they wanted to hear it. It’s their music, man. It’s their lives.” Mingus kept the rich legacy alive – including the black music roots in this album you’re hearing.
Also, as you can hear in this session, Mingus’ sidemen could no more coast than he could. One of them told me, “You had to keep stretching yourself while y ou were with Mingus. He just wouldn’t let you coast. Even in public – you’ve seen it – he’d yell at you in the middle of a solo to stop playing licks and get into yourself. He had more confidence in what we were capable of than we had.”
In addition to creating one of the few distinctive and distinguishing bodies of compositions in jazz – along with Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington, and Thelonious Monk – Mingus was one of the most memorable virtuoso bassists in jazz history. And he achieved that status by characteristic unyielding determination: “I’d preach the hardest things incessantly. The third finger is seldom used, so I used it all the time. What happened, however, for a while I concentrated on speed and techniques almost as ends in themselves. I aimed at scaring all the other bass players, I stood right, and I was conscious of every note I ran. There seemed to be no problems I couldn’t solve.
“Then one night, when I was 18 or 19, all this changed. I began playing and didn’t stop for a long time. I was suddenly me, it wasn’t the bass anymore. Now I’m not conscious of the instrument as an instrument when I play. And I don’t dig any longer thinking in terms of whether one man is a ‘better’ bassist than another. Actually, you’re up there – everyone is – trying to express yourself.”
Mingus was so triumphantly himself in all contexts that he liked to tell the story of how, as a young man, he greatly enjoyed playing in the New Orleans-rooted band of legendary trombonist Kid Ory.
“While I was in that band,” Mingus says, “Fats Navarro [a much respected modern trumpet player] was telling me, ‘That’s not right, Mingus. That’s what they used to do.’ Well, I’m not going to worry about that sort of thing anymore, I said to myself at the time, I’m going to be me. And if Charlie Parker himself were to come back to life, I wouldn’t do something just because he did it. I’d have to feel it, too.”
When I was a boy, growing up on jazz, I wasn’t conscious of it as a liberating music, but I was aware of what seemed to me an extraordinary vitality in these jazz musicians. Each had so singular a sound and phrasing; each was so free and sometimes daring in his self-expression. Much more than the classical musicians I also heard as a boy. Much more so than any adults I knew. To me these jazz musicians were heroic as they played. Heroically individualistic.
As I got to know more of them, I began to see jazz musicians in a somewhat less luminous light. They were fallible and some could be obnoxious and even harmful to themselves and others. But I was still struck by how much life was in them.
And Mingus had more life – or rather, lives – than anyone I knew. In his apartment, I would listen to new compositions of his – string quartets – that were as bursting with life and individuality as his jazz works.
I saw him while he was afflicted with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s disease). He was in a wheelchair and couldn’t speak, but his eyes spoke as he hummed some new music into a tape recorder. He died, still looking for life, in Cuernavaca, Mexico in 1979.
As this album powerfully affirms, Mingus’ music will remain alive so long as there is life in the world.
- Nat Hentoff
September 1997
__________________________________________________
My music is as varied as my feelings are, or the world is, and one composition or one kind of composition expresses only part or the total world of my music. In the notes for another album, I go into more detail as to why my pieces are so different from one another and ·don't have one specific, unalleviated mood, sound or style. At a concert or night club I call tunes in an order that I feel is right for the particular situation and what I'm trying to say in that situation. Each composition builds from the previous one, and the succession of compositions creates the statement I'm trying to make at that moment. The greatness of jazz is that it is an art of the moment. It is so particularly through improvisation, but also, in my music, through the successive relation of one composition to another.
This record is unusual - it presents only one part of my musical world, the blues.
A year ago, Nesuhi Ertegun suggested that I record an entire blues album in the style of Haitian Fight Song (in Atlantic LP 1260), because some people, particularly critics, were saying I didn't swing enough. He wanted to give them a barrage of soul music: churchy, blues, swinging, earthy. I thought it over. I was born swinging and clapped my hands in church as a little boy, but I've grown up and I like to do things other than just swing. But blues can do more than just swing. So I agreed.
I decided to memorize the compositions and then phrase them on the piano part by part to the musicians. I wanted them to learn the music so it would be in their ears, rather than on paper, so they'd play the compositional parts with as much spontaneity and soul as they'd play a solo. And I decided to use a larger group to play in a big band form I'd like to hear that has as many lines going as there are musicians. I called musicians that I knew had great ears for playing and understanding my music.
The first tune, Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting, is church music. I heard this as a child when I went to meetings with my mother. The congregation gives their testimonial before the Lord, they confess their sins and sing and should and do a little Holy Rolling. Some preachers cast out demons, they call their dialogue talking in tongues or talking unknown tongue (language that the Devil can’t understand). The solos are taken by John Handy, Willie Dennis, Horace Parlan, Booker Ervin and Dannie Richmond.
The Cryin’ Blues is a blues without the usual tonic, sub-dominant, tonic, dominant changes. Booker Ervin opens with the group. After the last solo, Horace Parlan solos on piano, and Jackie McLean plays with the ensemble on the out chorus.
Some time before making this album I’d bought a book of Jelly Roll Morton tunes that I planned to arrange. I then misplaced the book, and later I wrote My Jelly Roll Soul – an impression of or afterthoughts on Jelly Roll’s forms and soul. The solos are by Jimmy Knepper, Horace Parlan, Jackie McLean and Dannie Richmond and I pass the progressions around in bars of four and two.
E’s Flat Ah’s Flat Too is composed in pyramid lines and canon form. The solos are by Mal Waldron, Booker Ervin, Jackie McLean, John Handy and Dannie Richmond.
The solos on Tensions are by myself, Jackie McLean, Booker Ervin and Horace Parlan.
In Moanin’, each musician plays separate lines, simple blues lines. The solos are by Jackie McLean, Pepper Adams and Booker Ervin.
We played down to earth and together, and I think this music has a tremendous amount of life and emotion.
- Charles Mingus
(as told to Diane Dorr-Dorynek)
To buy this recording from Amazon.com, click here: Blues & Roots
_________________________________________________________________Blues and Roots
Charles Mingus
_________________________________________________________________
Original Album
1. Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting (5:40)
(By Charles Mingus, Jazz Worship, BMI)
Charles Mingus – Bass
Jackie McLean & John Handy – Alto Saxes
Booker Ervin – Tenor Sax
Pepper Adams – Baritone Sax
Jimmy Knepper & Willie Dennis – Trombones
Horace Parlan - Piano
Dannie Richmond – Drums
2. Cryin’ Blues (4:59)
(By Charles Mingus, Jazz Worship, BMI)
Charles Mingus – Bass
Jackie McLean & John Handy – Alto Saxes
Booker Ervin – Tenor Sax
Pepper Adams – Baritone Sax
Jimmy Knepper & Willie Dennis – Trombones
Horace Parlan - Piano
Dannie Richmond – Drums
3. Moanin’ (7:59)
(By Charles Mingus, Jazz Worship, BMI)
Charles Mingus – Bass
Jackie McLean & John Handy – Alto Saxes
Booker Ervin – Tenor Sax
Pepper Adams – Baritone Sax
Horace Parlan - Piano
Jimmy Knepper & Willie Dennis – Trombones
Dannie Richmond – Drums
4. Tensions (6:26)
(By Charles Mingus, Jazz Worship, BMI)
Charles Mingus – Bass
Jackie McLean & John Handy – Alto Saxes
Booker Ervin – Tenor Sax
Pepper Adams – Baritone Sax
Horace Parlan - Piano
Jimmy Knepper & Willie Dennis – Trombones
Dannie Richmond – Drums
5. My Jelly Roll Soul (6:47)
(By Charles Mingus, Jazz Worship, BMI)
Charles Mingus – Bass
Jackie McLean & John Handy – Alto Saxes
Booker Ervin – Tenor Sax
Pepper Adams – Baritone Sax
Jimmy Knepper & Willie Dennis – Trombones
Dannie Richmond – Drums
Horace Parlan - Piano
6. E’s Flat Ah’s Flat Too (6:42)
(By Charles Mingus, Jazz Worship, BMI)
Charles Mingus – Bass
Jackie McLean & John Handy – Alto Saxes
Booker Ervin – Tenor Sax
Pepper Adams – Baritone Sax
Jimmy Knepper & Willie Dennis – Trombones
Dannie Richmond – Drums
Mal Waldron – Piano
Bonus Tracks
7. Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting
(Alternate Take) (6:54)
(By Charles Mingus, Jazz Worship, BMI)
8. Tensions (Alternate Take) (5:14)
(By Charles Mingus, Jazz Worship, BMI)
9. My Jelly Roll Soul (11:20)
(By Charles Mingus, Jazz Worship, BMI)
10. E’s Flat Ah’s Flat Too (Alternate Take) (6:47)
(By Charles Mingus, Jazz Worship, BMI)
Recorded at Atlantic Studios, New York City, February 4, 1959
Recording Engineer: Tom Dowd
Cover Photo: Lee Friedlander
Supervision: Nesuhi Ertegun
__________________________________________________
This is a high fidelity recording. Atlantic uses Electro-Voice 667, Capps and Telefunken U-47 microphones, and Ampex Model 300-8R tape recorder for its recording sessions. Individual microphone equalization is not permitted. The sound created by musicians and singers is represented as faithfully as possible, and special care is taken to preserve the frequency range as well as the dynamic range of each performance.
Original Album Released as Atlantic SD-1305, March 1960.
__________________________________________________
Reissue Supervision: Bob Carlton and Patrick Milligan
Reissue Liner Notes: Nat Hentoff
Editorial Supervision: Steven Cehan
Editorial Coordination: Ted Meyers, Elizabeth Pavone
Editorial Research: Daniel Goldmark
Reissue Art Direction: Hugh Brown and Rachel Gutek
Reissue Design: Geoff Gans and Rachel Gutek
Color Photos: Geoff Gans
Illustration: John Seabury
Remastering: Bill Inglot and Dan Hersch / Digiprep
Project Assistance: Rick Brodey, Lori Carfora, David Dorn, Peter Pasternak, Brian Schuman, Thane Tierney
Special Thanks: Sue Mingus, Leon Leavitt, Vincent Pelote / Institute of Jazz Studies
__________________________________________________
I recently had the honor of co-producing Rhino's Charles Mingus box set, Passions Of A Man: The Complete Atlantic Recordings, 1956-1961. After an extensive vault search for extra material to include in the set, the tape gurus at Atlantic (Joey Hillguera and Mike Kull) made an amazing find by turning up the original tapes for the Blues & Roots sessions. We were able to acquire fascinating alternate takes of four songs from the album for inclusion on the box that we've also included on this deluxe reissue. Studying these session tapes under a microscope gave me some revealing insight into the incredible ensemble work and genius that went into the making of this album. Hopefully, you'll walk away with some of that insight too. Including these new alternate takes, restoring the original album artwork, and offering new notes by one of jazz's greatest writers, Nat Hentoff, it has been our goal to create the definitive version of Blues & Roots. We hope you enjoy it.
- Patrick Milligan
Rhino A&R
__________________________________________________
Charles Mingus was like a mythological creature.
As he once said of himself, there were many Minguses. He could be fiercely antagonistic, confidentially gentle, extraordinarily naïve, bitterly cynical, playful, and depressed.
He was also of different sizes. I’ve seen Mingus huge, Mingus shrunken, Mingus in between. His weight would vary so adventurously that he had different-sized clothes to fit each new body.
Most of all, Mingus was simultaneously singular and diverse in his music. “I don’t get caught in any one groove,” he used to say. “Everything I do is Mingus.” He didn’t like to use the word jazz. Everything he did was “Mingus music.” And that ranged from long symphoniclike compositions to blues to musical portraits to harsh evocations of racism.
He had a remarkably sustained skill at melodic writing and improvisation. A characteristic Mingus piece began with long, boldly arching melodies with a tenor swelling, deeply textured designs of an ensemble whose various sections were also engaged in sinewy interplay.
One of Mingus’ strengths as a musician was his ability to do what he described Charlie Parker as doing – “he made the whole room feel as he did.” And with Mingus, those were strong, often clashing feelings.
But then there was the Mingus who saw beyond the bitter feelings that divisions often arouse. “It’s not only a question of color anymore,” he told me. “It’s getting deeper than that. I mean it’s getting more and more difficult for a man or woman to just
love. People are getting so fragmented, and part of that is fewer and fewer people are making a real effort anymore to find exactly who they are."
Mingus thought about more than music. He kept up on economics and the lies people told in and out of politics. And as for getting to know who he was, he said one morning, "I'm going to keep on getting through and finding out the kind of man I am through my music. That's the one place I can be free."
I greatly miss Mingus and his music. One thing I particularly miss is hearing the phone ring, picking it up, and hearing music. Mingus music. He would often call and play a new piece without identifying himself so that I could concentrate on the music. And then, after five minutes or so, his voice would come on: "What do you think of that one?"
One of the pieces that made my morning had the call and the textures of the blues, although - as with the music on this album - much more went into it.
Mingus sure knew and felt his roots. He had played, after all, with the whole range of jazz - from Kid Ory to Charlie Parker. He knew the entire language - from the inside.
It was all the more ironic that one night, in a New York club, Charles was confronted by a very black visitor standing at the bar. Mingus, who was of a lighter complexion, was accused by the angry man of being "not black enough to play the blues."
The man advanced on Mingus, who was about to end the discussion with his fists. But suddenly, Mingus picked up his bass and roared into a solo that plunged into the deepest rivers of black blues. Mingus’ tormentor acted as if Mingus’ bass had turned into a cross before an oncoming vampire. The very black man slunk away into the night.
Mingus was a natural challenger. “Music,” he once told me, “is, or was, a language of the emotions. If someone has been escaping reality, I don’t expect him to dig my music … My music is alive and it’s about the living and the dead, abut good and evil. It’s angry, yet it’s real because it knows it’s angry.”
His music was always angry. It often was so achingly lyrical as to bring back one’s own memories of loss and mistaken priorities in love.
You never quite knew what was coming in Mingus’ music. This was also true of his dealings with people. He was unpredictable because people are. If you made any attempt at honest communication with him, Mingus returned the honesty with love. He was the most open human being I’ve ever known. But if he felt his love had been betrayed or exploited or misunderstood, his initial instinct was to strike from his hurt, sometimes physically, sometimes verbally, very often in his music.
I’ve seen Mingus at his most buoyant. It was after he and his group had played Mingus music for kids in Harlem. “A lot of what the kids get to hear,” Mingus told me, “is noise, with rock music all over the place. Rock is so limited in what it expresses, and it’s limited in how it expresses what little it has to say.
“But kids are able to hear more, much more than rock. So with my band, I went and played free concerts in the streets for Harlem kids during the summer. First, we were in Central Harlem and one of the guys in my band said, ‘Mingus, you can’t play what you usually do for these kids. They don’t dig it.’”
Mingus smiled in telling the end of the story. “But I did play what I usually play. And I did more. I took the music as far out as I could, and they still liked it. All those kids, following the truck, were wanting more. Of course, they wanted to hear it. It’s their music, man. It’s their lives.” Mingus kept the rich legacy alive – including the black music roots in this album you’re hearing.
Also, as you can hear in this session, Mingus’ sidemen could no more coast than he could. One of them told me, “You had to keep stretching yourself while y ou were with Mingus. He just wouldn’t let you coast. Even in public – you’ve seen it – he’d yell at you in the middle of a solo to stop playing licks and get into yourself. He had more confidence in what we were capable of than we had.”
In addition to creating one of the few distinctive and distinguishing bodies of compositions in jazz – along with Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington, and Thelonious Monk – Mingus was one of the most memorable virtuoso bassists in jazz history. And he achieved that status by characteristic unyielding determination: “I’d preach the hardest things incessantly. The third finger is seldom used, so I used it all the time. What happened, however, for a while I concentrated on speed and techniques almost as ends in themselves. I aimed at scaring all the other bass players, I stood right, and I was conscious of every note I ran. There seemed to be no problems I couldn’t solve.
“Then one night, when I was 18 or 19, all this changed. I began playing and didn’t stop for a long time. I was suddenly me, it wasn’t the bass anymore. Now I’m not conscious of the instrument as an instrument when I play. And I don’t dig any longer thinking in terms of whether one man is a ‘better’ bassist than another. Actually, you’re up there – everyone is – trying to express yourself.”
Mingus was so triumphantly himself in all contexts that he liked to tell the story of how, as a young man, he greatly enjoyed playing in the New Orleans-rooted band of legendary trombonist Kid Ory.
“While I was in that band,” Mingus says, “Fats Navarro [a much respected modern trumpet player] was telling me, ‘That’s not right, Mingus. That’s what they used to do.’ Well, I’m not going to worry about that sort of thing anymore, I said to myself at the time, I’m going to be me. And if Charlie Parker himself were to come back to life, I wouldn’t do something just because he did it. I’d have to feel it, too.”
When I was a boy, growing up on jazz, I wasn’t conscious of it as a liberating music, but I was aware of what seemed to me an extraordinary vitality in these jazz musicians. Each had so singular a sound and phrasing; each was so free and sometimes daring in his self-expression. Much more than the classical musicians I also heard as a boy. Much more so than any adults I knew. To me these jazz musicians were heroic as they played. Heroically individualistic.
As I got to know more of them, I began to see jazz musicians in a somewhat less luminous light. They were fallible and some could be obnoxious and even harmful to themselves and others. But I was still struck by how much life was in them.
And Mingus had more life – or rather, lives – than anyone I knew. In his apartment, I would listen to new compositions of his – string quartets – that were as bursting with life and individuality as his jazz works.
I saw him while he was afflicted with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s disease). He was in a wheelchair and couldn’t speak, but his eyes spoke as he hummed some new music into a tape recorder. He died, still looking for life, in Cuernavaca, Mexico in 1979.
As this album powerfully affirms, Mingus’ music will remain alive so long as there is life in the world.
- Nat Hentoff
September 1997
__________________________________________________
Original Liner Notes
My music is as varied as my feelings are, or the world is, and one composition or one kind of composition expresses only part or the total world of my music. In the notes for another album, I go into more detail as to why my pieces are so different from one another and ·don't have one specific, unalleviated mood, sound or style. At a concert or night club I call tunes in an order that I feel is right for the particular situation and what I'm trying to say in that situation. Each composition builds from the previous one, and the succession of compositions creates the statement I'm trying to make at that moment. The greatness of jazz is that it is an art of the moment. It is so particularly through improvisation, but also, in my music, through the successive relation of one composition to another.
This record is unusual - it presents only one part of my musical world, the blues.
A year ago, Nesuhi Ertegun suggested that I record an entire blues album in the style of Haitian Fight Song (in Atlantic LP 1260), because some people, particularly critics, were saying I didn't swing enough. He wanted to give them a barrage of soul music: churchy, blues, swinging, earthy. I thought it over. I was born swinging and clapped my hands in church as a little boy, but I've grown up and I like to do things other than just swing. But blues can do more than just swing. So I agreed.
I decided to memorize the compositions and then phrase them on the piano part by part to the musicians. I wanted them to learn the music so it would be in their ears, rather than on paper, so they'd play the compositional parts with as much spontaneity and soul as they'd play a solo. And I decided to use a larger group to play in a big band form I'd like to hear that has as many lines going as there are musicians. I called musicians that I knew had great ears for playing and understanding my music.
The first tune, Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting, is church music. I heard this as a child when I went to meetings with my mother. The congregation gives their testimonial before the Lord, they confess their sins and sing and should and do a little Holy Rolling. Some preachers cast out demons, they call their dialogue talking in tongues or talking unknown tongue (language that the Devil can’t understand). The solos are taken by John Handy, Willie Dennis, Horace Parlan, Booker Ervin and Dannie Richmond.
The Cryin’ Blues is a blues without the usual tonic, sub-dominant, tonic, dominant changes. Booker Ervin opens with the group. After the last solo, Horace Parlan solos on piano, and Jackie McLean plays with the ensemble on the out chorus.
Some time before making this album I’d bought a book of Jelly Roll Morton tunes that I planned to arrange. I then misplaced the book, and later I wrote My Jelly Roll Soul – an impression of or afterthoughts on Jelly Roll’s forms and soul. The solos are by Jimmy Knepper, Horace Parlan, Jackie McLean and Dannie Richmond and I pass the progressions around in bars of four and two.
E’s Flat Ah’s Flat Too is composed in pyramid lines and canon form. The solos are by Mal Waldron, Booker Ervin, Jackie McLean, John Handy and Dannie Richmond.
The solos on Tensions are by myself, Jackie McLean, Booker Ervin and Horace Parlan.
In Moanin’, each musician plays separate lines, simple blues lines. The solos are by Jackie McLean, Pepper Adams and Booker Ervin.
We played down to earth and together, and I think this music has a tremendous amount of life and emotion.
- Charles Mingus
(as told to Diane Dorr-Dorynek)
