Charles Mingus and His Jazz Groups
Mingus Dynasty
Columbia Legacy
CK 65513
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1. Slop (6:14)
Don Ellis – Trumpet
Jimmy Knepper – Trombone
John Handy – Alto Saxophone
Booker Ervin – Tenor Saxophone
Roland Hanna – Piano
Charles Mingus – Bass
Dannie Richmond – Drums
Maurice Brown – Cello
Seymour Barab - Cello
Recorded November 13, 1959 – 30th Street Studio, NYC.
Originally released 1979 in edited form, now in unedited form for the first time on CD.
2. Diane (7:28)
Richard Williams – Trumpet
Jimmy Knepper – Trombone
John Handy – Alto Saxophone
Booker Ervin – Tenor Saxophone
Benny Golson – Tenor Saxophone
Jerome Richardson – Baritone Saxophone
Teddy Charles – Vibes
Roland Hanna – Piano
Charles Mingus – Bass
Dannie Richmond – Drums
Recorded November 1, 1959 – 30th Street Studio, NYC.
Originally released 1960
3. Song With Orange (6:47) (CO 63882-4)
Richard Williams – Trumpet
Jimmy Knepper – Trombone
John Handy – Alto Saxophone
Booker Ervin – Tenor Saxophone
Benny Golson – Tenor Saxophone
Jerome Richardson – Baritone Saxophone
Teddy Charles – Vibes
Roland Hanna – Piano
Charles Mingus – Bass
Dannie Richmond – Drums
Recorded November 1, 1959 – 30th Street Studio, NYC.
Originally released 1979 in edited form, now in unedited form for the first time on CD.
4. Gunslinging Bird (5:12) (CO 63881-4)
Richard Williams – Trumpet
Jimmy Knepper – Trombone
John Handy – Alto Saxophone
Booker Ervin – Tenor Saxophone
Benny Golson – Tenor Saxophone
Jerome Richardson – Baritone Saxophone
Teddy Charles – Vibes
Roland Hanna – Piano
Charles Mingus – Bass
Dannie Richmond – Drums
Recorded November 1, 1959 – 30th Street Studio, NYC.
Originally released 1979 in edited form, now in unedited form for the first time on CD.
5. Things Ain’t What They Used To Be (7:35) (CO 63991-2)
Don Ellis – Trumpet
Jimmy Knepper – Trombone
John Handy – Alto Saxophone
Booker Ervin – Tenor Saxophone
Roland Hanna – Piano
Charles Mingus – Bass
Dannie Richmond – Drums
Recorded November 13, 1959 – 30th Street Studio, NYC.
Originally released 1979 in edited form, now in unedited form for the first time on CD.
6. Far Wells, Mill Valley (6:11) (CO 63885-2)
Richard Williams – Trumpet
Jimmy Knepper – Trombone
John Handy – Alto Saxophone
Booker Ervin – Tenor Saxophone
Benny Golson – Tenor Saxophone
Jerome Richardson – Baritone Saxophone
Teddy Charles – Vibes
Roland Hanna – Piano
Charles Mingus – Bass
Dannie Richmond – Drums
Recorded November 1, 1959 – 30th Street Studio, NYC.
Originally released 1960
7. New Now Know How (4:12) (CO 63886-3)
Jimmy Knepper – Trombone
John Handy – Alto Saxophone
Booker Ervin – Tenor Saxophone
Nico Bunink – Piano
Charles Mingus – Bass
Dannie Richmond – Drums
Recorded November 1, 1959 – 30th Street Studio, NYC.
Originally released 1960
8. Mood Indigo (8:12) (CO 63990-2)
Don Ellis – Trumpet
Jimmy Knepper – Trombone
John Handy – Alto Saxophone
Booker Ervin – Tenor Saxophone
Roland Hanna – Piano
Charles Mingus – Bass
Dannie Richmond – Drums
Recorded November 13, 1959 – 30th Street Studio, NYC.
Originally released 1960
9. Put Me In That Dungeon (2:51) (CO 63989-2)
Don Ellis – Trumpet
Jimmy Knepper – Trombone
John Handy – Alto Saxophone
Booker Ervin – Tenor Saxophone
Roland Hanna – Piano
Charles Mingus – Bass
Dannie Richmond – Drums
Maurice Brown – Cello
Seymour Barab - Cello
Recorded November 13, 1959 – 30th Street Studio, NYC.
Originally released 1960
10. Strollin’ (4:33) (CO 63883-8)
Honey Gordon - Vocal
Richard Williams – Trumpet
Jimmy Knepper – Trombone
John Handy – Alto Saxophone
Booker Ervin – Tenor Saxophone
Benny Golson – Tenor Saxophone
Jerome Richardson – Baritone Saxophone
Nico Binink – Piano
Charles Mingus – Bass
Dannie Richmond – Drums
Recorded November 1, 1959 – 30th Street Studio, NYC.
Originally released 1979
Bonus track, not included in original LP.
All compositions by Charles Mingus
Except “Things Ain’t What They Used To Be” by M. Ellington, “Mood Indigo” by I. Mills/B. Bigard/D. Ellington, and “Strollin’” by C. Mingus/G. Gordon.
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The following are the original LP liner notes by Charles Mingus, as told to Diane Dorr-Dorynek:
Mingus Dynasty
It seems to me that ten or fifteen year cycles in jazz are camouflages for insecure musicians who hide behind the current style. I remember too well the era when critics raved about a new creative dissonance in jazz and its unheard of harmonies - or disparaged what they later named "beboppers" and their long lines of unrelated notes. I went around listening to find these boppers and came up with a handful of musicians who adopted this idiom to their instruments and became famous through their invention in this style. But I wonder about the wealth of individuality and creativity we might have had and what they could have added to the evolution of jazz had they not been caught up in the Charlie Parker trend.
Who were the other boppers that critics spoke about, as though a myriad of bop disciples were taking over the earth of jazz? Anyone who attempted to play a familiar rhythmic pattern from the beginnings or endings of Bird's phrases or wore a goatee and bop glasses like Dizzy was called a bebopper. I disliked stylish "new looks" then and still think that such fashions generate sterile rehashings of one man's achievement. I studied Bird's creative vein with the same passion and understanding with which I'd studied the scores of my favorite classical composers, because I found a purity in his music that until then I had found only in classical music. Bird was the cause of my realization that jazz improvisation, as well as jazz composition, is the equal of classical music if the performer is a creative person. Bird brought melodic development to a new point in jazz, as far as Bartok or Schoenberg or Hindemith had taken it in the classics. But he also brought to music a primitive, mystic, supra-mind communication that I'd only heard in the late Beethoven quartets and, even more, in Stravinsky. Looking backward, I realized that this kind of communication has been there in other jazz creators' improvisation, for instance in Rex Stewart's trumpet. Bartok and most other composers knew about life up to death and wrote music as though it and they only existed here. But Bird had an unafraid soreness of self and of the relation of self to life, and death, and creation. His music exists here and beyond - as though he had been playing before he got here.
The followers who supposed Bird's greatness lay in his melodic patterns copied them without realizing that if Bird played something as diatonic as a scale on his horn (do, re, me, fa, so, la, ti, do), he could play it millions of different ways with millions of different meanings.
These sham copies have distorted Bird's beauty and greatness. I wonder how he felt hearing copies of himself all over America? How would a great, original painter feel if he saw in every gallery copies of his paintings, copies that were being hailed as good along with his own. I think it would be difficult, if not impossible, to retain his sense of himself, and that such a situation can destroy a man's capacity to continue to create.
Recently a young man came to New York with a plastic horn who critics are saying will cause a new era in jazz. He's doing atonal things that I've heard other musicians do, but he talks with his horn in the profound and primitive way Bird did. Shortly after hearing this young man, Ornette Coleman, I spoke to George Russell. George said, "I hope the critics won't do to him what they did to Bird," I said, "I know what you mean. They can brainwash the public into forgetting that what preceded Coleman is still valid and that Coleman is simply one more addition to the mainstream of great jazz creators. They have the power and perhaps the irresponsibility to inflate him and his style to such importance that it wouldn't take long to erase in most musicians' minds the awareness of anything other than the need to join the "new look." It would become an economic pressure on many who will think they have to play that way to make a living and the new camouflage for the people who have no faith in their individuality."
When the musicians who used to hide behind Charlie Parker buy plastic saxophones, trumpets, trombones and basses, hanging on to a few of the rhythmic phrases Coleman has been able to create - when they realize they have a new camouflage of atonality, no time bars, no key signature - when they all simultaneously begin to jabber in this borrowed style in all the night clubs all over America - then the walls of all the jazz clubs will probably crumble at this pretentious era of so-called good music, jazz.
But it won't happen again if every musician will play himself.
If you agree with me that in addition to borrowing another man's solutions a composer can also repeat himself, then perhaps you'll understand what I mean when I say I'd be bored with rooms full of Picasso's early cubist paintings and that I'd prefer selections from his entire oeuvre. It has taken me many years of being misunderstood - (critics wanted to pigeonhole and stylize me, saying "Mingus uses whistles and effects" when I used them on only one piece out of thirty or forty different recorded compositions) - to finally find acceptance for my point that a composer writing twenty pieces should write twenty pieces that are different... as much as you'd want twenty paintings to look different from one another. When I went to a Gauguin retrospective I saw a great painter: no painting looked like the other, each was done by a new genius, unimpressed by himself and his previous creation.
My last record for Columbia, Mingus Ah Um, on which each piece was different, sold many thousands of records, and I'm sure it's due to the fact that people are tired of hearing vibes, piano, bass and drum groups, or any other concocted "group sound," playing at the same low level of dynamics, with the same compositional form, the same color and embellishment. Or the same big bands with four or five trumpets, four or five trombones, five or six saxophones, and a rhythm section pounding away, 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4, as though the audience has no sense of rhythm or beat in its mind. And still playing arrangements as though there were only three instruments in the band: a trumpet, a trombone and a saxophone, with the other three or four trumpets, three or four trombones and four or five saxophones there just to make the arrangement sound louder by playing harmonic support to the leading trumpet, trombone and saxophone. What would you call this? A big band? A loud band? A jazz band? A creative band?
I'd write for a big sound (and with fewer musicians) by thinking out the form that each instrument as an individual is going to play in relation to all the others in the composition. This would replace the old hat system of passing the melody from section to section, for example from trumpet to reed section while the trombones run through their routine of French horn chordal sounds. Even this cliche would be listenable if it were not made to stand alone but were used as background for ad lib solos. I think it's time to discard these tired arrangements and save only the big Hollywood production introduction and ending which uses a ten or more note chord. If these ten notes were used as a starting point for several melodies and finished as a linear composition - with parallel or simultaneous and juxtaposed melodic thoughts - we might come up with some creative big band jazz.
"Far Wells, Mill Valley" is scored for piano, vibes, flute, alto, two tenors, baritone, trumpet, trombone, bass and drums. Section A opens (1A) with four lines: flute and vibes in a 12/8 line against alto and trumpet in a 16/16 line (that is, three notes against four), an inner counter-melody played by two tenors, and a slow melodic line on bass, baritone and trombone. The trombone leaves the bass line during pedal points and his weaving in and out blends the whole into a harmonic or organ sound. The opening is recapitulated, A, in a swinging 4/4 which repeats, in keeping with the traditional jazz structure AABA. Section B opens with a trumpet trill written in sound more primitive than it sounds here. All solos in this section are ad libbed from a voiced thirteen tone row scale against a pedal point rhythmic pattern. The scale replaces the traditional chord patterns from which musicians usually improvise. It may be broken up in any manner by the soloist. When Roland Hanna takes the first solo with the piano right hand (the left hand continues the percussive pattern), the written flute line takes up the melodic mood. When the flute line dissolves from written part to solo, the written alto part continues the melodic line. This technique assures compositional continuity even if a soloist plays something unrelated. The soloist can't play a "wrong" note, but he can make a bad choice of notes not related to the composer's melodic conception. Jerome Richardson's flute solo is played within the context and the point at which the written part ends and the solo begins is indecipherable. The alto (John Handy) joins the flute in double improvisation and the continuity is then carried by written lines for trumpet tenors and trombone.
Section C has the combined emotional coloring of the opening, 1A, and A proper. The background behind the bass solo is written in high register as a compliment to the bass solo and to be out of its range. The solos in this section were written to be ad libbed from open fifths. That means there is no major or minor third or tone center. All the chromatics are at the soloist's disposal which would allow a pivot point type of atonal solo. The solos by Handy on alto and Richard Williams on trumpet are fine solos, but they are executed in a diatonic Charlie Parker chordal manner that doesn't utilize the possibilities given by the open fifths. Booker Ervin's tenor joins the alto in double improvisation that does achieve the compositional continuity that I'd wanted in the preceding individual solos.
The final section recapitulates section B, with improvisations by Williams on trumpet and Dannie Richmond on timpani, and, foregoing the Hollywood production ending, ends with a single note.
The full title of "Gunslinging Bird" is "If Charlie Parker Were A Gunslinger There'd Be A Whole Lot Of Dead Copycats." A poet who heard this one night at the Showplace improvised a poem called "If Bird Were A Gunslinger There'd Be A Lot Less Robbins." Incidentally, many of my titles are given arbitrarily to the music without being related to it. This composition features solos by Knepper on trombone, Handy in alto chorus and Richmond on drums. Ellington's "Things Ain't What They Used To Be" features Ervin on tenor, Knepper, Hanna on piano, and bass. The melody's rhythmic patter differs from the original in the second chorus.
"Song With Orange" is the title composition from a CBS television play, A Song With Orange In It, for which I wrote the score. It features Knepper in a plunger solo and Williams on trumpet. "Mood Indigo" is played in the beautiful mood in which Duke originally wrote it and with a new inner counter-melody on the tenor. The lead is played by the alto and the solos are by Knepper, Hanna and myself. "New Now Know How" opens with the introduction followed directly by the bridge (to break the AABA routine) and ends with A. Solos are played by Nico Bunink on the piano, John Handy on alto and Knepper.
"Diane" is a melodic, atonal composition. The melodies for flute, trumpet, alto, tenor, piano and bass are all equally important. I suggest listening to it as a whole rather than trying to follow one particular line. After the ensemble glissando there is a piano solo by Roland Hanna on the second theme. In the out chorus the vibes reinforce the piano line, and a trombone line is added. "Put Me In That Dungeon" is the opening music from my score for the CBS television ballet, Frankie And Johnny, starring Melissa Hayden. It features Handy on alto. "Slop" was written for a barroom scene for Frankie And Johnny. If you notice a similarity to a 3/4 composition on my last Columbia album, it is not coincidental. The choreographer had rehearsed his dancers to "Better Git It In Your Soul," and asked for something like it when I composed the score. "Slop" has the same church influence, but with a looser, sloppier approach - they've left church meeting and gone to the picnic grounds where they sing the same meeting songs but the Rev or the Deacon has just sneaked a few nips to a few of the leading voices. In the beginning you hear Ervin on tenor and Hanna solos on piano. Both "Slop" and "Put Me In That Dungeon" feature cellos.
- Charles Mingus
1959
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Charles Mingus and his jazz groups
As Mingus Ah Um (see Volume 1 of this series) was being released to the general public, Mingus and producer Teo Macero were about to record his second album for Columbia. Whoever thought up the title of the first collection was obviously inspired by studying Latin at school, and the same person or someone else managed to top that witticism with the follow-up title, Mingus Dynasty. The reference to Imperial China (the Ming emperors ruled from 1368-1644) was highly appropriate since the bassist's teenage nickname was 'Ming,' and he was in fact one-quarter Chinese himself and quite happy to go along with the art director's ideas for the album cover. By a happy coincidence, the title also provided an obvious choice of band-name for the groups put together to perform his music after Mingus's death in 1979.
This second album was also an opportunity for Mingus to give an even broader picture of his musical scope, for he absorbed an extremely wide range of influences before achieving the recognizable Mingus style represented by the enclosed classic recordings. 1939, the year he turned 17, is the date he gave for the creation of his first successful composition ("The Chill Of Death," recorded many years later on Let My Children Hear Music, Columbia CK 48910) but its basic concept is far more influenced by late 19th-century European symphonic writers than by any of the jazz he'd heard up to that point. Gradually, in the 20 years separating that effort from Mingus Ah Um and Dynasty, he discovered how to incorporate his compositional inspiration into a context of African-American music and, in doing so, created a new way of organizing jazz performances.
He also drew on many of the earlier traditions of jazz and blues and gospel, nowhere more so than in Dynasty's opening track, "Slop." Programming it in this position was not unconnected with the success of "Better Git It In Your Soul," the opening item on Ah Um. This new piece was one of three here created through Mingus's simultaneous involvement with two CBS-TV productions - other Columbia recording artists such as Duke Ellington (A Drum Is A Woman), Jimmy Rushing and Miles Davis also benefited from similar television exposure. For the ballet Frankie And Johnny, Mingus was asked to come up with a piece resembling "Better Git It" and even incorporated a quotation of its main theme. His current favorite saxophonists, Booker Ervin and John Handy, are featured and his new pianist, Roland Hanna, gets to play accompanied only by hand-clapping.
The ten-piece band heard on "Diane" is the largest team Mingus had led on record since his very early days in Los Angeles and San Francisco and, by comparison with some of his more conventional writing for full-sized big-bands, he always had interesting ideas about such semi-large groups. Again, Hanna is featured in an excellent solo, but the two themes of the fully-composed sections make full use of the orchestration available and the alto theme first heard at 1'16" (preceded by atonal variations on the same bass-line) is provocatively submerged with numerous countermelodies. The piece was originally intended for use in Mingus's earlier video incursion, the background music for John Cassavetes's Shadows. Here it was retitled in honor of Diane Dorr-Dorynek, Mingus's partner at the time, who put together the album notes for both Ah Urn and Dynasty.
"Song With Orange" was written for the CBS television play described in the original notes to Ah Urn, its title derived from the plot about a musician with an unsympathetic partner who challenges him to write a lyric containing a rhyme for the word "orange." First conceived for bass alone (and later re-recorded by Mingus on solo piano!), this is given a typical treatment which begins with a brief ballad statement leading directly to a bluesy riff number. Both trombonist Jimmy Knepper and trumpeter Richard Williams use plunger mutes in their solos, and the closing section starting at 5'00" from the start consists entirely of riff permutations built one on top of another, until at 5'49" Mingus runs out of instruments and sings an extra figure in his wailing falsetto.
There's further use of riffs on "Gunslinging Bird," a reference to Charlie Parker explained in the original album notes, which is the first straight 12- bar blues in this album and (after "Slop") the second six-to-the-bar piece. This one goes at a furious pace, which drummer Dannie Richmond appears to increase during the course of the performance, heightening the tension as the frontline and the rhythm-section almost lose each other's beat. Richmond has the climactic solo, backed by the same one-note riff used behind the preceding solos from Handy, Hanna and Knepper. Handy and Knepper, incidentally, were the initial front-line of the group that Mingus took into the Showplace right after Christmas 1959, only to find themselves fired and replaced by Eric Dolphy and Ted Curson.
Comparatively relaxed is the first of two standards from the Ellington book, a blues which Mingus amended in his own particular way. "Things Ain't What They Used To Be" (from 1941) lives up to its title since, after an out-of-tempo piano introduction, it's taken at a brighter tempo and in a brighter key than the original. Hanna's piano work contains idiomatic and unforced allusions to Ellington's own playing, and Mingus takes a brief opportunity to spotlight his brilliant, speech-like bass work, seldom featured on record at this period because of the emphasis on his compositions.
Even more so than Mingus Ah Um, Dynasty was particularly well-programmed, with every new track bringing a change of pace and of texture. "Far Wells, Mill Valley," dedicated to the bassist's friend and mentor named Farwell Taylor who lived in Mill Valley, California, is the most involved composition here. It has some typical touches in the orchestration, especially at the bass end and the high treble. The execution of all the written parts is beautifully achieved, even down to Richmond's use of the tympani (also incorporated in the drum solo on "Gunslinging Bird"). Mingus commentator and collaborator Sy Johnson described this piece and "Diane" as being "a vestige of Mingus's write-it-all-out period," rather than his normal late-1950s method of dictating music from the piano during rehearsals. It's worth noting, though, how well integrated are the solos from Hanna, Jerome Richardson, Handy, Williams and Ervin.
Next we are into what seems by far the most boppish (or Lennie Tristanoesque) tune on the album, "New Now Know How." Despite the relatively conventional, mainly unison sound of the three front-line instruments, the bar-count of its AABA chorus structure is set deliberately off centre, with the A sections equalling eight-and-a-half bars and the B section only seven. As a result, life is far from easy for the soloists who include Knepper, Handy and Nico Bunink, a 23-year-old Dutch pianist who was then beginning a dozen years of work in the USA and, for the next 17 years, remained the only European musician to record with Mingus.
The bassist's arrangement of Duke's 1930 "Mood Indigo" adds one extra note held by the trumpet, which gives it a whole new texture. So also does the format of soloists taking one chorus at the original tempo followed by one at double-tempo (and, in Hanna's case, a further chorus with the tempo doubled yet again). Mingus features his bass once more and, with the thematic material being so familiar, this is a good place to hear how well he and Richmond work together. Incidentally, there's an audible edit at 7’09" where four bars go missing, an example of faulty post-production work on a single version rather than the use of a different take - no other complete take of this piece survives (but hear Volume 3 for those that have).
The last track of the original LP album was "Put Me In That Dungeon," taken again from Mingus's score for Frankie And Johnny. The two cellos that are supposed to be audible on the companion piece "Slop," according to both Mingus and the session log, do play a significant part here, especially beginning at 0'59". Despite the inclusion of a piano solo, this short and effective piece was not opened out as it could easily have been, which at least saved it from being edited down later. As with Mingus Ah Um, five of the preceding performances were shortened for initial release and only issued in their complete form on the 1979 compilation Nostalgia In Times Square.
That took its title from the one number recorded at these sessions which didn't make it on to the original album, a piece which was actually used (briefly) in the film Shadows. A catchy 12-bar blues with an amended chord-sequence, it had in this version a lyric added by Nat Gordon and sung by his daughter Honey - the Gordons first recorded with Mingus back in 1953 and with Dizzy Gillespie and Stuff Smith in 1957. Mingus's work of 1953, however, though bursting with promise and exploding in all sorts of directions, was not entirely satisfying musically or emotionally. But the giant strides he took in the following six years achieved a brilliant fulfilment in this album and its predecessor.
- Brian Priestley
March 1998
Author, Mingus: A Critical Biography (Da Capo); and Co-author, Jazz: The Rough Guide (Penguin/Rough Guides)
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ORIGINAL RECORDINGS PRODUCED BY Teo Macero
REISSUE PRODUCER: Michael Cuscuna
RECORDING ENGINEERS: Ray Moore, Fred Plaut
PROJECT DIRECTOR: Seth Rothstein
DIGITALLY REMIXED AND REMASTERED FROM THE ORIGINAL 3-TRACK TAPES USING AN ORIGINAL PRESTO TUBE TAPE RECORDER BY Mark Wilder AND Rob Schwarz AT SONY MUSIC STUDIOS,
NY PHOTOGRAPHY: Don Hunstein, Bob Parent
REISSUE ART DIRECTION: Howard Fritzson
REISSUE DESIGN: Randall Martin
PACKAGING MANAGER: Michael Cimicata
A&R COORDINATION: Patti Matheny
PRODUCTION ASSISTANCE: Rene Arsenault
LEGACY A&R: Steve Berkowitz
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MINGUS ON COLUMBIA:
THE BIRTH OF THE THIRD STREAM
(WITH MILES DAVIS, BILL EVANS, ET AL.) CK 64929
CHARLES MINGUS & FRIENDS IN CONCERT C2K 64975
EPITAPH C2K 45428
LET MY CHILDREN HEAR MUSIC CK 48910
MINGUS AH UM CK 65512
THIS IS JAZZ #6 CK 64624
CONNECT WITH SONY ONLINE AT http://www.sony.com
