Latest Release
- MAR 15, 2024
- 5 Songs
- Mingus Ah Um (Bonus Track Version) · 1959
- Blues & Roots (Bonus Track Version) · 1960
- Jazz Portraits: Mingus In Wonderland (Live) · 1959
- Mingus Ah Um (Bonus Track Version) · 1959
- Mingus Ah Um (Legacy Edition) · 1959
- Mingus Ah Um (Bonus Track Version) · 1959
- Mingus, Mingus, Mingus, Mingus, Mingus · 1963
- The Clown · 1957
- Mingus Ah Um (Bonus Track Version) · 1959
- The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady · 1963
Essential Albums
- This 1963 effort from Charles Mingus is more of a single song cycle than a standard jazz album. The esteemed bassist/composer saw this composition as a kind of ethnographic ballet, and he filled it with tumultuous mood swings and serene textures. Mingus put together an 11-piece band for the recording session, and the complexities and raw emotions of these arrangements and performances make this one of the finest releases in jazz or any genre. The horn work here is especially vibrant. Charlie Mariano's alto sax and Quentin Jackson's trombone come together like a chorus of urban voices amid the nightlife clamor. This entire album is as evocative and melodic as anything done by Mingus' hero, Duke Ellington, but its wild emotional swells foretell the sounds of more outré jazz musicians like Albert Ayler and late-period John Coltrane. An inspiring and riveting listen from a giant of modern music.
- Bass virtuoso and composer Charles Mingus cut a singular swath across jazz by simultaneously embracing the traditions of Ellington and bebop, as well as using players like Eric Dolphy, who were part of the emerging avant-garde. One of his most swingin’, soulful, and best, the album draws inspiration from early jazz, gospel, blues, and folk music. True to form, Mingus drives each tune with a muscular sense of swing, fiery solos, and, on occasion, emotive vocal exhortation.
- With such major statements as Pithecanthropus Erectus and The Clown behind him, bassist-composer Charles Mingus reached an early career height in 1959 with Mingus Ah Um, his first album for Columbia. It’s not trivial that roughly half of it was recorded on May 5, the same day that John Coltrane waxed roughly half of Giant Steps for Atlantic. Creative fire and intelligence were in the air, and Mingus’ contribution was as bluesy and timelessly melodic as ever, performed by a eight-piece incarnation of his Jazz Workshop. The abstract cover art of S. Neil Fujita (who also designed Dave Brubeck’s Time Out cover) evoked a modernist mindset well-suited to some of Mingus’ most enduring compositions, including the dark, dissonant ballad “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat,” an implied homage to saxophone great Lester Young (with a John Handy tenor solo that Joni Mitchell later set to words on her album Mingus). With the Young dedication as well as the multilayered “Open Letter to Duke,” the minor-key uptempo swinger “Bird Calls,” and the playful finale “Jelly Roll,” Mingus seemed to be working out his own place in the jazz pantheon. The result was avant-garde in its way, even if not as conceptually radical as Ornette Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come, recorded for Atlantic just two weeks later. Mingus’ music conveyed a unique sense of abandon—one hears it in his uninhibited vocal hollers at the outset of “Better Git It in Your Soul.” There’s also an overt connection to the freedom struggle of the time, evident in “Fables of Faubus,” one of jazz’s most celebrated protest songs, which was aimed at the governor of Arkansas in the aftermath of Little Rock's school-integration crisis. (Columbia, however, shied away from including Mingus’ scathing lyrics, which can be heard instead on Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus from 1960 on Candid, under the title “Original Faubus Fables.”) Given that he produced Mingus Ah Um and Brubeck’s Time Out (and coproduced Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue as well), Teo Macero’s role in the jazz sound of 1959 can’t be overlooked. The splices he used to shorten six of the nine tracks on Mingus Ah Um were predictive of techniques he’d employ 10 years later (to much different ends) on Davis’ Bitches Brew.
- 2024
Music Videos
- 2007
- 2007
Artist Playlists
- Innovator, artist, free spirit—accept no substitute.
- Booming solos and lyrical supporting lines from the bassist.
- Ambitious compositions and gorgeous piano meditations.
Appears On
About Charles Mingus
Charles Mingus was one of the most important figures in jazz and popular music over the course of the 20th century. Born in 1922 in Nogales, Arizona, Mingus was raised in Watts, California, and studied double bass and composition with the esteemed Herman Reinshagen and Lloyd Reese. From there, Mingus spent most of the ‘40s touring with legendary artists such as Louis Armstrong, Kid Ory, and Lionel Hampton. It wasn’t until the ‘50s, though, that Mingus’ solo career truly began to skyrocket, bringing avant-garde exercises to the straight-ahead formula of the popular bebop subgenre. After settling down in New York, he began working with other jazz players who would go on to write the genre’s history beside him: Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington, and more. Mingus was at his creative peak in the ‘60s, when he released a number of groundbreaking albums that pushed the boundaries of jazz into new territory, with outstanding testaments to Black culture like 1963’s The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady and 1964’s Mingus, Mingus, Mingus, Mingus, Mingus. Though he died far too young, at the age of 56, he remained one of jazz’s most accomplished songwriters, releasing 51 albums between 1949 and 1977.
- BORN
- 1922
- GENRE
- Jazz