(Avant-Garde, Post-Bop) Charles Mingus - Pithecanthropus Erectus - 1956, FLAC (tracks+.cue), lossless

I remember the satisfaction in Mingus's voice when he read me, on the phone back then, that section of his notes below dealing with this album's title composition. He had taken a rather huge theme, on which he had been brooding extramusically for a long time, and had not only transformed it into music but had also brought his colleagues into a sharing of his bold, grim vision. As Mingus explains in his notes, he could not have done that by simply setting score paper in front of his musicians. They had to "learn" it by hearing it from Mingus and then finding their own routes, within his design, to understanding the rise and fall of Pithecanthropus Erectus.
On the other tracks here, and in all of Mingus's collective discoveries that were to come, his musicians were similarly compelled to dig into themselves. As one Mingus alumnus told me recently, "He would yell at you in the middle of a solo: 'Stop playing licks and get into yourself.'' Christ, he had more confidence in what we were capable of than we did."
Here, for instance, you can hear the stretching of Jackie McLean, J. R. Monterose, Mai Waldron, and Willie Jones. And of Mingus himself, of course. In its joy and rage and remembrance of loves past, in its celebration of the life force - Mingus's was serious music. To paraphrase the English writer on jazz, Valerie Wilmer, it was as serious as his life. As Mingus himself said: "In my music, I'm trying to play the truth of what I am. The reason it's difficult is because I'm changing all the time."
Yet, certain themes, certain preoccupations, concerned - and sometimes consumed - Mingus all his life. He often spoke, for instance, of Pithecanthropus Erectus because he often thought of the future of the species. At times he felt, and his music reflected this, that we might yet learn - before it's too late to learn anything - how shatteringly destructive the false security of the enslaver can be.
On the other hand, there was an afternoon, toward the end of his life, when we were speaking about the racism he had fought all his years. "It's not only a question of color anymore," Mingus said. "It's getting deeper than that. I mean it's getting more and more difficult for a man and a woman to just love. People are getting fragmented, and part of that is that fewer and fewer people are making a real effort anymore to find out exactly who they are and to build on that knowledge. Most people are forced to do things they don't want to most of the time, and so they get to the point where they feel they no longer have any choice about anything important, including who they are. We create our own slavery."
The continuing powerful presence of Mingus's music is valuable in many ways, but perhaps no more vitally than in its illumination, as in this album, of this one man's unbendingly free spirit

3427489094 112242188 01 - Pithecanthropus Erectus.wav
3272300483 82943324 02 - A Foggy Day.wav
1433409445 33821804 03 - Profile Of Jackie.wav
79279037 157842764 04 - Love Chant.wav
auCDtect: CD records authenticity detector, version 0.8.2
Copyright (c) 2004 Oleg Berngardt. All rights reserved.
Copyright (c) 2004 Alexander Djourik. All rights reserved.
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Processing file: [01 - Pithecanthropus Erectus.wav]
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This track looks like CDDA with probability 100%
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Processing file: [02 - A Foggy Day.wav]
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This track looks like CDDA with probability 100%
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Processing file: [03 - Profile Of Jackie.wav]
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This track looks like CDDA with probability 100%
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Processing file: [04 - Love Chant.wav]
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This track looks like CDDA with probability 99%
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Final Conclusion:
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These tracks looks like CDDA with probability 100%