(Post-Bop, Avant-Garde Jazz) Charles Mingus - Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus - 1960, FLAC (tracks+.cue), lossless

Until the end of October, 1960, Charles Mingus had been in volcanic residence at the Showplace in Greenwich Village for nearly a year. The room is comparatively small, and there were times when the towering passions of Mingus himself, let alone his men, seemed about to burst through the walls and level the buildings on West 4th Street. When visiting journalist friends of mine came to New York, I invariably ended a jazz tour by taking them to the Showplace. There was no other experience in jazz at all like it.
For most of that year, Mingus' colleagues included his perennial drummer Dannie Richmond; trumpeter Ted Curson; and Eric Dolphy on alto and bass clarinet. Mingus subtitles his band, The Jazz Workshop, and the term is entirely accurate. For almost a decade, since basing himself in New York, Mingus has served as a kind of Lee Strasberg of jazz. He has taken many men into his group (most of them virtually unknown when they started with him) and has challenged them to find themselves musically. Some have lasted only a night, others a week, and a few stayed for long stretches. The conditions of apprenticeship in the Mingus Jazz Workshop are fiercely demanding. Mingus, for one thing, cannot endure evasion or musical sleight-of-hand of any kind. He insists on a man giving all he can all the time. The goal is impossible; but it's always on the wall in the Workshop, and there are nights when Mingus hovers over his men like a brooding Zeus making up the final score card for eternity. His own moods are unpredictable. When he is buoyant, the bandstand becomes a picnic ground in Elysium. When he is angry, the room contracts and is filled with the crackling tension of an impending electric storm. At those times, Mingus' bass begins to mutter like a thunderbolt on the way. This huge cauldron of emotions at the center of a band can be taxing to a sideman; but if the latter has his own center of emotional and musical gravity, he can survive - and grow. A sideman has to grow, in fact, if he stays with Mingus himself is continually evolving as a composer, bassist, and leader. I know of no contemporary jazzman so consistently harsh on himself. It is not that he bends to passing trends or that he gives a damn any longer what the hippies say. His relentless drive to excavate his music from the deepest recesses of his feelings and memories comes from the completeness with which he is involved with that music. Some men make non-violence a way of life; others find an enveloping reason for their existence in painting or socialism or biochemistry. With Mingus, his core of living is being as honestly and fully expressive as he possibly can through music. Accordinlgy, nothing remains the same in his book. New numbers are added, old ones are changed, and suddenly Mingus will bring in a piece he wrote in 1941 or 1943 that makes much "modern" jazz sound cautious.
Mingus expects his men to learn their parts through what their own feelings tell them about the music. Often he will give his sidemen only a scale or a row of notes against a chord and rhythm pattern to work with. He then expects them to listen again and again to what he and Dannie Richmond work out as a base while they gradually find their own ways in the piece. "No" says Charlie McPherson, a young Detroit alto saxophonist who is the newest member of the Workshop and will be heard on future Mingus recordings for CANDID, "Mingus doesn't give you so much in the way of a guideline. I figure if I can work with this cat, I can work with anybody."
If a man has the musical capacity - and the temperamental equanimity - to remain with Mingus for several months, he invariably becomes a markedly more personal player. Moreover, his technical skills expand because in finding ways to meet Mingus' unconventional standards of self-expresssion, he has to make his instrument try things he never would have thought possible. When a musician does grow to the point at which he is no longer intimidated by Mingus' relentless challenges, he usually leaves the Workshop to try a band of his own. Like the best teachers, Mingus produces students who eventually have to rebel and work out their own further standards. The Workshop can never be a resting place for anyone, especially the leader. Somehow, Mingus always finds replacements who do not resemble their predecessors, who have a nucleus of barely tapped originality, who are striking in their power to communicate emotion, and who must in turn leave in time.
This album (in many ways the most extra-ordinarily cohesive set Mingus has ever made) was recorded during a crisis of personnel. After many months with Mingus, Dolphy and Curson had decided to leave. These record sessions, and a few to follow for Mingus and the Jazz Astists Guild (whose albums will soon be released on CANDID) were to be their last tie with Mingus. I didn't know how I could use my last chances to record this quartet in such a way that record would contain the explosive spontaneity the unit had been achieving in its final weeks at the Showplace. Location recordings are hazardous particularly in terms of sound, and so we tried a studio that both Mingus and I feel is perhaps the warmest for small jazz combos in New York Tommy Nola's Penthouse in the Steinway building. Mingus also decided to set a mood that might resemble a night in the club. That's why his announcements are on the record, and that's why he wanted the lights turned out during the recording. "I finally realized," he said during a playback, "that a lot of jazz records don't make it because guys almost unconsciously change their approach in a studio from what they do every night. I finally wanted to make an album they way we are on the job."
As a liner- note writer, as well as the time-keeper on the date, I ma expected to say that this is a remarkable record. I do so say, but obviously, each listener makes up his own mind. What was interesting were the reactions of the men. Dannie Richmond, surprisingly left out of George Frazter's Esquire list of best-dressed Americans, is a compact, lithe, carefully contained man who rarely allows himself to cavort in front of strangers. Yet this day,, he raced out of the studio after one take, jumped into the air when he reached the corridor, and exclaimed, "Damn it, I made it! I finally got to play it like I've been hearing it." Eric Dolphy, an exceptionally alert, unpretentious and self-critical musician, was grinning throughout the play backs. "I don't know what happened, but we never got together like this in the club. Maybe it's because we were leaving, and the tension was off." Mingus himself, long noted for rarely giving sidemen reason for egocentricity, was expansive in his praise. "Damn, that Dolphy played! And Ted's even bending his notes. He never could do that before."
Anyway, enough of the celebratory description. FOLK FORMS, NO. 1 was first created during the period several years ago when Mingus forged his HAITIAN FIGHT SONG. His performance of the latter at the first Great South Bay Jazz Festival in 1957 was the kind of defiance of the limitations of man and instrument that leads to Bolden-like legends. Before that, in letters during the time I lived in Boston and Mingus was on the road, he referred several times to possible ways in which folk-based feelings and patterns could be naturally fused with jazz. The fusion of folk elements in Mingus' work has never been so surprisingly spontaneous and startlingly logical as in this piece with its broken rhythms, almost literal talking on the instruments, and tornado-like climaxes. For this work, the men were mainly given a rhythm pattern. "Then they had to listen to what I do on the bass. If I changed it, they'd have to go a different way. This is a very flexible work. About the only other guidance I give them is that if I hear them doing something particularly good one night, I remind them of it next time we play the number and suggest they keep it in. But as a whole, it never comes out the same."
FOLK FORMS, No. 1 illustrates a point Whitney Balliet has made: "Mingus has allowed his forms to be primarily ordered by the highly original content of his music, and unlike a lot of his contemporaries, who play as if at chess, he performs with an exuberant, sometimes unruly urgency that ignites both his compositions and the musicians who work with them." Curson has never been as "ignited," from my knowledge of his work, as on this recording. A 25-year old, originally from Philadelphia, Curson first worked around his home town, was encouraged by Miles Davis to come to New York, and played with Duke Jordan, among others before joining Mingus. He's now on his own. "Mingus brought me out. He put so much pressure on me I had to come out." Dolphy has grown in the past year to become a restlessly original and blazingly emotional player. Thirty-two, Dolphy was born in Los Angeles. His first professional job was at a dance; Mingus was on bass. After working with George Brown, Gerald Wilson, Buddy Collette and Eddie Beat, Dolphy became more widely known on the road with Chico Hamilton from 1958-59. He has been impressed by Ornette Coleman, but claims not to be a disciple. "I think of my piaying as tonal," he told Martin Williams in The Jazz Review. "I play notes that would not ordinarily be said to be in a given key, but I hear them as proper. I don't think I leave the changes; every note I play has some reference to the chords of the piece. And I try to get the instrument to more or less speak."
I was disappointed when I heard an earlier recorded version of THE ORIGINAL FAUBUS FABLES. In the club, the mood of the caricature was much more bitingly sardonic and there was a great deal more tension. Mingus says the other label would not allow him to record the talking sections, which he feels are an important part of the overall color and movement of the piece. This version is the way Mingus did intend the work to sound.
WHAT LOVE was being played by Mingus in the Down Beat Club in Los Angeles as far back as 1945. "People thought we were crazy, and I only did it when there weren't too many around. They wanted to hear the beat all the time, but it always seemed to me that so long as you could feel the beat, you didn't have to keep emphasizing it. Moreover, you can speed it up and make it slower, as happens in Yiddish and Spanish music. Why tie yourself to the same tempo all the time?" And so, in this original piece that thoroughly transmutes into Mingus-music the What Is This Thing Called Love which gave it initial direction, the tempos go up and down intentionally. The long, sweepingly lyrical opening line has a poignantly meditative character that Curson sustains in an almost incantatory solo that suddenly breaks into a brief, conventionally swinging section only to return to a chant. Mingus' solo is subtle and yet strongly assertive. Dolphy's bass clarinet continues the free-speaking momentum of the performances until he and Mingus engage in a conversation that should not be too difficult to follow in its literal argument. It begins with Mingus swearing at Dolphy on the bass as a similar musical conversation actually did begin on the stand of the Showplace several months before. The conversations gathered in intensity when Dolphy for leaving; but Dolphy explains why he has to, urgently asks Mingus to understand, and at last Mingus does. The final return to the melody is, therefore, resigned - and leads to the quick good-bye.
ALL THE THINGS YOU COULD BE BY NOW IF SIGMUND FREUD'S WIFE WAS YOUR MOTHER was first tentatively
formed in 1940. "The title probably came," says Mingus, "from the way the audience was reacting one night." The musicians keep the original structure of All The Things You Are in their minds but do not even play the tune's chord structure. The piece in general is based on A flat. Again, the rhythms change. There is no set beat, and yet there's an implicit rhythmic flow, up and down, throughout the work. "Mingus and I," explains Dannie Richmond, feel each other out as we go; but always, when the time comes to back into the original beat, we're both always there. The best way I can explain is that we find a beat that's in the air, and just take it out of the air when we want it."
Richmond has stayed longer than anyone else with Mingus. "He doesn't think of the drums," Mingus explains, "as something to pound the beat on. He can play melody as he does in FOLK FORMS, NO. 1; and like a classical drummer, he knows when to lay out. He also feels dynamics and is not afraid to change when a piece does. The point is that unlike many drummers, Dannie is a musician."
In this final track, the players' emotions intensify through a series of near breaking-points with Curson and Dolphy, about to leave Mingus, driving themselves-into a final testimony that they've learned their lessons and now have to the confidence to depart from Mingus' unorthodox but radically re-energizing University. Mingus expects from his men what he gets in his own playing. Whitney Balliett has observed that Mingus "invariably gives the impression of accomplishing what the instrument was never intended for, and yet, peculiarly, it is not his virtousity that one is hypnotized by but the daring and inimitable melodic and rhythmic content that is the result of it."
For once, in these sessions, everyone in a Mingus unit reached - and maintained - that level of daring and that power to make their instruments become extensions of themselves.