(Bebop, Post-Bop, Avant-Garde Jazz) [CD] Charles Mingus - Revenge! The Legendary Paris Concerts 1964 (with Eric Dolphy, Clifford Jordan, Jaki Byard, Dannie Richmond, Johnny Coles) - 1996, FLAC (tracks+.cue), lossless

http://www.allmusic.com/artist/charles-mingus-mn0000009680/biography
Artist Biography by Richard S. Ginell
Irascible, demanding, bullying, and probably a genius, Charles Mingus cut himself a uniquely iconoclastic path through jazz in the middle of the 20th century, creating a legacy that became universally lauded only after he was no longer around to bug people. As a bassist, he knew few peers, blessed with a powerful tone and pulsating sense of rhythm, capable of elevating the instrument into the front line of a band. But had he been just a string player, few would know his name today. Rather, he was the greatest bass-playing leader/composer jazz has ever known, one who always kept his ears and fingers on the pulse, spirit, spontaneity, and ferocious expressive power of jazz.
Intensely ambitious yet often earthy in expression, simultaneously radical and deeply traditional, Mingus' music took elements from everything he had experienced -- from gospel and blues through New Orleans jazz, swing, bop, Latin music, modern classical music, even the jazz avant-garde. His touchstone was Duke Ellington, but Mingus took the sonic blend and harmonies of Ellingtonia much further, throwing in abrasive dissonances and abrupt changes in meter and tempo, introducing tremendously exhilarating accelerations that generated a momentum of their own. While his early works were written out in a classical fashion, by the mid-'50s, he had worked out a new way of getting his unconventional visions across, dictating the parts to his musicians while allowing plenty of room for the players' own musical personalities and ideas. He was also a formidable pianist, fully capable of taking that role in a group -- which he did in his 1961-62 bands, hiring another bassist to fill in for him.
Along the way, Mingus made a lot of enemies, causing sometimes violent confrontations on and off the bandstand. A big man physically, he used his bulk as a weapon of intimidation, and he was not above halting concerts to chew out inattentive audiences or errant sidemen, even cashiering a musician now and then on the spot. At one of his concerts in Philadelphia -- and a memorial to a dead colleague at that -- he broke up the show by slamming the piano lid down, nearly smashing his pianist's hands, and then punched trombonist Jimmy Knepper in the mouth. For a savage physical portrait of the emotions that seethed within him, check out the photo on the cover of Duke Ellington's Money Jungle; Mingus looks as if he is about to kill someone. But he could also be a gentle giant as his moods permitted, and that quality can be felt in some of his music.
Mingus felt the lash of racial prejudice very intensely -- which, combined with the frustrations of making it in the music business on his own terms, found its outlet in music. Indeed, some of his bizarre titles were political in nature, such as Fables of Faubus (referring to the Arkansas governor who tried to keep Little Rock schools segregated), "Oh Lord, Don't Let Them Drop That Atomic Bomb on Me" or "Remember Rockefeller at Attica." But he could also be wildly humorous, the most notorious example being "If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There'd Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats" (later shortened to "Gunslinging Bird").
Born in a Nogales Army camp, Mingus was shortly thereafter taken to the Watts district of Los Angeles, where he grew up. The first music he heard was that of the church -- the only music his stepmother allowed around the house -- but one day, despite the threat of punishment, he tuned in Duke Ellington's "East St. Louis Toodle-Oo" on his father's crystal set, his first exposure to jazz. He tried to learn the trombone at six and then the cello, but he became fed up with incompetent teachers and ended up on the double bass by the time he reached high school. His early teachers were Red Callender and an ex-New York Philharmonic bassist named Herman Rheinschagen, and he also studied composition with Lloyd Reese. A proto-third stream composition written by Mingus in 1940-41, "Half-Mast Inhibition" (recorded in 1960), reveals an extraordinary timbral imagination for a teenager.
As a bass prodigy, Mingus performed with Kid Ory in Barney Bigard's group in 1942 and went on the road with Louis Armstrong the following year. He would gravitate toward the R&B side of the road later in the '40s, working with the Lionel Hampton band in 1947-48, backing R&B and jazz performers, and leading ensembles in various idioms under the name Baron Von Mingus. He began to attract real national attention as a bassist for Red Norvo's trio with Tal Farlow in 1950-51, and after leaving that group, he moved to New York and began working with several stellar jazz performers, including Billy Taylor, Stan Getz and Art Tatum. He was the bassist in the famous 1953 Massey Hall concert in Toronto with Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell and Max Roach, and he briefly joined his idol Ellington, where he had the dubious distinction of being the only man Duke ever personally fired from his band.
Around this time, Mingus tried to make himself into a rallying point for the jazz community. He founded Debut Records in partnership with his then-wife Celia and Roach in 1952, seeing to it that the label recorded a wide variety of jazz from bebop to experimental music until its demise in 1957. Among Debut's most notable releases were the Massey Hall concert, an album by Miles Davis, and several Mingus sessions that traced the development of his ideas. He also contributed composed works to the Jazz Composers' Workshop from 1953 to 1955, and later in '55, he founded his own Jazz Workshop repertory group that found him moving away from strict notation toward his looser, dictated manner of composing.
By 1956, with the release of Pithecanthropus Erectus (Atlantic), Mingus had clearly found himself as a composer and leader, creating pulsating, ever-shifting compendiums of jazz's past and present, feeling his way into the free jazz of the future. For the next decade, he would pour forth an extraordinary body of work for several labels, including key albums like The Clown, New Tijuana Moods, Mingus Ah Um, Blues and Roots and Oh Yeah; standards like "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat," "Better Git It in Your Soul," "Haitian Fight Song" and "Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting," and extended works like Meditations on Integration and Epitaph. Through ensembles ranging in size from a quartet to an 11-piece big band, a procession of noted sidemen like Eric Dolphy, Jackie McLean, J.R. Monterose, Jimmy Knepper, Roland Kirk, Booker Ervin, and John Handy would pass, with Mingus' commanding bass and volatile personality pushing his musicians further than some of them might have liked to go. The groups with the great Dolphy (heard live on Mingus at Antibes) in the early '60s might have been his most dynamic, and The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady (1963), an extended ballet for big band that captures the anguished/joyful split Mingus personality in full, passionately wild cry -- may be his masterpiece.
However, Mingus' obsessive efforts to free himself from the economic hazards and larceny of the music business nearly undermined his sanity in the 1960s (indeed, some of the liner notes for The Black Saint album were written by his psychologist, Dr. Edmund Pollock). He tried to compete with the Newport festivals by organizing his own Jazz Artists Guild in 1960 that purported to give musicians more control over their work, but that collapsed with the by-now-routine rancor that accompanied so many Mingus ventures. A calamitous, self-presented New York Town Hall concert in 1962; another, shorter-lived recording venture, Charles Mingus Records, in 1964-65; the failure to find a publisher for his autobiography Beneath the Underdog, and other setbacks broke his bank account and ultimately his spirit. He quit music almost entirely from 1966 until 1969, resuming performances in June 1969 only because he desperately needed money.
Financial angels in the forms of a Guggenheim Fellowship in composition, the publication of Beneath the Underdog in 1971, and the purchase of his Debut masters by Fantasy boosted Mingus' spirits, and a new stimulating Columbia album Let My Children Hear Music thrust him back into public attention. By 1974, he had formed a new young quintet, anchored by his loyal drummer Dannie Richmond and featuring Jack Walrath, Don Pullen and George Adams, and more compositions came forth, including the massive, kaleidoscopic, Colombian-based "Cumbia and Jazz Fusion" that began its life as a film score.
Respect was growing, but time, alas, was running out, for in fall 1977, Mingus was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's disease), and by the following year, he was unable to play the bass. Though confined to a wheelchair, he nevertheless carried on, leading recording sessions, and receiving honors at a White House concert on June 18, 1978. His last project was a collaboration, Mingus with folk-rock singer Joni Mitchell, who wrote lyrics to Mingus' music and included samples of Mingus' voice on the record.
Since his death, Mingus' importance and fame increased remarkably, thanks in large part to the determined efforts of Sue Mingus, his widow. A posthumous repertory group, Mingus Dynasty, was formed almost immediately after his death, and that concept was expanded in 1991 into the exciting Mingus Big Band, which has resurrected many of Mingus' most challenging scores. Epitaph was finally reconstructed, performed and recorded in 1989 to general acclaim, and several box sets of portions of Mingus' output have been issued by Rhino/Atlantic, Mosaic and Fantasy. Beyond re-creations, the Mingus influence can be heard on Branford Marsalis' early Scenes in the City album, and especially in the big band writing of his brother Wynton. The Mingus blend of wildly colorful eclecticism solidly rooted in jazz history should serve his legacy well in a future increasingly populated by young conservatives who want to pay their respects to tradition and try something different.

http://www.allmusic.com/album/revenge%21-mw0000187124
AllMusic Review by Scott Yanow
Of all of bassist Charles Mingus' bands, one of the most exciting was the sextet that he took to Europe in 1964. Consisting of the unique Eric Dolphy (on alto, bass clarinet and flute), tenor saxophonist Clifford Jordan, pianist Jaki Byard, drummer Dannie Richmond and trumpeter Johnny Coles, this band really stretched the limits of bebop. Mingus (greatly assisted by Richmond) constantly changed rhythms when the music became too comfortable and was always pushing his sidemen to play above their capabilities. Revenge, a two-CD set from the tour, was the first release on Sue Mingus' label. She organized her company so as to combat the many bootleggers who illegally put out music by her late husband without paying anyone. The Revenge twofer has (despite saying that it is from April 18) the complete Paris concert of April 17. Coles, who unfortunately is not listed in the personnel, just appeares on "So Long Eric" (the same version previously out on Fantasy's The Great Concert of Charles Mingus) before becoming ill; otherwise this is a brilliant quintet date of previously unavailable music. While the versions of "Peggy's Blue Skylight" and "Orange Was the Color of Her Dress" have their moments, the band really digs in during the lengthy explorations of "Meditations on Integration," "Parkeriana" (a tribute to Charlie Parker that is quite a bit different than the Fantasy version) and a definitive and very exciting "Fables of Faubus." Eric Dolphy (particularly on alto) was at the peak of his powers during the tour (he died just a couple months later), Clifford Jordan (whose tone was quite distinctive) manages to keep up and Jaki Byard's versatility (going from bop and free to Duke Ellington and stride) is a major asset to the colorful music. A highly recommended release.
The first time I was caught stealing records was in Paris in the autumn of 1991. I'd passed through the front door of the city's largest record store and was standing outside on the Champs-Elysees when three store guards sprang out of nowhere and surrounded me. They were waving walkie talkies and shouting in French to someone inside the store. I had about 20 stolen Mingus CD's under my arms.
The guards shoved me back through the entrance, escorted me swiftly past the cash register which I had ignored on my way out, up a long stairway and across a series of executive suites until I stood before the desk of the store manager. The manager stood up when I entered the room. He was tall and he looked threatening. I explained that I had taken the CD's because the store had no right to sell them. I said they were issued by pirate record
companies, none of which was in the habit of paying royalties, and that I had no intention of returning them to their bins.
The manager eyed me with disbelief and said he was calling the police. He reached for the phone. I told him to go right ahead I also suggested he call the dally newspapers as well as the television crews for the evening news and also the principal French jazz magazine whose offices happened to be across the street so that I could explain everything to everyone at once.
The manager glared from across his desk and put down the phone. In a gentler tone he declared that a third of the product he was selling fit the category I was condemning, that I had no right to carry off what belonged to a legitimate enterprise, that he was offering the public what the public wanted to buy.
I stood my ground. I reminded him that pirated CD's compete with legitimate records in the store. I said he was abetting a crime, I told him I was sorry I had not stolen my CD's the previous day when Mingus' work called "Epitaph" was being performed in one of the major concert halls in Paris to a less than-capacity audience. I said that publicity from an arrest would have sold out the hall.
The store manager rose suddenly from his desk and left the room. I waited alone with my CD's. After a while someone arrived to say I would be allowed to leave. When I passed through the front door again, I had the CD's under my arm. This time the alarm bells remained silent.
For years I have rifled through record bins around the world, while on tour, removing illegal Mingus product. I have done this while Charles Mingus was alive and since his death. The ratio in most bins is about three-to-one in favor of the pirates. I stack the illegal records in plain view and walk out in front of the cash register. Although in the old days I piled records under my arms, the packaging of today's CD's is less manageable. I have stood in the center of record stores and ripped open the difficult plastic CD covers and left them sitting on top of bins. With the exception of Paris, and one store in Chicago, I have never been stopped. By the same token, I have had a negligible effect on the sale of these records. Illegal records and CD's are big business.
So now I will continue my fight on a grander scale. Jazz Workshop Inc., the publisher of Charles Mingus' legacy of composition, will reissue, legitimately, the best stolen Mingus material on hand. We will press the very material released illegally by others, do it better and sell it back again-with comprehensive notes, authentic photographs, historical data, cheaper rates. We will undersell the pirates and put them out of business. That is our plan.
Joel Dorn heard my story and now we are armed: Revenge Records! Anyone in possession of pirated Mingus CD's, please contact us at the address below. The presses are waiting.
- Sue Mingus
c/o Jazz Workshop Inc.
Suite 43-S, Manhattan Plaza
484 West 43rd St.
NY, NY 10036
The first time I was caught stealing records was in Paris in the autumn of 1991. I'd passed through the front door of the city's largest record store and was standing outside on the Champs-Elysees when three store guards sprang out of nowhere and surrounded me. They were waving walkie talkies and shouting in French to someone inside the store. I had about 20 stolen Mingus CD's under my arms.
The guards shoved me back through the entrance, escorted me swiftly past the cash register which I had ignored on my way out, up a long stairway and across a series of executive suites until I stood before the desk of the store manager. The manager stood up when I entered the room. He was tall and he looked threatening. I explained that I had taken the CD's because the store had no right to sell them. I said they were issued by pirate record
companies, none of which was in the habit of paying royalties, and that I had no intention of returning them to their bins.
The manager eyed me with disbelief and said he was calling the police. He reached for the phone. I told him to go right ahead I also suggested he call the dally newspapers as well as the television crews for the evening news and also the principal French jazz magazine whose offices happened to be across the street so that I could explain everything to everyone at once.
The manager glared from across his desk and put down the phone. In a gentler tone he declared that a third of the product he was selling fit the category I was condemning, that I had no right to carry off what belonged to a legitimate enterprise, that he was offering the public what the public wanted to buy.
I stood my ground. I reminded him that pirated CD's compete with legitimate records in the store. I said he was abetting a crime, I told him I was sorry I had not stolen my CD's the previous day when Mingus' work called "Epitaph" was being performed in one of the major concert halls in Paris to a less than-capacity audience. I said that publicity from an arrest would have sold out the hall.
The store manager rose suddenly from his desk and left the room. I waited alone with my CD's. After a while someone arrived to say I would be allowed to leave. When I passed through the front door again, I had the CD's under my arm. This time the alarm bells remained silent.
For years I have rifled through record bins around the world, while on tour, removing illegal Mingus product. I have done this while Charles Mingus was alive and since his death. The ratio in most bins is about three-to-one in favor of the pirates. I stack the illegal records in plain view and walk out in front of the cash register. Although in the old days I piled records under my arms, the packaging of today's CD's is less manageable. I have stood in the center of record stores and ripped open the difficult plastic CD covers and left them sitting on top of bins. With the exception of Paris, and one store in Chicago, I have never been stopped. By the same token, I have had a negligible effect on the sale of these records. Illegal records and CD's are big business.
So now I will continue my fight on a grander scale. Jazz Workshop Inc., the publisher of Charles Mingus' legacy of composition, will reissue, legitimately, the best stolen Mingus material on hand. We will press the very material released illegally by others, do it better and sell it back again-with comprehensive notes, authentic photographs, historical data, cheaper rates. We will undersell the pirates and put them out of business. That is our plan.
Joel Dorn heard my story and now we are armed: Revenge Records! Anyone in possession of pirated Mingus CD's, please contact us at the address below. The presses are waiting.
- Sue Mingus
c/o Jazz Workshop Inc.
Suite 43-S, Manhattan Plaza
484 West 43rd St.
NY, NY 10036
Historical Notes on this Recording
Charles Mingus took his sextet to Europe in April of 1964, including Eric Dolphy on alto saxophone, bass clarinet and flute; Johnny Coles on trumpet; Clifford Jordan on tenor saxophone: Jaki Byard on piano and Dannie Richmond on drums. For its first release, Revenge Records has chosen material from one of the two most pirated concerts on the tour, the legendary Paris concert that took place on Friday, April 17, 1964 at the Salle Wagram.
According to Johnny Coles, a Russian Circus performed In the Salle Wagram just prior to the Mingus Sextet's engagement, and the stage was still extremely high off the ground. (Coles actually counted 22 steps on his way up before the concert.) He says that after playing a solo early in the set he started to feel a severe pain in his sides. When the pain became unbearable he headed across the stage, walked through the curtain and fell down all those steps. "I never even got a dent in my horn when I hit bottom!' he says. The actress Mae Mercer took him first to a French hospital which refused him because, as they said, "he didn't speak French." They went on to the American Clinic at Neuilly where he was finally admitted. He stayed in the room Louis Armstrong once occupied and was attended by the same doctor. Three days later when he woke up, the operating physician greeted him. "It's nice to see you alive," he said. "If you'd come to the hospital five minutes later I wouldn't be talking to you." The tour continued without Johnny Coles, although his trumpet was placed on an empty chair on stage each night, in tribute. Coles can be heard here on the only complete tune he played, "So Long Eric."
Jaki Byard remembers that all the musicians were aware, as they traveled through Europe, that people were out there taping them. "We knew they were doing it. We couldn't do anything about it." Mingus regularly complaincd about the movie-cameras and recorders that were visible and finally, after
several other incidents, relieved someone in the front row of his tape-deck.
The concert at the Salle Wagrarn should not be confused with a second concert the following day, Saturday, April 18, at the Theatre Champs-Elysees (which started after midnight and is often dated Sunday, April 19th.) That second concert was released in the US on LP by Prestige/Fantasy under the title "The Great Concert of Charles Mingus," in the mid-seventies. The release caused some confusion by adding one track from the first concert at the Salle Wagram and then compounding the confusion by mistitling the track. Although the piece was Mingus' farewell song to Eric Dolphy. "So Long Eric," it was for some unfathomable reason given the title of one of Mingus' best known compositions, "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat."
Because this titling error was made on the original and illegal French release (a further sign that Mingus was not consulted), it was then inadvertently perpetuated by Fantasy and other European pirate versions.
Even Joel Dorn, who collaborated with Revenge Records on our first release, plucked the same mistaken title off the pirate master. We have now (in our second pressing) corrected this error, once and for all.
PLEASE NOTE: Any CD version of either one of these two Paris concerts (with the exception of the Revenge version), is pirated and will no doubt sell for far more than the twenty dollars set by Revenge.
In a taped interview from 1975, Charles Mingus complains: "The French people put a record out without even paying me for it. I haven't got paid for it yet. Fantasy (Prestige) assumed the French had paid for it so they bought it from them. But no one has paid the musicians." Revenge Records has done so, at last, but there are countless versions on the market that have not.
Notes on compositions performed at the concert
Peggy's Blue Skylight:
"I wrote it on the puno at Peggy Hitchcock's house. We were fnends. She wanted to take the blue plastic shield from the cockpit of a fighter plane and replace her skylight with it so the sky would always be blue. The government wouldn't let her do it." (Mingus quoted in "Charles Mingus: More Than a Fake Book". Jazz Workshop, Inc., 1991, distnbuted by Hal Leonard).
Orange was the Color of her Dress Then Blue Silk:
Mingus wrote an earlier composition entitled "Song with Orange," about which he said: "It was written for a Robert Herridge television show. It's about a talented composer who meets a rich girl that tries to ruin his life. She doesn't have anything to offer him but money, so she asks him to write a song and dedicate it to her dress which was orange. She knew nothing rhymes with 'orange.'" Although "Orange was the Color of her Dress Then Blue Silk" is another tune entirely, it may have stemmed from the same television show. This is its first recorded version. (It was at the beginning of this tune that Johnny Coles collapsed, and the show continued without him.)
Meditations on Integration:
Mingus has said: "On our 1964 European tour people never heard 'Meditations' the way it was supposed to be done with a trumpet... Most of the melody was left out because Johnny Coles passed out on the bandstand early in the tour. He had an ulcer operation and it started to hemorrhage. I didn't even
know it until Eric Dolphy kept playing his horn, calling to my attention that something was wrong. Later on the French people put a record out without paying me."
Mingus said this song "grew out of a newspaper article that Eric Dolphy read describing conditions in the South," шncluding the fact that people of various colors were being separated into dungeons "built especially for darker-skinned people, with barbed wire and electric fences... They don't have ovens and gas faucets yet but they have electric fences. So I wrote a piece called "Meditations on Integration," or "Meditations for a pair of wire-cutters," or "Meditations on inner peace," a prayer that we can find some wire cutters and get out."
Fables of Faubus
Orval E. Faubus was a governor of Arkansas who, in 1957, sent out the National Guard to prevent a few black children from entering Little Rock's Central High School. Mingus' condemnation of this action was apparently too strong for those in charge at Columbia Records when the piece was first recorded on "Mingus Ah-Um" in 1959, so Mingus and his drummer Dannie Richmond were prohibited from singing the following lyrics. On this recording, the lyrics are slightly audible in the background.
Oh, Lord, don't let 'em shoot us!
Oh, Lord, don't let 'em stab us!
Oh, Lord, don't let 'em tar and feather us!
Oh, Lord, no more swastikas!
Oh, Lord, no more Ku Klux Klan!
Name me someone who's ridiculous, Dannie.
Governor Faubus!
Why is he so sick and ridiculous?
He won't permit integrated schools.
Then he's a fool!
Boo! Nazi Fascist supremists!
Boo! Ku Klux Klan with your Jim Crow plan
Name me a handful that's ridiculous, Dannie Richmond.
-Faubus-Rockefeller-Eisenhower
Why are they so sick and ridiculous?
Two, four, six, eight: They brainwash and teach you hate.
H-E-L-L-O—Hello."
Later retitlings of "Fables of Faubus" included "Nix on Nixon" and "Oh, Lord, Help Mr. Ford." Although Orval Faubus died in the fall of 1994, "Fables of Faubus" lives on.
So Long Eric (aka Praying with Eric):
This composition was written as part of Mingus' continuing argument with Eric Dolphy about his decision to leave Mingus' group and stay in Europe after the tour. (Other versions have the additional subtitle "Don't Stay Over There Too long.") Eric Dolphy's death a few months later gives the title an added sad resonance.
Parkeriana:
Sometimes titled "Ow" or "Dedicated to a Genius," "Parkeriana" is an homage to alto saxophonist Charlie Parker. Musicologist Andrew Homzy writes: "Compositionally it is a collage of be-bop tunes, not all of which were written by Parker. Besides 'Ow,' we hear fragments of 'Scrapple From The Apple,' the intro to 'Kansas City Blues,' 'Groovin' High,' 'If I Should Lose You,' 'Ornithology,' '52nd Street Theme,' 'Anthropology,' 'Buzzy' and probably others. The solo choruses are based on standard rhythm changes to which Byard adds time and mind-bending anachronisms before launching into a brilliant chronology of jazz piano styles. And listen to the way Mingus and Richmond move the time around! Our greatest scientists have yet to match this accomplishment."
The photo of the Minguses on the back cover of this CD was taken shortly after the couple returned from a North African tour in the summer of 1977. Mingus, dressed in jalaba and headdress, traveled around New York for a brief period in disguise, though he frequently blew his cover by lapsing into unmistakable minguspeak.
Thanks for purchasing Revenge Records. Future releases will be announced on the Mingus website.
http://www.mingusmingusmingus.com
- Sue Mingus
Package design by Geoff Cans
Cover Photo by Susanna Ungaro
Booklet back cover photo by Jill Krementz, 1964
Remastered by Gene Raul at DB Plus

Charles Mingus – bass
Johnny Coles – trumpet (disc 2, track 1)
Eric Dolphy – alto saxophone, bass clarinet, flute
Clifford Jordan – tenor saxophone
Jaki Byard – piano
Dannie Richmond – drums