Album of the Week

After a prodigious decade, from which we received Pithecanthropus Erectus in 1956 to Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus in 1964, Mingus began to rack up a string of historic recordings while developing a deeply personal style of music that combined tradition in all its forms (the blues and gospel of the early days, the jungles of Ellington, the bebop of Charlie Parker) with the insurrectionary spirit of the most political free jazz, Charles Mingus, following the tragic death of his musical counterpart Eric Dolphy in 1964, was to experience a long period of personal wandering and artistic vacillation at the end of the 60s/beginning of the 70s, which many fans feared would be definitive. But this assumption was wrong, as the fans underestimate the extraordinary life force of this remarkable musician, who gradually rekindled his inspiration by integrating new partners from the younger generation, and with Atlantic, (re)found a record company worthy of his reputation to accompany his unexpected creative rebound.

This final period, inaugurated in October 1973 with the recording of the album Mingus Moves, lasted only a few years, with Mingus discovering in 1977 that he was suffering from the terrible disease of Charcot which, in the space of a few months, was to deprive him of his autonomy and finally take him away in the early hours of 1979. Of the seven albums Mingus had time to record in this short space of time, Changes One and Changes Two, from the same session on the 30th of December 1974, have long since solidified their place the Mingus saga, considered at the time of their release to be proof of the double bassist’s renaissance and since considered to be his last great masterpieces. At the head of a new quintet featuring his old friend, drummer Dannie Richmond, as well as talented young musicians - George Adams on tenor saxophone, Jack Walrath on trumpet and Don Pullen on piano - Mingus revisits some of his favourite themes (Duke Ellington’s Sound of Love, Orange Was the Color of her Dress, Then Silk Blue), not forgetting new compositions directly linked to the most burning political and racial issues (Remember Rockfeller at Attica) - two major jazz records of the 70s.

But this major achievement should not overshadow the quality of the other works in this corpus, which is far less heterogeneous than we have been able to judge up to now. And it is the main virtue of this box set that it renews our listening some fifty years after these discs were recorded. In Three or Four Shades of Blue (released in 1977), it’s hard to resist the sublime rereadings of the great classics of the Mingus repertoire, Goodbye Pork Pie Hat and Better Get in Your Soul, admirably showcasing the complementary styles of guitarists Larry Coryell and Philip Catherine. How could we fail to rehabilitate without reservation the long, luxuriant suites on the album Cumbia & Jazz Fusion, placing them immediately among Mingus’s finest orchestral achievements as a composer, somewhere between Ellington and Nino Rota?

One cannot simply dismiss the musician’s last two albums, Me, Myself an Eye and Something Like a Bird, on the pretext that, confined to a wheelchair, he did not play the double bass and merely supervised the sessions. Mingus, like an omniscient dramatist, combines covers and new compositions to create a flamboyant orchestral kaleidoscope of the quintessence of his poetic art, creating music that is more than ever in his own image, brimming with life and fertile contradictions, moving in the moment from anger to tenderness, introspection to insurrection, without ever indulging in sentimentality or demagoguery.

The album Mingus, which singer Joni Mitchell conceived with him in a relationship of friendship and mutual respect, should not be forgotten as a final reminder of this genius’ last fires. Its release, only a few months after his death, brought to a close, like a kind of epitaph, the recording odyssey of one of the greatest musicians of the century.