Читать книгу The Mojo Collection - Various Mojo Magazine - Страница 27

Record label: CBS

Produced: Teo Macero

Recorded: 30th St Studio, NYC; May 5 and 12, 1959

Released: 1959

Chart peak: None (UK) None (US)

Personnel: Charles Mingus (b); John Handy (as, clarinet); Booker Irvin (ts); Shafi Hadi (as, ts); Jimmy Knepper (tb); Horace Parlan (p); Dannie Richmond (d); Willie Dennis (t)

Track listing: Better Git It In Your Soul; Goodbye Pork Pie Hat; Boogie Stop Shuffle; Self-Portrait In Three Colors; Open Letter To Duke; Bird Calls; Fables Of Faubus; Pussy Cat Dues; Jelly Roll

Running time: 45:56

Current CD: Sony SNY65512SACD Super Audio CD adds: Pedal Point Blues; GG Train; Girl Of My Dreams

Further listening: Blues And Roots (1959); Black Saint And The Sinner Lady (1963)

Further reading: Mingus: A Critical Biography (Brian Priestley, 1984); Beneath The Underdog (Charles Mingus, 1995) www.mingusmingusmingus.com

Download: iTunes

One of the all time great jazz composers, Mingus quickly found that writing out parts for the players of his Jazz Workshop was not quite achieving the vibrant synthesis of composed and improvised material he was after. He took to directing musicians from the piano, demonstrating the parts, encouraging an adventuresome attitude. One sideman remembered: ‘You had to keep stretching yourself while you were with Mingus. He just wouldn’t let you coast. Even in public he’d yell at you in the middle of a solo to stop playing just licks and get into yourself. He had more confidence in what we were capable of than we had.’

Though by 1959 this titan of jazz creativity was already a colossus of modern bass playing and composition, Mingus always had a respectful ear for the roots of the music. He had grown up with church music – Duke Ellington’s Orchestra was the first secular musical sound he heard – and had cut his teeth with the Dixieland-style bands of Kid Ory and Louis Armstrong. Earlier that year he had already recorded Blues And Roots for Atlantic, a modernist album drenched in raucous Afro-American musical tradition. He was in the same broad bag by May 1959 – when it was time to record what became Ah Um – but this time he had more explicit references in mind. Ah Um, for all its Mingussy flavour (double-time passages, riffs bouncing off one another, ragged ensembles and free-spirited improvised solos) can be seen as a tribute to his ancestors. Sometimes generic (the gospel of the pulse-racing Better Git It In Your Soul, the deep blues of Pussy Cat Dues), there are also character-specific pieces; Goodbye Pork Pie Hat salutes saxophonist Lester Young who had died two months earlier; the dense, multi-tempo Open Letter To Duke is a gorgeous pastiche of his idol Ellington; Bird Calls was the latest of his tributes to Charlie Parker; Jelly Roll is for the great jazz composer of the ’20s, Jelly Roll Morton.

Its head in the present and its heart in the past, there’s a richness of spirit and expressiveness that makes Ah Um one of those rare jazz albums that can reach beyond jazz heads into the wider listening world.