Billboard : 10/05/1959
Four Stars

What Charlie Mingus says in jazz is never unimportant, and he has a lot to say on this new recording. On this new album, his first for Columbia, he turns in some first-rate performances on a highly personal group of tunes, all of which he composed. With Mingus on this waxing are Shafi Hadi, Jimmy Knepper, Dannie Richmond and Willie Dennis. This is avant-garde jazz, but jazz with a soul. Best sides are Goodbye Pork Pie Hat and Self Portrait in Three Colors. For Mingus’ many fans.

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Cashbox : 10/17/1959
Jazz Pick of the Week

Mingus music is distinctly different from much jazz that is being played today. His experiments have resulted in jazz that not only swings but is stylistically individual, communicating all sorts of unusual sounds. All of the nine pieces here are Mingus originals, very effectively performed by John Handy, Booker Ervin, Horace Parlan, Willie Dennis, Jimmy Knepper, Shafi Hadi and a drummer of amazing virtuosity, Dannie Richmond. The gospel-based Better Git It in Your Soul is a prime example of a successful Mingus experiment.

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American Record Guide
Joe Goldberg : March, 1960

The importance of this record and of Charles Mingus‘ work as a whole to the contemporary jazz scene can perhaps be best discussed in terms of the first Mingus composition on the album, Better Git It In Your Soul. In recent years, the funky school of jazz, which takes much of its inspiration from Negro church music, and made a dramatic entrance into the jazz mainstream with such early Horace Silver records as The Preacher, has become an unstimulating backwater devoid of all freshness. Too many of the young musicians attempting this style satisfy themselves with a mere aping of the harmonic devices of the music, along with such gospel conventions as 3/4 time. Everything they do could be achieved by listening to Silver, without ever once going to the church music that is the source of the style. Mingus has revitalized himself from this same source, but has gone directly to the essence of it, added his own energy, and come up with a fresh much distinctly his own. Soul, benefitting from a powerful rhythmic piano solo by Horace Parlan, and suffering from a few of the extra-musical elements that Mingus too often finds necessary, is a stunning example of the fact that nothing is cliché in the hands of a dedicated musician, no matter how nearly second-rates have done the material to death. It is only a few men like Mingus who keep the current East Coast music from being as completely bloodless as the West Coast has been for several years, with that stultifying effect of each group sounding exactly like every other group.

Briefly now about the other compositions, all by Mingus (who is, incidentally, aside from being a major jazz composer, as startling a bass virtuoso as you are likely to hear):

Goodbye Pork Pie Hat: From its title, an elegy to the late Lester Young (notice that Mingus almost always titles his music in such a way as to make a specific point). Much of Prez’ seemingly lazy languor is caught.

Boogie Stop Shuffle: Mingus’ inherent rhythmic excitement makes this the kind of piece that the many TV writers who do “The Man With the Golden Arm”-type private eye scores would give anything to be able to come up with but, as usual, the real article is instantly identifiable.

Self-Portrait in Three Colors: a near miss at the hardest of all tasks, writing a jazz ballad.

Open Letter to Duke: the last section of this piece is particularly exciting, using the same rhythms that Ellington employed in sections of Liberian Suite.

Bird Calls: A tribute to Charlie Parker, and once again Mingus gets to the essence of the matter, particularly of the Ko-Ko period. Unfortunately, Mingus does not always trust his achievement, and again uses extraneous effects.

Fables of Faubus: On this, I can only come up with a subjective extra-musical interpretation: Half of it sounds like Mingus musical portrait of a bigot’s portrait of a Negro (with Horace Parlan’s apt quotation of Walk All Over God’s Heaven), and the other half sounds like his anger at this.

Pussy Cat Blues: A blues which owes much to Ellington (as does Mingus’ work in general). In harmony, voicing and instrumentation, this is reminiscent of Before My Time in Ellington’s Controversial Suite.

Jelly Roll: A delightful burlesque of Morton, showing Mingus’ deep understanding of any style he attempts as well as the depths of his background.

Besides Mingus and Parlan, the album features John Handy, Booker Ervin, Dannie Richmond, Willie Dennis, Jimmy Knepper, and Shafi Hadi. As with all Mingus records, they do some of their best work while remaining subordinate to the power and originality of Mingus’ conception.

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Audio
Charles A. Robertson : December, 1959

The current quest of young modernists for jazz roots is having an affect on musicians who happen to be amply endowed with such appendages. Besides causing a number of them to tap these resources more avidly than in recent years, it is prompting more than a few to pause and reexamine early influences in the light of later experience. With the same intrepidity that established him as one of the most forwarding-looking composers, Charles Mingus gives prominence to the trend, on this occasion, by harking all the way back to first memories of the gospel church and Duke Ellington. The attempt to describe the Times Square scene, which has held his attention lately, is left to Jack Kerouac, while Mingus leads an augmented group through some personal annals of jazz history.

When a student at Los Angeles City College in 1943, Mingus was attracted by the workshop idea, as a means of furthering his musical progress, and has organized one whenever possible since then. His last was a Composer’s Workshop that included Teddy Charles, John LaPorta and Teo Macero, the supervisor of the present album. Because of this experiment, Mingus is able to draw two conclusions. “First, a jazz composition as I hear it in my mind’s ear – although set down in so many notes on score paper and precisely notated – cannot be played by a group of either jazz or classical musicians. A classical musician might read all the notes correctly but play them without the correct jazz feeling or interpretation, and a jazz musician, although he might read all the notes and play them with jazz feeling, inevitably introduces his own individual expression rather than the dynamics the composer intended.

“Secondly, jazz, by its very definition, cannot be held down to written parts to be played with a feeling that goes only with blowing free.

“My present working methods,” he also states, “use very little written material. I ‘write’ compositions on mental score paper, then I lay out the composition part by part to the musicians. I play them the ‘framework’ on piano so that they are all familiar with my interpretation and feeling and with the scale and chord progressions to be used. Each man’s particular style is taken into consideration. They are given different rows of notes to use against each chord but they choose their own notes and play them in their own style, from scales as well as chords, except where a particular mood is indicated. In this way I can keep my own compositional flavor in the pieces and yet allow the musicians more individual freedom in the creation of their group lines and solos.”

If something about this last statement seems familiar, it is because Duke Ellington followed a like procedure when he brought his early band to the Cotton Club more than three decades ago. The first jazz Mingus heard as a boy, by coincidence, came from this source and he pays it just due on Boogie Stop Shuffle, and Open Letter to Duke, which includes a postscript for Johnny Hodges from the alto sax of John Handy. It was a creative period for the Duke, although he went on to compositions of greater sophistication and polish, and the impact on Mingus was lasting. It even extends to exotic jungle sounds on Bird Calls, which must be heard in stereo for complete effect.

What sets Mingus apart from previous Ellington imitators is his personalized approach and the originality of his ideas, as expressed on Self-Portrait in Three Colors, and Goodbye Pork Pie Hat, with a tribute to Lester Young from tenor-saxist Booker Ervin. Those Ellington devotees who feel their mentor became too refined in later years will find his early spirit surpassed on Better Git it in Your Soul, an invigorating gospel shout which drummer Dannie Richmond lifts to soaring heights. Soloing less than usual on bass, Mingus uses his instrument to deflate pomposity on Fables of Faubus; to depict the humorous antics of his household pets on Pussy Cat Dues; and to inject rhythmic surprises on Jelly Roll. The addition of Shafi Hadi and Willie Dennis, who joins Jimmy Knepper on trombone, swells the regular group to an octet. An excellent stereo recording represents Mingus in the fullest expression of his talent to date.

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Boston Traveler
John McLellan : 10/15/1959
Let The Future Judge Mingus

I’ve just finished listening to a new album by Charlie Mingus.

And that’s not an easy job, because Mingus lives in a world of his own. And I don’t have a passport to some of the stranger lands.

It’s not an easy job for the musicians, either. One time at Storyville, Mingus told me:

“Someday they’ll play my music as easily as they do Bird‘s now.”

In other words, Charlie Parker’s stuff, which used to be considered so far out, is just like old shoes now. The young musicians rattle off Bird heads and Bird licks as though these ideas had been around forever.

And Mingus figures that eventually his music will achieve the same degree of familiarity. And then, and only then, will it sound the way it’s supposed to.

IF MUSIC IS GOOD, THEN HE’S RIGHT

Well, maybe he’s right. I say “maybe” because if the music is good, then he is right. But, if the material is shoddy, then he’s wrong. No matter how well it’s played.

In other words, just because something is far-out doesn’t necessarily insure it a brilliant future when people just get to understand it better.

Now, let’s see what we’ve got in this new Columbia package. It’s called Mingus Ah Um. (Latin scholars will now chuckle).

There are nine compositions – all of them written by Mingus.

These are played by Mingus’ regular five-piece group of relatively young musicians plus three others added for the recording session.

APPROACHES MUSIC WITH STRONG EMOTION

Mingus’ approach to music is strongly emotional. There’s nothing “cool” about the way he expresses himself.

The album starts right off with the gospel song-like Better Git It In Your Soul. But, here as in everything Mingus writes, there is little that is conventional. The feeling is that of the gospel song. But the form, though of AABA pattern, has a 10-bar A part. Just when you feel the cadence should end at the normal eight bars, the music slips on harmonic ice and ends up two bars further on.

Everywhere in the album, there are these strange angles and twists. Unusual patterns of rhythm and form.

At the heart of each composition, there is usually some very simple emotional idea. The sadness over the passing of Lester Young in Goodbye Pork Pie Hat. The thrilling drive of the express train in Boogie Stop Shuffle. The basic blues of Pussy Cat Dues.

But these simple emotions are almost always intensified through violent exaggeration or distortion.

SOMETIMES RESULTS IN WEIRD SOUNDS

The result of this treatment is at times like experience a nightmare. A typically frightening example is Bird Calls. It sounds like the tortured dreams of a saxophone player plagued by some of Charlie Parker’s wilder melodic fragments. The whole thing disintegrates at the end into a series of chirps and squeaks, probably effected by the sax player using only the mouthpieces of their horns.

As for the instrumental work, these are all competent jazzmen. Only two, however, really stand out in my mind. One is a trombonist (though I don’t know whether it’s Willie Dennis or Jimmy Knepper) on Pussy Cat Dues who has at times a tone like Teagarden with remarkable imagination.

The other soloist that stands out is Mingus himself. He has a sound on the bass that should be the envy of all others. It positively sings.

This travel through the mind of Mingus could be an unnerving experience. But if you’re interested in the possible future path of jazz, you may find this travel rewarding.

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The Guardian (London, England)
Michael Frayn : 12/12/1959
Miscellany in Birdland: At the House of Gone Sounds

Birdland is ten years old this month. The news makes me feel the way I did when I heard that Minou Drouet was writing poetry when she was eight, or that Pitt became Prime Minister when he was 24 – old and haggard.

Birdland, which boasts in its brash, youthful way that it is the oldest jazz club on Broadway, figures so prominently in the learned texts on the jackets of modern jazz records, that I pictured it as an enormous glass palace on some island in the Hudson filled with the offbeat minor chords of a dozen different cool combos. In fact, you approach it down a flight of stairs from the Broadway sidewalk, and it looks like any other night club.

The lights are dim, the tablecloths are red check, and there are white-jacketed waiters to bring you a meal or drinks. Running down one side of the low room is a bar and in front of it the “bull-pen” – an enclosure of hard chairs where the more high-minded section of the audience is railed off from the nightclubbers at the tables.

There are merchant seamen, it is said, who head for Birdland after their ship has docked in Hoboken even before they find a lodging for the night. When I was there, however, the audience mostly wore dark suits, white collars, and neat ties. So did the bands.

At ten o’clock, when I came in, the number two band was holding the stand until the arrival of the quintet led by a man called Cannonball Adderley. The cool notes were still falling on a fairly thin house. It wasn’t until the first band went off, followed by a sputtering of applause and the small voice of Pee Marquette, the club’s midget gladhander, had twanged through the microphone to announce Mr. Adderley and his fellow grapeshot that the place began to fill up. The maître de (they do not bother about the “hotel” bit) ushered some important looking parties to good tables and a sprinkling of carefully set blondes in tight skirts began to dilute the dark suits in the bull-pen. From then on the two bands played turn and turn-about through the night until the club closed at 4 a.m.

Birdland describes itself as the House of Gone Sounds, and they have a sign over the door which reads with simple splendour: “Thru’ these portals pass the most.” It is called after the bird – the name by which the afficionados knew Charlie Parker, who more or less invented (so far as any one man could) the whole concept and practice of modern jazz. Parker played here a lot in the club’s early days, before he died in 1955. The club has passed its name on in the tune Lullaby of Birdland, written by the blind English-born pianist, George Shearing (who has also frequently played here).

But Birdland is by no means the only good jazz club in New York. Through the end of the evening and the first three or four hours of the morning the city is pretty well shaking with jazz. The West Coast, say returning fans, is running dry now that its favourite sons – Brubeck, Konitz, Tristano, Mulligan – are all off to New York, and touring the world with State Department backing. You can still hear blues sung in a few places on Chicago’s South Side, but New Orleans is for the tourists. It’s New York that is the capital of the jazz empire now.

There are plenty of jazz clubs in Harlem, but they do not welcome visiting whites any more (perhaps they had enough of them in the roaring twenties). I had my first taste of New York jazz in a German athletic hall on the Upper East side, thumped out hot and strong by an amateur group who called themselves the Clambake Society. Washed down with plenty of beer it sounded all right.

There was more hot jazz on the ground floor of the Metropole, not far from Birdland. This was a long bar, brightly lit, full of red leather and shiny chromium. The two alternating bands wore dinner-jackets, and played on a sort of narrow shelf behind the bar, their feet practically touching the barmen’s necks, swapping jibes with the customers between breaks. In the darkness of the upstairs bar, with the thump-thump-thump of the Dixie coming faintly through the floor, Dizzy Gillespie burbled on a trumpet. The trumpet had an up-ended bell; Mr. Gillespie an embroidered skullcap. Once, while I was listening, he played Happy Birthday to You for a woman in the audience, then abstractedly improvised on the theme for ten minutes. Later he grinned, crossed his eyes, and announced: “We’d now like to play the gorilla song – ‘The Gorilla my Dreams.'”

At Basin Street East, Dinah Washington was singing rather sophisticated blues, and at Eddie Condon’s Club (which moved a few years ago from Greenwich Village to a smart uptown address on East 56th Street) Mr. Condon was talking to the patrons while the rest of his band played the music, imported from New Orleans by way of Chicago. But the best of the old-fashioned jazz was at the Roundtable, a smart, expensive night club decorated with horrid chunks of Arthuriana, where Red Nichols and his Five Pennies (who got the full biographical treatment from Hollywood in Danny Kaye’s latest film) were sweetly swinging souvenirs of the prohibition with a zest and bounce which made Mr. Nichols’ cropped grey hair seem positively unlikely.

The smart club nowadays in the Village is the Five Spot, on Cooper Square at the end of the Bowery. It used to be a beatniks’ refuse, but now there is a minimum charge of three dollars for drinks, and the clients who queue to get in usually have English-tailored tweed overcoats to keep the cold out. When I struggled inside, Ornette Coleman‘s quartet was making the most extraordinary noises, far out on some limb of its own. A famous English dramatic critic sitting about two feet in front of Mr. Coleman’s deeply disturbed saxophone shouted to me: “I think they have gone too far.” I think perhaps they had.

On the other side of the Village is the Half Note, which also specializes in cool music, and where the band occupies a stand behind the bar like the one at the Metropole. I missed Konitz and Tristano, who were both playing here when I arrived in New York, but came in time to hear Charlie Mingus and his band making more noise than I ever heard a band make before. I enjoyed them enormously – particularly a moment in a number called You’ve got to get a bit of this inside your soul, when Mr. Mingus gave up playing his own bass, leaned over his pianist’s shoulder, and bashed out the rhythm on the keys with the flat of his hand. When they went off the stand at the end Mr. Mingus said a real truth about jazz: “If you think this is weird, just take a look at yourselves.”

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Miami News
Bill Moeser : 10/18/1959

Charlie Mingus‘ jazz workshop ideas are exploited in excellent stereo. Fables of Faubus and Self-Portrait in Three Colors show off this immense imagination and empathy for the jazz idiom. Jimmy Knepper‘s bristling horn and the drumming of Dannie Richmond spark the experiment. Well worthwhile and the sound is great.

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Oakland Tribune
Russ Wilson : 10/11/1959

Charles Mingus is at once a thinking and sensitive individual, a bassist who plays with exceptional technique and a big tone, a composer whose musical patterns range from atonality to the sounds heard in a sanctified church, and a musician who has worked with Armstrong and Ory as well as Parker and Powell.

All of these facets are reflected in his latest album, Mingus Ah Um. For instance, Goodbye Pork Pie Hat is a moving tribute to Lester Young that is introduced and ended with a dirge; Better Git It In Your Soul is the finest instrumental evocation of a sanctified church service I ever have heard; Bird Calls includes complex harmonies based on a familiar Parker riff, plus a stunning ending; and Pussy Cat is a melodic, slow blues.

The music is playing by an octet that includes John Handy, the former Oakland saxophonist. The extensive liner notes are miserable in one important respect; they fail to identify the instrumentation and the soloists. The latter is particularly important when you have three saxes, plus a clarinet, and two trombones in the ensemble. There are some beautiful solos, too. Incidentally, in these days of 30-minute “long play” albums, this one is exceptional: it runs to 47 minutes. A few years ago that used to be about par for the course.

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San Francisco Examiner
C.H. Garrigues : 07/31/1960
Is Jazz at the End of Its Rope or at a Crossroads?

(A review of Ah Um, Jazz Portraits, Blues and Roots, and Mingus Dynasty)

In recent years there has been an increasing uncertainty among jazz reviewers as to the future of jazz. Many of the most discerning and experience among them have expressed the view, that jazz is near the end of its rope, creatively. They maintain that little has been accomplished in the last decade except to colonize and cultivate the ground discovered and explored during the bop revolution of the early 40s.

Their view of the problem may be based upon a misconception: the idea that jazz must always be “going forward,” “advancing” into new areas, I am not sure this must be; I am not aware that either baseball or love have made any significant advances in the last two decades yet I cannot bring myself to believe either of these two considerable adjuncts to the enjoyment of life will cease to be practiced because of lack of novelty.

Nevertheless, jazz does face a problem which most critics and all thinking jazzmen are well aware: the problem of improvisation vs. the performance of written music. It is this problem which, I think, jazz has failed to solve.

Essentially, jazz is, almost by definition, improvised music – or music which is partially improved within a set pattern. Original New Orleans jazz was almost wholly “collectively improvised” with all the horns playing together within the pattern set by the rhythm section.

But as jazz progressed, collective improvisation has been almost wholly abandoned. The contemporary jazz performance consists of a series of solos, often almost wholly disconnected, in which everyone (even the bassist and the drummer) gets his chance to blow a stated number of bars whether he has anything to say or not. The result is that, more often than not, most of the blowing time is taken up by men who, adequate though they may be in many respects, have very little to communicate to their audience beyond the fact of their supposed virtuosity.

Perhaps the one jazzman out of the bop era who has most seriously attempted to transcend these limits is Charlie Mingus. For the last dozen years or so he has been struggling (on the stand and in the studio) with the problem – a problem which, for him, has been transformed into the problem of producing a jazz music as profoundly creative as the music of Beethoven or Bartók.

Essentially, Mingus (though he is undeniably the greatest of bassists) thinks of himself as a writer, a composer.

But since jazz can only be partially written (the notes can be written, the dynamics indicated, but there is no known notation for subtleties of inflection, of placement of accent, of rhythm, of the reorganization of the time span), the task of writing, as it confronts Mingus, involves not only the production of a written score, but the communication – endlessly over and over – to the musicians of the intent of the score. In this way each musician in the band tends to become an extension of the Mingus-self, rather than a fulfillment of his own self.

But jazz musicians are notoriously an individualistic lot; if a musician is asked to be some other self than his own, he is likely to decide that he’d as well be working in a studio job where the pay is steady.

And so Mingus’ task involves not merely writing the score, not merely teaching it to the musicians (he plays the various parts to them on the piano and works out on the stand the accents, inflections, nuances which cannot be notated) but also of finding capable musicians who are willing to become an apostolate for him. These are hard to find.

The records listed here constitute, individually and collectively a testament of how difficult has been Mingus’ task and how well or ill he has succeeded, during the last year, in accomplishing it. They are not, I think, records which will recommend themselves highly at first to the usual jazz fan, the hipster who last year dug Miles and this year digs “Cannonball” and next year will dig Ornette Coleman.

But they are records which, I think, must be taken into serious consideration by all serious enthusiasts who hope for jazz a more productive future than the endless repetition of repetitive solos by an endless succession of competent tenor players, alto players, trombone players, and trumpet players. (And they are also, I suspect, records which might be heard with profit by hardy souls among fans of modern classical music who have the fortitude to plunge into the very forefront, the most inexplicable area, of jazz and conquer it by their sheer courage.)

They are not, for all of that, records which I would unqualifiedly praise – even from the Mingus point of view. It seems to me that in his almost desperate need to communicate (and this through other selves than his own) Mingus has been forced to compromise. Unable to communicate the profound, and unwilling to communicate the banal, Mingus has been forced to content himself with the communication of the picturesque.

As a result of this, I believe, Mingus has tended increasingly in the last year, to fall back upon the use of vocal shouts and grunts as an essential part of the score, as well as the use of weird tremolos or “shakes” by the horns, and the composition of pieces which are essentially descriptive of places and times than musical.

Any criticism beyond these observations must be for me somewhat tentative. The earliest of the albums (Jazz Portraits) was received for review nearly a year ago and the others in the succeeding months. Despite countless playings, I have not reached the point where I get from them all that Mingus put in them.

A part of this reaction is due, quite frankly, to the inability to get past the vocal shouts and the tremolos. It has seemed to me that when musical communication breaks down the break cannot be healed with spoken words or shouts. Instrumental music must transcend the voice; it cannot be otherwise. (Even though Beethoven, when he had said all that could be said in the instrumental movements of the Ninth, turned then to the human voice for the “Hymn to Joy.”)

But, on other grounds, it seems to me that the task Mingus has set for himself is well nigh impossible. Were he a horn player, and so capable of direct and immediate communication with both his band and his audience, his task would be much easier. But the bass is not an instrument which can communicate in this way – not even in the hands of Mingus who handles it as deftly as though it were a guitar. And so he is compelled to speak with other men’s voices. And I am not certain this can be done in jazz.

Nevertheless, the problem which Mingus confronts is the problem which tomorrow’s jazz must solve. And it must solve it in somewhat the way Mingus has attacked it: by giving each soloist free blowing room but finding soloists who can blow meaningfully within the compositional forms, and intent, of the composer.

The Mingus direction thus becomes, I suspect, the most meaningful in jazz. The question of whether jazz is to continue to develop into an authentic art form or whether it is to revert to the status of a folk art, rigorously saved for posterity by a few, will depend very much on whether the Mingus problem can be solved.

—–

Down Beat : 11/26/1959
Leonard Feather : 5 stars

First let’s put your minds at ease about that weird title; it’s a corruption of an imaginary Latin declension (mingus-min-ga-mingum). Don’t ask why.

It seems to me that without retrenching from his position of a few LPs ago, Mingus has now completely found himself, found a personal and vital direction that does not lean on atonality or foghorn effects as crutches.

The nine pieces he created for this album do not represent a break from the past; rather, they are a reflection of the past and an image of the present, seen through the mirror of tomorrow. They are sanctified like Soul, touchingly emotional like Pork Pie (a moving tribute to Lester Young), sarcastic like Faubus (a witty and unforgettable little main strain). They are sometimes Dukish – strangely, there is more of Ellington in the up, minor Shuffle than Open Letter to Duke, which to me spoke more of early Stan Kenton and actually resembles some old Pete Rugolo piece. They can also be deliberately comic: I’m afraid Jelly Roll will bring no joy to Martin Williams, its kidding of the early Morton corn being dangerously honest in its closeness to the truth.

Though Mingus still makes frequent use of the blues and of certain basic harmonic and structural patterns, he is their master, never their servant, just as the composition and over-all form are more the essence of each work than any one solo.

One comes away from this album not with a recollection of any specific solo tour de force but rather with the sense of having been in direct and invigorating emotional communication with Mingus.

Nevertheless, there are a number of solo credits that should be given, and it’s too bad that the otherwise excellent, highly informative liner notes by Diane Dorr-Dorynek didn’t mention who plays what on which.

As far as can be determined with Mingus out of town at this writing, Hadi plays the alto solos, also tenor on Pork Pie; Knepper has the solos on Pussy Cat and Soul, Dennis on Duke. Handy has the tenor solo on Soul, Erwin is the tenor on Boogie and Roll.

This is a consistently exciting and stimulating set. Mingus has something to say, knows how and through whom to say it, and it is all stated with communicative authority.

—–

Liner Notes by Diane Dorr-Dorynek

The idea for a jazz workshop was conceived in 1943 while Charles Mingus was attending Los Angeles City College. Then it was a classical workshop where musicians could exchange ideas and perform their new compositions. Mingus moved to New York in 1951, and, deciding to try the idea in the more spontaneous medium of jazz, by 1953 had organized a series of jazz workshop concerts at the Putnam Central Club in Brooklyn. Some of the musicians who participated in the early days were Max Roach, Thelonious Monk, Horace Silver, Art Blakey, and the audience, who also had a hand in the working out of new compositions and arrangements.

Because of the success of this workshop, a Composer’s Workshop was formed, in collaboration with Bill Coss of Metronome, that included Teddy Charles, John LaPorta, and Teo Macero (who, as an A&R man for Columbia, arranged the date for this album.) Mingus believes now that it got too far away from jazz – spontaneity – since almost all of the music was written. He remembers one rehearsal at which Teddy had left several bars open for blowing and everyone jumped on him with “Man, are you lazy? Write it out!”

From this series of concerts Mingus discovered two important things. “First, a jazz composition as I hear it in my mind’s ear – although set down in so many notes on score paper and precisely notated – cannot be played by a group of either jazz or classical musicians. A classical musician might read all the notes correctly but play them without the correct jazz feeling or interpretation, and a jazz musician, although he might read all the notes and play them with jazz feeling, inevitably introduces his own individual expression rather than the dynamics the composter intended. Secondly, jazz, by its very definition, cannot be held down to written parts to be played with a feeling that goes only with blowing free.

“My present working methods use very little written material. I ‘write’ compositions on mental score paper, then I lay out the composition part by part to the musicians. I play them the ‘framework’ on piano so that they are all familiar with my interpretation and feeling and with the scale and chord progressions to be used. Each man’s particular style is taken into consideration. They are given different rows of notes to use against each chord but they choose their own notes and play them in their own style, from scales as well as chords, except where a particular mood is indicated. In this way I can keep my own compositional flavor in the pieces and yet allow the musicians more individual freedom in the creation of their group lines and solos.”

Of the musicians on this album, John Handy, Booker Ervin, Horace Parlan and Dannie Richmond are currently working with Mingus. Willie Dennis, Jimmy Knepper and Shafi Hadi have worked with him in the past, and were called especially for this date.

John Handy was born in Dallas on February 3, 1933. While in Dallas he began studying the clarinet, then moved to Oakland, California, where he played alto sax at McClymonds High School. He gigged in rhythm and blues in Oakland for two years and later, when he moved to San Francisco, at Bop City. All of the musicians passing through were sure to show there, and although he wasn’t working in jazz, he heard a passing pageant of the greatest names in jazz. He didn’t hear Bird until 1952 when Bird was playing at the Say When. He feels that Bird was probably his greatest influence, but the list of musicians that were important to him musically is long: Louis Jordan, Lester Young, Flip Phillips, Gillespie, Dexter Gordon, Wardell Gray, Stan Getz, early Konitz, Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane. In 1952 he studied at San Francisco City College, playing clarinet, bass clarinet, baritone sax, alto and tenor. After a stint in Korea, he returned to San Francisco and switched his main instrument from alto to tenor. He studied for a secondary teaching degree at State College, and plans to complete it and eventually teach improvisation at the college level.

Handy came to New York in July 1958. He met Mingus in December at a jam session at the Five Spot. He’d been pacing about anxiously, hoping to blow, but the musicians on the stand thought he looked too square. Mingus asked them to give him a chance to play, and they did. A day later Mingus asked him to join his group.

Booker Ervin was born on October 31, 1930, in Denison, Texas. When he was nine he wanted to learn the saxophone, but his mother bought him a trombone. He played it for five years and then gave it up. He had wanted to be a jazz musician after hearing Count Basie and other bands of the 30s on the radio, but it wasn’t until 1950, when in the Air Force, that he finally took up tenor sax and played with a jazz group in Okinawa. He attended the Berklee Music School in Boston in 1954 and then went on the road for a year with Ernie Fields, playing rhythm and blues. For the next few years he traveled. He stopped off in Denver for a year and there played his first jazz gigs – at the Piano Lounge, and as house combo at Sonny’s Lounge. In the meantime he had studied clarinet and flute. He’d listened to Lester Young and Dexter Gordon earlier, now he listened to Sonny Stitt, and later, to Rollins and Coltrane.

He quit music to work in the post office but that became unbearable after three months. “There was no place to go but New York.” He came east with a drummer who lived in Pittsburgh and stayed there for six months (where he met Horace Parlan.) He landed in New York in May of 1958. Shafi Hadi, then working with Mingus, told him “There’s a new cat in town cuts everybody, me and Sonny and all those cats. I’m a sax player so I know what he’s doing on that instrument.” Horace brought Booker to the Half Note where they were then working and he finished the gig with them, but didn’t join the group until November.

Horace Parlan was born in Pittsburgh on January 19, 1931. He gigged around Pittsburgh a while with Tom Turrentine and others, and has played with Sonny Stitt and Dizzy Gillespie. One night Mingus was invited to a jam session in Pittsburgh and Horace, who was also jamming there, was playing so much and so consistently that Mingus tried to outdo him with his bass. It wasn’t until later that he noticed Horace’s right hand was paralyzed. He had polio when he was five and can use only two fingers of his right hand. Bassist Wyatt “Bull” Ruther and his teacher, Mary Alston, encouraged him to overcome this, and he has developed a predominately left hand style – single note solos, left hand chords or chords with his right and left interlocked. He names as his favorite pianists Horace Silver, Bud Powell, John Lewis and Ahmad Jamal.

After this session in Pittsburgh Mingus lost contact with Horace until a year later when a car drove up to the Alvin Hotel and Horace got out to check in. Mingus, who was passing by, found he had come here looking for work and hired him. Horace’s father was a preacher and he, like Mingus, has a strong church music background. On Better Git It in Your Soul Mingus took a moaning repetitive churchlike line from one of Horace’s solos and added it to the piece.

Dannie Richmond was born in New York thirty years ago, and raised in Greensboro, North Carolina. He returned to New York to study tenor sax at the Music Center Conservatory and then went on to the road with rhythm and blues units like the Clovers, Joe Anderson and Paul Williams. He left rhythm and blues in 1956 because he felt it was exhibitionism rather than music, and at that time switched to drums. That summer the jazz workshop was at The Pad in Greenwich Village (later called Lower Basin Street.) At one intermission, after they had played a fast number on which their present drummer couldn’t keep up, Lou Donaldson told Mingus, “I’ve got my home town buddy here. I bet he’ll make those fast tempos.” He introduced Mingus to Dannie, and Mingus, noting his careful grooming and nice clothes, was skeptical. Dannie sat in for several numbers. On the first number, an uptempoed Cherokee, he had very little trouble. Mingus say he could tell Dannie was a good musician and just needed more work. Dannie joined the jazz workshop later that winter when the regular drummer left. Mingus believes the drummer is the most important member of the group and says he’d rather have no drummer at all if Dannie weren’t available. “He’s a musician, not just a time keeper, one of the most versatile and creative drummers I’ve ever heard.”

A shorter word about the non-regulars. Shafi Hadi was born in Philadelphia on September 21, 1929, and raised in Detroit. He served his apprenticeship in rhythm and blues bands such as Ivory Joe Hunter, Ruth Brown, Paul Williams and the Griffin Brothers. He left rhythm and blues late in 1956 and joined Mingus in 1957, with whom he worked regularly until the fall of 1958. He was among the nine musicians (along with Knepper, Richmond, and Parlan) who recorded the score, composed by Mingus, for the experimental film Shadows. The theme song from Shadows, retitled Self-Portrait in Three Colors, is recorded in this album.

Willie Dennis was born in South Philadelphia 33 years ago. He picked up the trombone when he was about fifteen, learning by ear. He has played in a long list of famous bands; with Percy and Jimmy Heath, Elliot Lawrence, Howard McGee, Claude Thornhill, Sam Donahue, Woody Herman (with whom he went to South America and became very interested in flamenco and concert guitar), and Benny Goodman (touring Europe). He has also worked with the smaller groups of Charlie Ventura, Coleman Hawkins, Lennie Tristano and Kai Winding. At one of the early jazz workshop concerts in Brooklyn, Mingus brought together Dennis, J.J. Johnson, Kai Winding and Bennie Green. This concert was billed as the Battle of the Trombones, and marked the beginning of the Jay and Kai team. In 1956 he went to the west coast with Mingus. He is currently working with Buddy Rich.

Jimmy Knepper, winner of the 1958 Down Beat International Critic’s New Star Award, was born in Los Angeles on November 22, 1927. His early musical experience was mainly with big bands, Charlie Spivak, Woody Herman, Charlie Barnet, Claude Thornhill and Ralph Marterie, and he played for awhile with Charlie Parker. He joined the jazz workshop early in 1957 and was one of the musicians playing at the Brandeis Festival that summer, where Mingus’ Revelations was performed along with the compositions of five other jazz and classical musicians. In the spring of 1958 Knepper organized his own group, later joined Tony Scott, and more recently toured with Stan Kenton. He is very accomplished technically. Britt Woodman and Duke Ellington‘s other trombonists listened to him enthusiastically last summer at the Great South Bay Festival, where he played with the jazz workshop. Britt summed up their feelings, saying: “Man, he’s all over that trombone!”

Mingus’ biography has been noted quite fully elsewhere, but for the benefit of new members of his audience I’ll recapitulate it in brief. He was born in an army camp at Nogales, Arizona, April 22, 1922, and soon thereafter his family moved to Los Angeles. He grew up in Watts, three miles from L.A. The first music he heard was church music. His step-mother took him to the Holiness Church where there were trombone, tambourines, bass and a bass drum, and the music was filled with blues, moaning and riffs set by the preacher. One day, listening to his father’s crystal set (at the risk of being severely punished if found tampering with it), he heard Duke Ellington’s East St. Louis Toodle-Oo. “It was the first time I knew something else was happening beside church music.”

He tried the trombone when he was six, later took up the cello, and switched to bass in high school. He studied the bass with Red Callender and then, for five years, with Herman Rheinschagen, formerly of the New York Philharmonic. His early gigs were with Louis Armstrong and Kid Ory, but under pressure of kidding by his friends, he left the old timers and gigged with Lionel Hampton, Duke Ellington, Red Norvo, Charlie Parker, Bud Powell and Art Tatum, finally becoming a leader of his own group in 1952.

I’ve mentioned in passing his foray into film scoring, and I’d like to add a word about jazz and poets. Mingus played with poets in Frisco ten years or so ago. He feels it hasn’t had the proper chance in New York, despite the many efforts to present it, including his own concerts last March with Kenneth Patchen. But music and poetry (or acting) does seem to have a definite future – if his recent experience with actors on television is a reliable forecast.

At this writing, he has just completed work on the first three plays by Leo Pogostin for the Robert Herridge Theatre. The first play of this trilogy uses bass alone for the score; the other two will employ other members of his group. During the week of rehearsal and the three dress rehearsals, musician and actors worked in close reaction to one another. For the actual taping of the show, however, the music was cut down so low as to be inaudible to the actors, to avoid a feed-back loop into their mikes. Two of the actors said they missed it – the bass had seemed to be another actor and had become an integral part of the play.

The acting methods used were peculiarly akin to jazz. The script formed the skeleton around which the actors might change or ad lib lines according to their response to the situation at that moment, so that each performance was slightly different. Martin Balsam, the lead, said “Sticking too closely to lines is stifling. This method gives an air of the unexpected and keeps us alive to the situation and the other actors.” A jazz musician works in this way, using a given musical skeleton and creating out of it, building a musical whole related to that particular moment by listening to and interacting with his fellow musicians. Jazz musicians working with actors could conceivably provide audiences with some of the most moving and alive theatre that they have ever experienced.

One poet, Jonathan Williams (if we may return to poets for a moment), in noting the rather bare poetic scene writes, “The only solace for a poet in New York is the occasional spirit in painting and jazz – the ‘opening out of my countree,’ the projective flash that Charles Olson sees inherent in the greatest American art; Ives, Ryder, Sullivan, Melville. In the winter of 1959 this spirit radiates for me from the paintings of de Kooning, which seem like the best landscapes since Oz, and from the sessions of the Charles Mingus Jazz Workshop. I heard this Quintet more than thirty times in three months, increasingly rapt by the presence of those tired but necessary words ‘nobility’ and ‘love’ in the music.

“It is incredible that Mingus can dredge out of the contemporary slough the potency and healing grace of his music. Pieces like the Fables of Faubus, Goodbye Pork Pie Hat and others are miracles of a kind. They are there, available, God knows, for anyone of those not so bugged by the crazy barrage of the Communication of Nothing that they can still hear. Poetry and music are for those with straight connections between ears, eyes, head, heart and gut.”