Cashbox : 02/08/1964

Charlie Mingus continues his far-out jazz ways on this new swingin’ set from ABC-Paramount. The vet bassist-88’er is backed by an accomplished crew of jazzmen including Walter Perkins, Eric Dolphy, Booker Ervin and Dick Hafer as he turns superb performances on I X Love, Theme for Lester Young and Mood Indigo. Jazzophiles should really dig it.

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Ashbury Park Press
Don Lass : 06/13/1964

The original and complex music of Charles Mingus (he prefers to call it ethnic folk dance music but it is actually jazz) transcends existing boundaries and sets new standards that must be understood to understand the artist. I must admit that I am often lost in the intensity and intricacy of Mingus’ world of music but I see in him the same advanced approach to jazz as Duke Ellington had in the 1920s. He is certainly years ahead of the times in his musical expression but any jazz devotee who is willing to listen intently and often will find much invention and meaning in Mingus’ work.

On this album we find Mingus closer to existing jazz patterns than on his recent and brilliant six-part The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady (Impulse! 35). Of the seven tracks here Better Git It in ‘Yo Soul and Theme for Lester Young (formerly Goodbye Pork Pie Hat) have been recorded before by Mingus though these versions are fresh variations of the originals. I X Love and Ellington’s Mood Indigo show Mingus’ great debt to the Duke, especially in his writing for saxophones. Both tracks are played superbly by the leader’s 11-piece orchestra.

Alto saxophonist Charlie Mariano plays a provocative statement on Celia, with Mingus creating intricate ensemble patterns in the background. Pianist Jaki Byard is also featured on several tracks but it is the excellent ensemble work that dominates throughout. Because this album offers an excellent introduction to Mingus it is heartily recommended. There are more stimulating Mingus sets available but most are only for those who have some understanding of the leader and his music.

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Audio
Bertram Stanleigh : May, 1964

The spread-out sound of this stereo waxing is in its way just as impressive as the warmth and color of these fine performances. Mingus can always be counted on for deeply felt, highly personal music making, but the special problems of recording a bass in proper perspective are rarely handled with the skill encountered here. Never is the level of Mr. M’s instrument cranked up to overpower the other players and never is it lost in the general din of a mighty climax. At all times it can be heard crooning darkly from a spot midway between the two speakers. The arrangements are all scored for a ten piece group, and although slightly different personnel is employed on three of the seven tunes, the results are largely the same, first rate Mingus. In addition to a fascinating version of Ellington‘s Mood Indigo, six Mingus originals are presented: II B.S., I X Love. Celia, Better Get Hit in Yo’ Soul, Theme for Lester Young and Hora Decubitus.

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Charlotte News
Jerry Reece : 03/28/1964

Charlie Mingus remains one of the most controversial and talented musicians in jazz. His latest release Mingus, Mingus, Mingus, Mingus, Mingus provides the “why” for both his claims to fame.

Using talents like Booker Ervin (tenor sax), Charlie Mariano (alto sax), Eric Dolphy (alto sax and flute) and Jaki Byard (piano) to play his compositions and jazz standards, Mingus has organized a very successful session.

Mingus originals range from the gospel mood in 6/8 time, Better Get Hit In Yo Soul, to modern Latin, Hora Decubitus. The man himself switches from his normal instrument, string bass, to piano and drums and shows fine playing form to match his composing ability.

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HiFi / Stereo Review
Joe Goldberg : May, 1964

Charles Mingus has joined that small group of jazz composters – Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, and John Lewis are others – whose pleasure it is to rework a small number of favorite themes in different contexts. Tus, in his new album for Impulse, Mingus rerecords Ellington’s Mood Indigo, plus his own Celia, Better Get Hit in Yo’ Soul, Nouroog (now called I X Love), Haitian Fight Song (now called II B. S.), and Goodbye Pork Pie Hat (now called Theme for Lester Young). Only Hora Decubitus is new.

Mingus’ musical platform, an eleven-piece group, is broader than usual. Deeply indebted to the work of Ellington, Mingus is surely one of the masters of jazz orchestration, achieving a thick, complex texture that would be beyond the reach of many men with twice as many instruments at their disposal. And it is a jazz texture – no borrowings from the classics. The method can best be observed by comparing Indigo with Celia; on both, Mingus uses ex-Ellington trombonists to create the subtle sound qualities that lie beyond mere notation.

It would be enough had Mingus only composed and arranged these pieces, but he plays them too – he is still the most incredible bassist in jazz, handling his instrument as if it were a huge guitar. His bass, often all but unbelievable in solo, is responsible for the violent swing of some of these pieces. Especially notable is II B. S., on which Mingus, tenor saxophonist Booker Ervin, and pianist Jaki Byard turn in their finest work on the set. In addition, Mingus has never been better recorded, and a special word of praise should therefore be entered for engineer Bob Simpson.

Listening to a Mingus record is usually a direct, deep plunge into a whirlpool of seething emotions, and such is the case here. But such an experience is, in the final analysis, exhilarating and even cleansing. Coming on the heels of Mingus’ recent recorded semi-failures, which were somewhat blotched and tarnished, this new disc is especially gratifying to have.

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High Fidelity
John S. Wilson : May, 1964

One of the oddities in the development of jazz, in view of the chain reaction of influences which has marked its growth, is that Duke Ellington, despite his long career and continued prominence, seems to have had little stylistic effect on other performers. Aside from brief imitative flings by Charlie Barnet, Woody Herman, and Hal McIntyre in the early Forties, none has followed in his footsteps. Charlie Mingus has, for twenty years, been acknowledging Ellington as an early influence, but he has kept the evidence pretty much under wraps until recently. In the past few years, however, Mingus absorption of Ellington has become more and more overt; there is now almost as much of the teacher in some Mingus performances as there is of the disciple. This is particularly noticeable here on the Ellington composition Mood Indigo, which is almost pure Ellington with a touch of Mingus, and on three compositions by Mingus in which the ensembles have a distinctly Ellingtonian texture. In the latter, Charlie Mariano‘s superb alto saxophone passages are a definite extension of Johnny Hodges‘ work with Ellington. This collection is played in part by the eleven-piece group with which Mingus recorded his provocative Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, and in part by a similar group employing many of the same musicians. Four of the pieces are in Mingus lyrical mood, a mood which often has a distinct bite, and three are in his exultantly swinging style. They all come off extremely well, held within time limits that avoid his occasional tendency to overdo a potentially good thing.

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New Pittsburgh Courier
Phyl Garland : 02/15/1964
Five Stars

During the course of any really down conversation – especially those conducted in the late-night hours when reason has fled and emotion holds sway in smoky rooms over tall bourbons – the question of the latest jazz offerings is likely to crop up, since music is the one area of human expression where none might fear to tread.

But that is where the cohesiveness ends. For in any sizable group of music-diggers, there will be those who respond only to rock ‘n roll and its insistent rhythms, shouts, screams and grunts; the traditionalists who refuse to accept anything more modern than Ellington and Basie; easy listeners who want some recorded thrush like Ella to warble until dawn.

In the other disorganized camps one is likely to find introspective lovers of Miles Davis, with his sad and lonely sound; exponents of hard jazz who look to “Bird” as their God, with special kudos accorded Horace Silver and Blakey; the funky crew, gritty with earthy soul; third streamers, tending toward a convoluted classicism; and exponents of manic obscurity who fall into a special kind of high behind Ornette Coleman, now so long silent.

Each of these will contend that his is the only way to musical truth – not to mention others who might be in their own singular “bags.” All who disagree with them are lost, done for, out of it, gone with the system and into a pitiful thing.

Seldom on these nights of loud, dogmatic talk, does one stop to consider that there is room for all, with none able to claim sole rights to musical expression.

As an architect who dug Bach and Monk equally, once said. “If it moves me, it’s good.”

This, then, will be the philosophy of this loosely spun, weekly commentary on the sounds. Nobody is shut out. No one need feel a fool for digging what he does… for who has not bowed his head in aesthetic shame for liking a pop tune or TV show theme song. No shame here. No snobbery, though many will more and likely disagree with this reviewer, who will call them as they come.

Such is the world of music where the magic of recording has made it possible for one to sit in the wilds of Pennsylvania or Kentucky, savoring the excitement of night exploding over Gotham or ‘Frisco. These are the soulful distillations of human experience. And we are fortunate to be its witnessses.

So, as the late JFK might have said in his stylized Boston accent, let us begin.

What better way could there be to begin than with a top-shelf disc by Charlie Mingus.

There can be no doubt that Mingus has as much to say as any jazzman around, not only as a bassist and pianist, but also as a composer. On this particular waxing, all the tunes are his own, with the exception of Ellington’s Mood Indigo, which is described as an appreciation of the Duke.

But then again, the entire album could well be designated as a tribute to Ellington, for on it Mingus displays the same brand of creative imagination and deft experimentation with tonal structure that have established Duke as a musical immortal.

Mingus’ Instrument is a ten-piece group that is able to capture the excitement of a big band while retaining the free feeling of a small combo.

Those who have followed his work through the years will recognize the pulsating II B.S. as an updated verion of his Haitian Fight Song. The turbulent Celia is a portrait of a former wife of Mingus, featuring excellent alto sax work by Charlie Mariano.

Members of the “funky” school might do well to study his Better Get Hit In Yo’ Soul in which the band swings deeply and Mingus accepts, with an incredible facility, the challenge of “playing in 6/8 time faster than anybody had ever tried before.” Amazing new worlds of sound open up in such renditions as I X Love and Hora Decubitus. However it is the moving Theme for Lester Young which is the piece de resistance of this set.

In this jazz dirge which was sketched out at New York’s Half Note on the night Mingus learned that Young had died, the artist’s greatness as a melodic innovator is captured to its best advantage. It is a towering testimony to both the late Lester Young, who still dominates the scene like a reluctant ghost, and to Mingus, as a creator.

No small portion of the credit for its success must go to Booker Ervin whose sensitive, probing tenor sax solo is bound to stir the emotions.

In a market which is glutted with hastily conceived recordings, it is only hoped that this memorable disc will receive its share of recognition.

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Santa Barbara News-Press
Bert Willard : 02/29/1964

Charlie Mingus has done it again. Thumbing his nose at the critics (he has a thing going with some of the editors of Down Beat – what a hassle!), Charlie the Great has come up with another hit album – and some of the tracks just might make the pops charts (but Mingus couldn’t care less) – Mingus-Mingus-Mingus, Etc. (Impulse A-54) offers a powerful jazz ensemble, with some really top soloists, in four highly personal evocations of Mingus’ style, on one side, and three more of the same on the flip.

Mingus indulges some of his whimsy in the song titles – opening with an opus called II B.S. (which he says is the Roman numeral followed by a popular expression or contempt which may be found in the Dictionary of American Slang); I X Love (Mingus really knows his Latin – this one is dedicated to an ex-girl friend); and in Celia another ode to an old love in which Mingus borrows phrases from Haitian Fight Song and The Lady in Red, ingeniously weaving them in the solo lines. Charlie Mariano gets the spotlight in “Celia.”

Then comes Mingus in a loving tribute to an old friend and associate, Duke Ellington. Mood Indigo is played solo on string bass. It is a passionate, imaginative and loving dedication to the “greatest of them all,” the Duke.

On the flip side is a soulful Better Get Hit in Yo’ Soul, followed by a moving eulogy to Lester Young Theme for Lester Young and closing with Hora Decubitus (more of Mingus’ Latin – he translates it “At Bedtime”) which is hard-swinging composition based on some old riff patterns, with Booker Ervin, Eric Dolphy and Richard Williams sharing in the solos.

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Down Beat : 04/23/1964
Pete Welding : 4.5 stars

One of the most absorbing musical autobiographies chronicled on record – that of the tumultuous, resolute, restless bassist Charlie Mingus – is continued in this album. The music is strong and undilute as always: forceful, impassioned, honest, and thoroughly “committed” music self-revelation of the highest order, as fascinating and multifaceted as the man and just as uncompromising.

Mingus employs two 11-piece groups on the seven performances, a size that facilitates the freedom of the small group and the power and wider coloration effects open to the larger band. The orchestrations – according to the notes, expanded by Bob Hammer from Mingus’ sketches – artfully interweave the two approaches, making for a music that is constantly intriguing in its mosaiclike alternation of the two. The ensembles are particularly arresting, with writing that is harmonically and contrapuntally rich, pungent, and resilient in the shift of colors and the sinewy movement of its lines.

Of seven numbers, six are Mingus originals (the exception being Ellington‘s Mood Indigo, an acknowledgement of a primary source), though only one – Hora Decubitus – is what may be called a new piece. II B.S. is, for example, an updated version of Haitian Fight Song; Celia had been recorded before by a smaller group; I X Love is a reworking of Nouroog; and the yearning Theme for Lester Young previously had been recorded as Goodbye, Pork Pie Hat. Thematically the new versions are not markedly different from previous ones; they are, however, finely wrought performances fully on a par with the earlier recordings.

Celia seems somewhat an extension of I X Love, though the former is much more astringent than the latter (which might best be described as a jagged Johnny Hodges-like ballad). Altoist Mariano is a featured soloist on both, and he plays with the coursing strength and lithe intensity that has marked his best work in recent years (most markedly on the Candid LP he did with his wife, pianist Toshiko Mariano).

Mingus has a splendidly expressive bass solo on Mood Indigo, a delightful appreciation of Ellington, whose imprint is very evident throughout this album: several of the themes are Ellingtonian, the ensemble colorations often derive from his work, and there are any number of very Ellingtonish effects (as the muted trumpet-trombone obbligato on I X Love) scattered throughout the compositions. Ervin has strong solos on II B.S. and Hora Decubitus, which also boasts declamatory work by Dolphy and Williams.

Strongly recommended.

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Liner Notes by Nat Hentoff

The two most basic characteristics of Charles Mingus as a band leader have been distilled in a Martin Williams column on Mingus in the Saturday Review. Williams writes that in his small groups – and Mingus conceives the ten-piece unit he heads in this recording as a small unit – Mingus has “rediscovered the semi-improvised ensemble style, the thrilling collective spontaneity that has been missing in jazz since Dixieland descended to its current boozy geniality as a substitute businessman’s bounce. Mingus also has a capacity that only an exceptional composer-player can have: he encourages merely good sidemen to much better than good performances.”

This addition to the record of Mingus as a powerful shaper of jazz ensembles begins with a piece whose title is much less opaque than it first appears to be. If you read the roman numeral with which it begins as “to” and then add the common meaning of B.S., you arrive at Mingus’s occasional exasperation at having to find titles for compositions after they’ve been created. “Often,” he explains, “when I’m sitting at the piano, developing a piece, it’s difficult to put a label on the particular feeling I have going. All I can really put into words about this one is that it’s meant to communicate a mood of elation. And it is strongly related to the Haitian Fight Song.” The principal soloists are Booker Ervin and Jaki Byard, but this is fundamentally an ensemble performance.

I X Love signifies both “my ex-love” and also “a love which I ended, which I x-x-x-ed out.” The song is an updating of Nouroog from the Mingus repertory. The girl being described was a most sensual being, and accordingly, the song and its performance reflect the emotions that such a young lady evokes in retrospect.

Celia is a portrait of a former wife of Mingus. She was – and is – a woman of wit, sensibility and resiliency. Mingus’s use of The Lady in Red as a secondary theme refers to the fact that she has red hair. Like the preceding track, Celia re-emphasizes the gentleness and capacity for loving which are at the core of the complicated phenomenon which is Charles Mingus. In both, the alto saxophonist is Charlie Mariano. in sections, Celia is more turbulent than I X Love since its basic emotional theme may well be the difficulty of getting to know oneself well enough to begin to get to know anyone else.

Mood Indigo is an appreciation of Duke Ellington. “It’s absurd,” says Mingus, “to put Ellington in polls. A man who has accomplished what he has shouldn’t be involved in contests. He should just be assumed to be in first place every year.” Mingus’s solo is an indication that by my criteria, there is no bassist in jazz who combines so authoritative a command of the instrument with such resourceful and passionate an imagination.

Better Get Hit in Yo’ Soul has, Mingus emphasizes, no religious significance. “I just enjoyed the challenge,” he explains, “of playing in 6/8 time faster than anybody had ever tried before. And I wanted to show that a band can swing as deeply in 6/8 as in the more usual time signatures.” The performance illustrates another impact of Mingus’s presence as a bassist-leader. As Martin Williams has pointed out, Mingus “at key moments does not so much ‘accompany’ with his strings, one-two-three-four/ one-two-three-four, as he manages also to enrich the ensemble texture with a spontaneous, interplaying, countermelodic part.”

Theme for Lester Young, which is also known as Goodbye Pork Pie Hat, was first sketched out at the Half Note In New York on the night Mingus learned that Young had died. “If I had to use one word to describe him,” says Mingus, “it would be sensitivity. He towered over most other musicians, but he didn’t do it as a gorilla.” The same quality, sensitivity, is also pervasive in this tribute to Young, both in the keening ensemble textures and the intense, reflective solo by Booker Ervin.

I am told by Mingus the Latinist that Hora Decubitus means At Bedtime. The genesis of the composition comes from Mingus’s memory of how the Savoy Sultans, though a small combo, “used to outswing most big bands, by just building on riff patterns. Here I wanted to do the same thing – to swing hard!” Again, a remarkable element in Mingus’s influence on his sidemen is his capacity to generate and sustain a fierce collective swing which is at the same time both loose and what I can best describe as spontaneously exclamatory. And when in addition, the soloists improvise with as much fire as Booker Ervin, Eric Dolphy and Richard Williams, the overall musical experience reaches deeply into the most basic emotions of both players and listeners. The seeming paradox of Mingus is that so forceful a personality can create situations which so irresistibly propel his sidemen to be so fully themselves.

Although all the men on the date met the musical and personal challenges which Mingus always poses, I should note how astutely Jaki Byard has become able to anticipate as well as fulfill the demands of Mingus’s music. And credit should be given to Bob Hammer who worked on Mingus’s original sketches and helped fill out the voicings for the ten-piece ensemble.

In a revealing interview with Stanley Dance, Mingus Speaks, in the November—December, 1963, Jazz, Mingus reaffirms his definition of his function in music: “What’s so funny is some people think a composer’s supposed to please them, but in a way a composer is a chronicler like a critic. He’s supposed to report on what he’s seen and lived.” And Mingus’s recordings, including this one, are among the most persistently candid and absorbing maturing autobiographies in jazz history.

It is not only that so heterogeneous a mixture of emotions, memories, aspirations and “sudden self-discoveries are constantly operating within Mingus, but his expressive power as a musician also comes from the size and surge of all those forces. Mingus is remarkably unblocked. While some of his ideas may at times seem inchoate and while he is always exploring more and more deeply into his motivations and values, he has been confronting himself as directly as he has been able to in all the stages of his growth as a man and a musician. And although Mingus has become a prose writer of unusual scope and insight—an achievement which has to wait on the publication of his Beneath The Underdog before it is widely recognized – it is in his music that he has most fully documented his reports on what he’s seen and lived.

Mingus’s musical autobiography is a molten mixture of many elements. Among them are the daily exacerbations and the toughening of the spirit which come from being a Negro in this country. His music also addresses, however, the essential problem of every man – how does one live to the fullest of one’s capacities? The answer to the question involves sufficient knowledge of yourself to begin to realize what your capacities actually are and it involves being able to stay alive economically without expending more and more of your spirit in activities which utilize only a small portion of your potential but which do swallow time, time which cannot be redeemed.

Mingus has found a more self-liberating answer to this question than have most of his contemporaries. He is one of the most alive men I have ever known, and it is this commitment to living rather than only existing which makes his music so energizing and so insistently provocative. Whenever you come in contact with Mingus – as a friend, a sideman, a listener – you are being challenged to be more of yourself. If you can find yourself. I don’t mean that Mingus is consciously playing a role compounded of Socrates and Freud. My point is that in the act of being himself, he makes it very hard to relate to him on the usual superficial levels on which we relate to most of what we experience. And that is why it is impossible to be indifferent to Mingus. Whether your reactions to him and his music are positive or negative, they are invariably strong reactions. There are all too few like him – in jazz or anywhere else.