Billboard : 07/27/1963
Special Merit Pick

The prolific Mingus is back with another album full of surprises that tear, bleed, shout and swing. The album shows Mingus’ Duke Ellington roots more clearly than ever before and also offers fine work by Quentin Jackson, Jerome Richardson, Jaki Byard and Charlie Mariano.

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Cashbox : 07/27/1963
Jazz Pick of the Week

Perhaps the most important aspect of Mingus’ music is its highly-personal nature. The bassist-88’er communicates through his music a variety of emotions which he feels. Although this might be limited, the jazzman’s artistry and skill transform his music into some amazingly concrete universals. On this new Impulse set Mingus is in his best form in recent years. While backed by an accomplished group of musicians the artist swings on Solo Dancer, Duet For Solo Dancers and four other self-penned selections. Jazzophiles should really dig the LP.

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Album of the Year : 09/14/2020
Aymeric Dubois : Score of 98
Copied with permission from here

The History of the Albums – n° 222
Have you ever imagined what paradise looks like, or at least the place that could be called ideal? To be honest I’ve asked myself this question hundreds of times, always making up different scenarios. And then one fine day, at the dawn of autumn, by dint of scratching my head to think, which by the way accelerated my baldness, I found the answer. What if The Black Saint and The Sinner Lady were the set, and the orchestra led by Charles Mingus were the actors. There will be no jazz lover who will contradict me, so if you’ve never visited paradise, it’s high time you thought about it. We are in July 1963 when a jazz record, as it comes out every week, appears in the bins of the stores. However, this is not like the other times, it was actually an unusual day. So yes, it was already not so insignificant because the reputation and fame of the name Mingus was making ink and saliva rain down on the listeners, but it is important to point out that despite his legend, Mingus was not the popular star of the jazz sphere either. It is with time that we all definitively understood that he was one of the monuments unlike Davis or Coltrane who had already acquired their reputations at that time. So nothing was written in advance.

However, The Black Saint and The Sinner Lady was suddenly, after its release, an earthquake of such intense magnitude that the whole jazz sphere (and beyond) was shaken and upset forever. Among the holy trinity of jazz albums, we finally found the 2nd relic, which follows Kind Of Blue (Miles Davis – 1959), 2 years before reaching the last piece of the puzzle A Love Supreme (John Coltrane – 1965). Beyond everyone’s opinion and his own subjectivity, the Holy Trinity generally illustrates the top jazz albums that we find almost systematically when we consult any jazz listener. The reputation of this album is so impressive, that just thinking about and writing this review was an agonizing moment for me. It’s that very moment when you’re faced with something so charismatic that you’re afraid you won’t do enough credit for it. Luckily this work is so wonderful that you end up taking the plunge.

So let’s put things in context. If I had to make a rather quick but concise synthesis of Mingus, I would say first of all that he is simply one of the greatest composers in the history of music of any genre and one of the best double bassists at the same time. Although it took a long time for everyone to realize his importance, sometimes underestimated as a Thelonious Monk, Mingus has always been such an avant-garde genius that he had already anticipated Post-Bop as early as 1955 when Hard bop (his ancestor) hadn’t even yet established its dominance over other jazz styles. Beyond all that he offered to jazz, be it his compositions, his innovations, his techniques and his masterful contributions, Mingus was probably one of the first artists to take the album format seriously, developing the first concept albums. And these are some very important things. From Pithecanthropus Erectus (1956) to more specifically The Clown (1957), Charles Mingus very often brought this conceptual distinction to his albums, which gives much more particularity to his discography. That’s why when he released The Black Saint and The Sinner Lady, we can say that not only did he reach his peak, making it the most successful and brilliant album of his career, but he also offered one of the most conceptual and innovative albums that jazz (and more) has known. In terms of the context of the time, Charlie Mingus was going through a period in his career where everything was working very well, a very inspired period that can be heard from Mingus Ah Um (1959) to Mingus Mingus etc… (1964). It can clearly be considered his best period. It can be explained in particular by the fact that he was able to offer his brightest ideas at a time when modern jazz was focusing on avant-garde and post-bop, of which he was rightly “favored” because he already had years of anticipation on this subject.

When Mingus and his team returned to the studio on January 20, 1963 for the only recording session of The Black Saint and The Sinner Lady, he still had an ambitious concept in mind. Articulated around a Third Stream and Avant-Garde structure, The Black Saint and The Sinner Lady is an album that is actually a long and experimental composition, cut into several tracks in the form of a ballet. Unless I am mistaken, it seems to me that it is a first in the world of jazz and outside of classical music. Basically, if we take away the concept of the album, it’s not the first time that Mingus explores Third Stream territories. As a reminder, it is a style that combines Jazz and defined European Classical Music and whose merit is very often attributed to the musician and composer Gunther Schuller. However he is not the only precursor of this current, we also find Stan Kenton, Moondog, Bill Evans and of course Mingus with his projects Jazzical Moods (1955). Moreover I will quote Stan Kenton and Moondog as the first influences of The Black Saint and The Sinner Lady, as much on Third Steam, experimentation, the avant-garde side or the experimental big band. Because yes indeed, The Black Saint and The Sinner Lady is interpreted by an orchestra of 11 musicians, reflecting both the European culture of classical music and the modern big band born in the 50s which was opposed to the traditional swing. We thus find to support Mingus that musicians who at the time was not known, led by the brilliant arranger Hammer.

Now that you know all about the artistic and conceptual vision of this masterpiece, it’s time to focus on the musical aspect and its content. First of all I would like to point out that as in any high level classic, you very quickly understand when you listen to it that it has something completely both magnificent and crazy, as if you were whispering in your ear: “yes, it’s going to be unforgettable”. There is no turning back. Once you’ve listened to The Black Sinner and The Sinner Lady, you’re not necessarily aware of it, but you’re changed forever. To know the main reasons, it’s important to remember again that Mingus had already experimented in a different way with several ingredients, including the Third Steam, the Flamenco sounds on Tijuana Moods and the big bands on Mingus Dynasty which included some of the musicians present here as well. It can be said that musically The Black Sinner and The Sinner Lady is not so innovative if we rely only on “style” innovations. On the contrary, Mingus was able to create a unique and more than perfect work that retraces under a concept for the first time a lot of ingredients that he had already tried to cook before. It is rather this moment where the alchemy is so incredible that it will never be equaled. If Mingus Ah Um was his pinnacle of post-bop/hard bop, The Black Sinner and The Sinner Lady is the pinnacle of avant-garde jazz.

Lending itself totally to his concept, the idea of ballet could only work well with Mingus. In fact, when one analyzes the similarities, everything becomes clear. Mingus is one of the jazzmen and composers who manages to deliver the most emotions through his music (and without talking). Mingus’ art is felt both psychologically and physically. He loves to immerse himself in the universe and culture he explores, always seeking to make its content very theatrical, lively and particularly real. The conceptual idea of a ballet is that it is a story, often dramatic with an emphasis on emotions, through music and dance. We find all these elements and all its metaphors in The Black Saint and The Sinner Lady. It’s never easy to listen and understand the works of Mingus at first, this one is no exception, it’s even pushed to its paroxysm. He always has this tortured and passionate side that confront and sometimes embrace each other for a few moments. There are its multiple details, this technique and this infinite richness which even if you dig you never have the occasion to arrive at the end. A godsend for listeners who are looking for true love. To introduce the idea of an ideal and paradisiacal place to illustrate and qualify this work, it becomes almost obligatory, has such points it is deserved. The Black Saint and The Sinner Lady is one of the most fascinating, romantic and brilliant works an artist has ever produced, because it simply contains all the elements of a perfect work. The concept is brilliant, original and clearly mastered, you are constantly surprised without ever losing track, and the content is so breathtaking that you will spend your time praying to God that it never ends.

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Asbury Park Press
Don Lass : 11/23/1963

Mingus‘ writing might best be described as an extension of Duke Ellington‘s work. As with Ellington, there is in Mingus’ scores a blending of the primitive and the sophisticated, though Mingus projects more naked emotional power. In many ways the six tracks of this album are an expression of the intensive feelings of Mingus. There is evidence of pain and anguish that has marked much of the musician’s personal life but there are also moments of tenderness and sensitivity. In this way the six tracks represent one composition – an amazingly provocative piece of music.

The 11-piece orchestra Mingus used to interpret this composition sacrifices its individual voices for an intriguing collective sound. But it is the collective power and the unorthodox instrumentation that enable Mingus to express himself in his highly charged manner. The result is a music so rich in texture and so packed with feeling that it is most difficult to describe. It collectively cries, shouts, moans, laughs, and surprises. The musicianship, sparked by Mingus’ bass and piano playing, is superb. And, though some portions of the compositions were ineffective and overpowering, the album on a whole is a masterpiece in modern jazz.

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Baltimore Sun
John Goodspeed : 11/17/1963

Contempt for jazz critics by jazz musicians is one old tradition that the moderns have preserved. “Critics write whole columns and pages of big words and still ain’t saying nothing,” the great, cool trumpeter, Miles Davis remarks in the liner notes for his latest Columbia album – Seven Steps to Heaven.

But the critics, who have promoted jazz from its eclipse during the depression until its present status as a regular hobby, forever turn the other cheek to the performers. “Miles has matured into a brilliant, complex man,” the veteran critic Leonard Feather notes on the cover of the same album.

The music, to get to that, stars Davis’ warm, metallic tone, his fairly tasteful, economical melodic improvisations and his quaint harmonies, which he may have learned when he attended Julliard. He is accompanied – with notable cohesion for a modern group – by two small combinations (one recorded in New York, the other in Hollywood) that include piano, drums, bass violin and tenor sax. The title piece is typical of his best work and would add class to any cocktail lounge. His Baby, Won’t You Please Come Home is utterly without the traditional spirit of that piece – which makes it cool humor, presumably.

Davis is a modern titan, in part, because he played with Charlie (Bird) Parker before that eccentric alto saxophonist and critic-hater died in 1955 and became a cool-jazz immortal. But the supreme scorn for critics expressed lately is the work of Charles Mingus, a bass violinist who believes in “extended form” and “spontaneous composition.” His new album is The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady and it sounds – to be critical – like the Duke Ellington band warming up for 40 minutes.

It is accompanied by a long printed essay composed by Mingus himself: “I feel no need to explain any further the music herewith other than to say throw all other records of mine away except maybe one other.” And appended is a sort of review that was not written by any fool critic, but by a clinical psychologist, Edmund Pollock, Ph.D.

Dr. Pollock admits he doesn’t know much about jazz. But he hears something unusual in the Mingus opus: “From every experience such as a conviction for assault or as an inmate of a Bellevue locked ward, Mr. Mingus has learned something and has stated it will not happen again to him… The suffering is terrible to hear.”

Actually, it isn’t all bad. There’s a brief Spanish guitar solo on the flip side which a modern collector might find worth the suffering – just as old-time collectors sat through Sweet Sue by the Sweet Paul Whiteman orchestra to hear the hot chorus in the middle by Bix Beiderbecke.

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Encyclopedia of Popular Music
4th Edition, 2006 : Five stars

In many ways the essential Charles Mingus album, more than Ah Um. The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady is a rich and powerful suite, embracing in one work the elements of blues, gospel, funk and Latin music that infused Mingus’ sound and made it what it was. As well as featuring some of the best group arrangement outside the work of Duke Ellington, it boasts superb contributions by pianist Jaki Byard and alto saxophonist Charlie Mariano. This album is also revealing for its early use (in jazz) of studio dubbing, heard on the occasions when Mariano can be identified in the ensemble at the same time as he is soloing.

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Erie Daily Times
Garth Minegar : 03/26/1964

Charlie Mingus appears to be something of a contradiction.

As the years have passed, since he became one of the innovators of modern jazz, the breadth of his musical vision has increased, his resources have deepened, and his self-assurance has flourished.

Yet his ability to mold and develop his work has become increasingly erratic. Why there should be such a distance between Mingus in brilliant form and Mingus missing the mark cannot be determined from listening to one recording, but it may come, to some extent from his tendency to over-extend himself.

A startling demonstration of this overextension took place before an audience at New York’s Town Hall about a year ago, when Mingus was scheduled to lead a 30-piece orchestra in a concert of his compositions, which was to be recorded.

The evening was a fiasco because Mingus did not have his music ready. What was scheduled to be a concert was nothing more than a badly organized rehearsal.

Although, it seems unlikely that anything could be salvaged from the recordings made that night, a collection of bits and pieces has been assembled as Town Hall Concert. It is a rough, unfinished grab bag of incidents.

It occasionally comes alive when one of the soloists – Clark Terry on trumpet, Charles McPherson on alto saxophone, Mingus on bass, or Charlie Mariano, alto, or Quentin Jackson, trombone – gets ahold of something, and this band of professionals falls into place around him.

Yet, this Town Hall mismash was the first step toward The Black Saint and The Sinner Lady recorded in a studio two months later, with an 11-piece orchestra, the same soloists as above, and a wonderfully finished, wholly complete performance.

The second side of this LP is a reworking into one long piece of the themes introduced on side one. The elements are the same, but this time Mingus gets bogged down in shouts, brass beats and tempo accelerations that seem to go nowhere.

The two recordings are instructive as a demonstration of the awesome distance between the flat chaos of one Mingus performance, and the brilliance and often as not, brilliant choas, of the successfully completed presentation.

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The Oregonian
Jack Berry : 08/11/1963

Two elements remain constant in the work of composer-bassist Charlie Mingus: the ability to gather an often changing but consistently superb group of players and the habit of forcing them through exercises in sustained fury.

In his newest long composition several different (but not new) faces appear in the Mingus ensemble. Most conspicuously present are former West Coast altoist Charlie Mariano and trombonist Quentin (Butter) Jackson. Mingus has frequently mentioned his respect for Duke Ellington and in Jackson, a plunger mute specialist with Ellington for some time, he has great assistance in making this influence heard.

The composition itself consists of six portions, called “modes” and seems, particularly in the calmer second half, to be more firmly integrated than the usual “extended form.” In developing a series of almost shattering climaxes, Mingus deliberately violates a traditional jazz principle: he gradually increases the tempo until it seems at times that the group will dash away with itself. That this device can be used while the group swings hugely in a usual groove elsewhere is another statement about rules and their violation. (The bassist refers to unveiled rhythmic regularity as “when a faucet dribbles from a leaky washer” on the liner notes.)

Wonderful Mingus, which is to say don’t plan to do any fine needlework while listening.

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The Reporter
Nat Hentoff : 09/12/1963

The volatile Charles Mingus has assembled an eleven-piece band, which often sounds twice as large, in a series of new Mingus compositions. All of them have been influenced by Duke Ellington, particularly in the density and occasional exotic colors of their harmonic texture. At their core, however, all these Mingus pieces are fiercely personal extensions of Mingus’ own turbulent body of work. Ellington, partly because of his intimate knowledge of his veteran sidemen, tends to create carefully and often delicately balanced vignettes or concisely impressionistic pictures. Mingus, on the other hand, tries to generate surging, trancelike moods that undulate through explosive climaxes and brooding passages of reflections after each storm. His soloists are given wide freedom of expression within this over-all aura of apocalypse, and they are usually so caught up in the camp-meeting fervor that they are more self-revealing with Mingus than in other musical situations. Alto saxophonist Charles Mariano, for example, indicates a depth of emotion in his playing here that has never been so unsparingly excavated on his other recordings. A sign, incidentally, of our jazz time is the fact that a postscript to Mingus’ own explanatory notes is provided by Edmund Pollock, Ph.D., Clinical Psychologist. I suggest that you ignore both exegeses at least until you’ve listened to the music itself several times.

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Penguin Jazz Guide
Brian Morton & Richard Cook, 2010

Sue Mingus says: “In some fashion, Charles absorbed Bob Hammer‘s rehearsal band for a six-week gig he had had the Village Vanguard in 1963, which provided a unique opportunity to work out, night after night, on one of his greatest compositions, The Black Saint and the Sinner Leady. During that six-week period, the piece grew and developed and changed and took on the colours and musical personalities of the musicians in the band as evidenced in the recording. Musicologist Andrew Homzy has noted how entirely different the original written score is compared to the actual recording, typical of Mingus’ incorporations of ideas and sounds of his band members as the music developed.”

Almost everything about Black Saint is distinctive: the long form, the use of dubbing, the liner-note by Mingus’ psychiatrist. On its release, Impulse! altered its usual slogan, “The new wave of jazz is on Impulse!,” to read “folk,” in line with Mingus’ decision to call the group the Charles Mingus New Folk Band. Ellingtonian in ambition and scope, and in the disposition of horns, the piece has a majestic, dancing presence, and Charlie Mariano‘s alto solos and overdubs on Mode D/E/F are unbelievable intense. There is evidence that Mingus’ desire to make a single continuous performance (and it should be remembered that even Ellington’s large-scale compositions were relatively brief) failed to meet favour with label executives; but there is an underlying logic even to the separate tracks which makes it difficult to separate them other than for the convenience of track listening. It remains one of the most significant jazz performances of that decade and one of the greatest jazz records of all time, a splendid artefact that doesn’t fail to reveal the circumstances of its creation, a kind of meta-text of modern improvisation.

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San Francisco Chronicle
Ralph J. Gleason : 05/17/1964

With the solo exception of Duke Ellington, no musician-composer in jazz has produced a body of work spanning such a wide spectrum of emotions and moods as Charles Mingus, whose group is scheduled to open Tuesday night at the Jazz Workshop.

Like Ellington, Mingus has dared to attempt music of the spheres, has dared to speak for others, not alone for himself and has carefully choreographed the performances of the musicians who have played for him into the pre-conceived plan of the composer.

And, again like Ellington, all of this has been done without losing the grace of spontaneity and the strength of raw emotion which is the fibre and the life blood of jazz.

Even without his compositions, Mingus would have bene a leader in jazz. As a bassist, he quickly startled the world of his fellow musicians by his playing, first with the big bands of Louis Armstrong and Lionel Hampton and then with the Red Norvo Trio.

But despite his virtuosity as an instrumentalist, it is his work as a composer that has built the image of Mingus into one of the handful of universally acknowledged jazz giants.

“I play Charlie Mingus,” he once said, and this sums up the mark of individuality and personal sound which has characterized his music for more than a decade. As the leader of his own group, Mingus has produced a series of albums for Columba, United Artists, Impulse and RCA Victor which have been among the most vital and sinewy products of the new age of jazz. In addition, Mingus participated with Max Roach and Duke Ellington in one album, The Money Jungle which is as remarkable for its sound as for the fact that such a collection of major talents could assemble to record it all.

Jazz artists were once castigated as anti-verbal by Kenneth Rexroth. There is evidence for the truth of this in the attitude that many have towards the subject of their own music: let the music speak for itself. Mingus, at least on the evidence of his albums, may share that belief but still wishes to make an extra effort to communicate and has contributed a series of informative, sometimes digressive and always fascinating statements concerning his life, his attitudes, his music and the work contained in that particular album.

The jazz composer does not merely write down notes which are then read and played by any qualified musician in any qualified orchestra, even though Mingus at one time envisioned a utopia in which this might occur where the right method of notation to be used.

The jazz composer, as Ellington, Thelonious Monk, and Mingus have demonstrated, in order to be successful in using an orchestra to express the musical ideas of an individual, as opposed to merely laying out traffic patterns and groupings for ensembles and soloists to swing by, must deal in individual talents and choreograph them individually into the whole.

Mingus has spoken of a musician lending the composer his mind, and at another time, of the way in which a jazz player knew the right emotional quality to get in a certain place in one of the Mingus compositions.

It is this understanding of the individual talent and potential, this fealty first of all to music, that has marked Mingus from the mass of jazzmen.

Mingus is the only jazz musician I know of who has rejected commercial considerations entirely in favor of art. You could caption a cartoon of an angry Mingus saying “Send them back the money” and every jazz musician and most jazz fans would get the point. Money has been secondary to art, which is to say to life, with Mingus to a degree unequalled in jazz.

This honesty, which pervades his music, may not always win him friends but it most certainly influences people.

Mingus makes music that can be disturbing, rawly exciting or capable of communicating basic emotions like sadness with shattering intensity. He is a large man with a large man’s large emotions but his music (and his statements concerning it) are continued re-avowals of his artistic responsibility to communicate what he has experienced, to reflect the world as he sees it and to emphasize the two parallels of “what is” and “should be.”

Mingus, like Ellington, has grappled with the big questions, with the universal themes. His compositions have been topical and universal simultaneously and he has been as mystic in one passage as programmatic in another.

But the sharp cutting edge of reality, the toughness of living bone and muscle have made his organized sounds lasting creations.

This is an angry, thwarted and unsure world and it is natural that any reflection of this would contain some of these feelings. Or that listeners from this world should bring these feelings to the music. But what the music of Mingus does with its stress on individual feeling organized into an emphatic plan is to reaffirm the basics of strength, fortitude, joy, love, triumph over adversity and courage. If I had to pick one word with which to characterize Mingus compositions, it would have to be “courageous.”

In a world of conformity, he has had the courage to stand alone, to define his own terms, to resist their change and to hack his own path through the money jungle.

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Saturday Review
Wilder Hobson : 08/31/1963

Charlie Mingus‘ The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady is his most ambitious jazz composition to date. It occupies both sides of an LP and, even if he did not tell us so in his program notes and the titles of the various parts, it would be clear that the music has intense reference to his personal experience, and to the struggle of the American Negro.

The work has many passages of powerful impact and others of lyric loveliness. It is rhythmically urgent, harmonically rich, and lustrous in its coloration; in all these respects it often suggests Duke Ellington. There is frequently an eloquent use of single or multiple instrumental voices over ostinato figures and a pedal point.

The expressive suggestions run a very wide gamut, from the songful to the clamorous, the impassioned to the anguished, the chaotic to the rebellious. It would appear that all of the players as well as their composer-leader-bassist, were thoroughly absorbed. The work is shiningly performed. It may be unfair to single out any one man, but it seems to me that I have never heard the alto saxophone played with such singing fervor as Charles Mariano exhibits in his numerous leading passages. The others of the splendid company are Rolf Ericson and Richard Williams, trumpets; Quentin Jackson, trombone; Don Butterfield, contrabass trombone and tuba; Jerome Richardson, soprano and baritone saxes and flute; Dick Hafer, tenor sax and flute; Jaki Byard, piano; Jay Berliner, guitar; Dannie Richmond, drums; and Charlie Mingus, bass and piano.

Having said this much in praise of The Black Saint, I come to certain reservations. In the second half of the composition, in which Mingus reworks many of the materials introduced in the first, I cannot, after repeated hearings, feel a cumulatively effective development of ideas; instead, the work seems to fragment. Furthermore, throughout the composition Mingus makes considerable use of accelerandos (I have counted eight instances). This gradual speeding-up of the tempo to produce increasing tension is an extremely powerful musical device, but there is the danger that too much of it will run into the law of diminishing returns, that what begins as excitement will wind up a bore. I find that something of this sort occurs here. Finally, I do not share Mingus’ feeling that the extreme vocalization of instruments, with mutes or other means, so that they sound very close to human voices, is a musically valuable process – no matter how artfully it is carried on (and Quentin Jackson is a master of it on the trombone). Where vocal effects are desired, I prefer voices. But all these qualifications to one side, The Black Saint is compelling, charged with fascinating detail, and richly felt both by its composer and his players, who have ample opportunity to bring their own spontaneity into his scheme of things. This is hortatory music – and it is full of fire and high musical skill.

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Liner Notes by Charles Mingus & Dr. Edmund Pollock

Dannie Richmond opens with a written repeated rhythmic bass drum to snare drum to sock cymbal figure that suggests two tempos along with its own tempo. These three tempos are alternately used throughout the entire composition along with accelerandos, retards, and rubatos. A slow ballad opens the second track that soon develops to the second alto theme after the piano interlude and solo. Then a double-time tempo of that same ballad tempo that arrives after the piano-entrance. The first and second piano solos on the third track, the third mode on the A side incidentally, is Mingus playing. Mingus played the two opening piano solos in the third track as example to Jaki Byard at his, Jaki’s, request to show him or play it himself. At first Jaki seemed only impressed to use pyrotechnical piano arpeggios, scales, etc., consecutive thirds, and grouped fifths rather than to invent suitable melody within the context of the coming theme and thematic material already laid out for piano ad lib by the composer. However, Bob Thiele felt to include the two examples given by Mingus which served to also clear up the intended idea enough for Jaki Byard to give himself up wholly to the composer’s development and help to prepare the listeners for the next idea intended by the composer – right on down to the moanful background where Charlie Mariano knew tears of sound were what was the intended thought in the background and what also was meant to come out of his alto sax solo. No words or example were needed to convey this idea to Charles Mariano. Only his love of living and knowing life and his understanding of the composer’s desire to have one clear idea at least musically recorded here for record.

Back to the drum opening – 12:8, 6:8, 9:8, 3:4 – whatever musical stenographers may care to title what the composer heard in his head, is part of a very old idea that someday all good music will return from its assorted labels which inhibit it with fashions, styles, and certain celebrated rhythms of pounding exactness that lead this composer to believe that either the musician or the audience playing or liking such repeated debuts of so-called musical inventions must be nuts to need drums, bass, guitar, and piano to pound out the already too obvious time night after night ’til actually if sanity can’t be sustained one begins to like it without twisting or even dancing, popping fingers, or at least working out one’s frenzy in ye old brass bed mama.

Time, perfect or syncopated time, is when a faucet dribbles from a leaky washer. I’m more than sure an adolescent memory can remember how long the intervals were between each collision of our short-lived drip and its crash into an untidy sink’s overfilled coffee cup with murky grime of old cream still clinging to the edges or a tidy rust stained enamel sink that the owner of such has given up on the idea that that maintenance man is ever going to change the rhythm beat of his dripping faucet by just doing his job and changing that rotten old rubber washer before time runs out of time.

Musicians partly come into the circle of various blame which encompasses much more than leaky faucets, rotten washers, or critics. Wow! Critics! How did they get here? I know. It’s Freudian. Faucets and old rotten washers. The innocent audiences that are sent in the direction of premature musicians – critics who want to play and some who play and study at music and can only encompass soul-wise and technically about someone else what they themselves can comprehend. They sing – good or bad you never know. They won’t dare stand up with their bald heads or long hair and do so. Especially with their sexataries who usually keep them so busy elsewhere but in places where music is to be played and reviewed. Critics, they sing, dance, play the piano, bass, drums, saxes, and most of the oral instruments. I even know one who can hear. I mean he can actually hear the difference between a major triad and A minor. He can also take old chords off old records recorded in 1902 by Jelly Roll Morton. After this accomplishment for many years now he also knows that every musician who improvises copies Louis Armstrong. And this man works while musicians who just play music are scuffling to pay rent or have their wives bury them in dirt with the few dollars insurance the American Federation of Musicians calls insurance. This kind of critic-musician man teaches people how to listen to music in new schools and he gets paid to play records to brainwash innocent little people who don’t know that if you’re going to like something that’s beautiful no one can tell you how if it don’t just happen. If it doesn’t just happen, you’re already brainwashed and instead of hiring someone to tell you what’s beautiful for you, and you’re past five years old, this means you need an analyst, not a public bathroom attendant with dirty faucets, who only knows what’s beautiful to him because of his own inadequacies as to how and why he knows everything Jelly Roll Morton, Flush Gordon, Louis Armstrong, etcetera did and on down to whoever he says is modern. He can even read and score music. Yet this musician-critic fails to ever turn over any charts of his own to be played by musicians he’s hired. But should one of these men whose music he reviews and labels come up with some little thing he truly believes is one of his own musical forms, well at least he had not heard it done in his thirty-five years in certain segregated elements of music that the critic is partly responsible for upholding the cursed name, Dirty Faucet will say in his favorite brainwashing voice, “My boy, I notice you call this music extended form when you use only one chord. Why, Jelly Roll Morton did that in 1902,” and brings in the following week the music that is similar in some respects. Yet this same kind of critic ten years later, when this extended form you used in a few tunes, or what is known in other music as pedal point, ten or more years later has too long been a fad by others who too may never have heard Jelly Roll Morton, and maybe not even this composer. Yet this same critic boasts the guys in print like it’s his team professionally that uses this pedal point form so it’s okay and he’s never mentioning Jelly Roll did it in 1902 and Mingus in 1957, that is to his knowledge, at a village club. It was 1959. He missed these forms in the composers’ workshop in 1954. He also missed the extended form in 1940, ‘41, and ‘42 at a Central Avenue club in Los Angeles with Buddy Collette, Spaulding Givens, Britt Woodman, John Anderson, Oscar Bradley, and Lucky Thompson. He also missed the extended forms when I was five years old when I laid my cello down with my sisters Vivian and Grace to figure out on piano why my sister’s violin clashed with my cello on certain notes. I always played my own music with one bass note or no note in the bass clef and moved melodic structure to try and fit what melody or melodies I heard in my brain. I never liked just chords. Miles Davis once came to my house in California with Lucky Thompson showing his idea of contrapuntal music which Gil Evans did most for him on records, credited to Gerry Mulligan. That was Miles’ idea. Miles even named the instrumentation to Lucky and myself French Horn, Tuba, etc. remember? This was in the mid-forties before he met Evans or Mulligan or even this bassist’s extended form. That same day Miles’ concept was the same as it was ten years later at Newport: “Damn, Mingus! How you going to play music with just one bass note so long?”

His second remark was, “Why do you put D flat, E flat, G flat, and A flat all in a C seventh chord?” I still just look at Miles when he jokes like that because Miles was flatting along with the seventh, the ninth, tenth, twelfth, and thirteenth in Bird’s days. And I am also aware that it is a compliment to Jelly Roll if not to me that he, Coltrane, and Roach with their bands got away from those bedamnable fourth cycles and chords on every two beats. Perhaps when it is understood to them and Jelly Roll that pedal point keys have an easily usable minimum of three key signatures for improvisation, “spontaneous composition” instead of the one tonic key pedal point scale now being used, music will make another turn in this century so that people will know how serious spontaneous composition “improvisation” really is and not just how loud and long it swings or how we swing and sway.

Perhaps it may sound conceited to point out on my own liner notes what I know I have contributed. This would not be a necessity if critics who do not own a direct financial interest in me and a few others would point out fairly the direction of every musician at the point of his musical debut like they do to or for those in whom they do have direct or indirect professional interest as to the furthering of bank accounts. Or sometimes they have odd little reasons not to like certain composers because they know who of the improvisationalists, composers know them and can really see right into their ugly little minds wanting the nerve to blow their horns or write their music.

I feel no need to explain any further the music herewith other than to say throw all other records of mine away except maybe one other. I intend to record it all over again on this label the way it was intended to sound. This is the first time the company I have recorded with set out to help me give you, my audience, a clear picture of my musical ideas without that studio rush feeling. Impulse went to great expense and patience to give me complete freedom, along with engineer Bob Simpson, for balance and editing.

The three reeds, baritone – Jerome Richardson, tenor – Dick Hafer, and alto – Charles Mariano, were placed in what I called a V balance with the tenor sax at the V’s bottom and the baritone and alto closer to the mike. My reason was that I wanted the tenor sax further from the mike, softer of course, if one is inclined to believe that presence need be obvious. The notes written for tenor were considered in the voiced reed section’s overall effect as an illusion of sound-overtones coming through between the baritone and alto that are non-directional so as to give the sound of more than two obvious saxes playing but with possibility of being perhaps four or five. In reverse, if my tenor sax were as close to the mike as my alto and baritone there would be three saxes obviously playing when sometimes I wanted the illusion of more than three. There are at least three perfect overtones that normal ears hear. I was more concerned that the overtones be heard, that one loud tenor note blending with alto and baritone closing out its overtones.

Don Butterfield opens on contrabass trombone with pedal point blast. The contrabass trombone to my knowledge is as rare to find as is a player such as Don. He has refused to play the instrument when requested by rock and roll promoters as a gimmick of odd sound that might start a fad and promote the sales of a million or so records. Don, aside from pedal point notes of both contrabass trombone and tuba, is written in counter lead and center tones on tuba to spread my voicings and help form the illusion of spreaded brass or full ensemble. Don plays two tubas at once with one mouthpiece. Yet it’s difficult to catch him doing this. It’s easy when he takes off a night though to realize that last night there were two tubas and tonight there is just one.

Dick Hafer’s eloquence is found on lead voice behind the alto’s opening statement, and solo’s, but mainly if you listen to the group as a whole, in the overall fullness rounding out the entire groups sound through his careful playing lines of overtones. His solo features will be heard on my second album for Impulse.

At this moment I’d like to pause for station identification. Station SOUL and LOVE. Charles Mariano lead alto and alto solos. Jerome Richardson lead baritone, flute, soprano, and baritone solos coming to you through some of these same above stated frequencies plus moral support to yours truly. When critics who couldn’t hear my Town Hall music tried to get rid of me forever, Jerome was there to say, “Come on, Mingus. You know we know those cats don’t know what they’re saying. Don’t read it. Let’s show them with our Vanguard band.”

Then there’s Butter, Quentin Jackson. Thanks, Mr. B., for preaching and playing my music, our music, the way I’ve always heard it in my mind’s ear. Also for helping to show that modern music is not owned by adolescents who can’t or won’t play plunger or bend a brass instrument to sound other than what it sounded like in parade bands. And let me not forget that you introduced me to adult musical life. From now on I do what I always wanted – work with men “mature people” only, of all ages, regardless of what the kids think.

Rolf Ericson. Your knowledge of all the eras in trumpet music meant so much. And I saw you play on cut, bleeding lips night after night trying to help the group’s sound. I saw your smiles grow, Richard Williams and Rolf Ericson, as the nights of playing cleared up the confusion of people playing music of a man who can’t speak and communicate with his mouth. I feel in musical love too when I hear your sympathetic understanding of my musical chores on this record. I hope America will accept you, Rolf, in fair musical employment and you, Richard, for the virtuoso that you are and sustain you as well financially.

Jaki, I hope you get the band you want and get stuck for a bass player and I can show up and cooperate with you on your music the way you did on mine. All is well, however. That’s what’s good about stereo. You can turn the channels up that make it and off if they don’t. Especially if it’s intentionally not what was meant to come off musically on the track.

Guitarist, Jay Berliner, presently with Harry Belafonte. Classical guitar was originally heard and written as in this composition but played by piano at the Vanguard. I wrote the guitar solo; Bob Hammer wrote the one bar modulation going into and the two bars leading out of the guitar solo on the B side from a Spanish piece I’d written some time before. However, Bob Hammer will be fully represented on my next album for Impulse due to the fact that he is one of the few musical people besides Roland Kirk who came to New York City knowing my music that he’d heard on records. In fact, this will probably be the last record session I will ever arrange. I will always voice my own compositions and orchestrate. But even at that I would not give up the arranging scene had I not met Bob. Although I still don’t think the three or four bars modulation he wrote were that expensive, especially since it was already orchestrated by me. Next time, Bob, we talk price up front.

Now my man Dannie Richmond. Without Dannie, who gave me his complete open mind seven years ago, to work with as clay – I didn’t play drums so I taught Dannie bass. Dannie is me with his own sense of will. Instead of hands strumming or bowing he uses his feet, hands, skin, metal, and wood. When I met Dannie several young drummers had just about burned me out time-wise, and they were sound deaf and tone deaf. Also they did not know, as Elvin Jones and I discussed many years ago, that you don’t play the beat where it is. You draw a picture away from the beat right up to its core with different notes of different sounds of the drum instruments so continuously that the core is always there for an open mind. While you make it live now and then you go inside the beat, dead center, and split the core to the sides and shatter the illusion so there is no shakiness ever. If one tries to stay inside dead center or directly on top of the beat or on the bottom the beat is too rigid on the outside where it is heard. The stiffness should only be felt inside the imaginary center of the exact tempo’s core. The top, the bottom, the sides, the back are where my favorite drummers, Dannie and Elvin, play, though differently. They tease the mind by not telling you exactly what everyone knows – where one, two, three, and four are. For ensemble work before I met Dannie, Elvin fit my taste. He still does but it’s Dannie who’s with me and I’m lucky he has stayed with me. There isn’t time to teach a lifetime of music to kids who don’t know a drum is an instrument, not a donkey for freeloader, horn-happy soloists to ride tempo on because it’s easier to listen to drums beat out tempo, wrong or right, than to think for yourself the tempo a musician like Dannie or Elvin suggests to you, yet not too obviously.

There is Bob Thiele. Thanks, man, for coming to my Town Hall open recording session, hearing the music, liking. it, and hiring my band to record for your company when the critics scared the pants off the people for whom I wrote the music.

Last and least is me. Mingus. I wrote the music for dancing and listening. It is true music with much and many of my meanings. It is my living epitaph from birth til the day I first heard of Bird and Diz. Now it is me again. This music is only one little wave of styles and waves of little ideas my mind has encompassed through living in a society that calls itself sane, as long as you’re not behind iron bars where there at least one can’t be half as crazy as in most of the ventures our leaders take upon themselves to do and think for us, even to the day we should be blown up to preserve their idea of how life should be. Crazy? They’d never get out of the observation ward at Bellevue.

I did. So, listen how. Play this record.

As far as reviewing the music on the record, I’ll leave that up to someone who is very close to me personally – Doctor Pollock.

Charles Mingus
March 13, 1963

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When Mr. Mingus first asked me to write a review of the music he composed for this record, I was astonished and told him so. I said I thought I was competent enough as a psychologist but that my interest in music was only average and without any technical background. Mr. Mingus laughed and said he didn’t care, that if I heard his music I’d understand. This is the uniqueness of this man: he jolts with the unexpected and the new. He has something to say and he will use every resource to interpret his messages. After all, why not have a psychologist try to interpret the projections of a composer musician? Psychologists interpret behavior and/or ideas communicated by words and behavior – why not apply this skill to music? It’s certainly a refreshing approach that Mr. Mingus suggests.

As Nat Hentoff has stated, “Mingus is ingenuous,” ever growing, looking for change and ways to communicate his life experiences, his awareness and feelings of himself and life. His early and late life sufferings as a person and as a black man were surely enough to cause sour bitterness, hate, distortions and withdrawal. Yet, Mr. Mingus never has given up. From every experience such as a conviction for assault or as an inmate of a Bellevue locked ward, Mr. Mingus has learned something and has stated it will not happen again to him. He is painfully aware of his feelings and he wants desperately to heal them. He also is cognizant of a power dominated and segregated society’s impact upon the underdog, the underprivileged and the minority. Inarticulate in words, he is gifted in musical expression which he constantly uses to articulate what he perceives, knows and feels.

To me this particular composition contains Mr. Mingus’ personal and also a social message. He feels intensively. He tries to tell people he is in great pain and anguish because he loves. He cannot accept that he is alone, all by himself; he wants to love and be loved. His music is a call for acceptance, respect, love, understanding, fellowship, freedom – a plea to change the evil in man and to end hatred. The titles of this composition suggest the plight of the black man and a plea to the white man to be aware.

He seems to state that the black man is not alone but all mankind must unite in revolution against any society that restricts freedom and human rights.

In all three tracks of Side I there are recurrent themes of loneliness, separateness and tearful depression. One feels deeply for the tears of Mr. Mingus that fall for himself and man. There can be no question that he is the Black Saint who suffers for his sins and those of mankind as he reflects his deeply religious philosophy. His music tells of his deep yearning for love, peace and freedom. A new note has crept into his music. Where once there was a great anger now one can hear hope. As with much of his past music, Mr. Mingus cries of misunderstanding of self and people. Throughout he presents a brooding, moaning intensity about prejudice, hate and persecution.

In the first track of Side I there is heard a solo voice expressed by the alto saxophone – a voice calling to others and saying “I am alone, please, please join me!” The deep mourning and tears of loneliness are echoed and re-echoed by the instruments in Mr. Mingus’ attempt to express his feelings about separation from and among the discordant people of the world. The suffering is terrible to hear.

In track B, the music starts with a tender theme. It is a duet dance song in which many emotions of relatedness are expressed – warmth, tenderness, passion. The music then changes into a mood of what I would call mounting restless agitation and anguish as if there is tremendous conflict between love and hate. This is climaxed by the piercing cries of the trombone and answering saxophones as if saying the “I” of personal identity must be achieved and accepted.

Track C begins with the happiest of themes. Here Mr. Mingus himself plays a classical piano reverie backed by a lyrical flute and cymbals. It is sweet and soft and has a lightness rarely seen in Mr. Mingus’ music. But once again the music shifts into a tonal despair and brooding anguish. The theme suggested by the title is the peace and happiness of the free person contrasted with the pain and tears of the black man. Mr. Mingus uses many forms of technique and instrumentation to reflect his meaning. He told me his use of the Spanish guitar was meant to mirror the period of the Spanish Inquisition and El Greco’s mood of oppressive poverty and death.

Side II develops all these themes in a very carefully worked out musical composition in concert style, repeating and integrating harmony and disharmony, peace and disquiet, and love and hate. The ending seem unfinished but one is left with a feeling of hope and even a promise of future joy.

Mr. Mingus thinks this is his best record. It may very well be his best to date for his present stage of development as other records were in his past. It must be emphasized that Mr. Mingus is not yet complete. He is still in a process of change and personal development. Hopefully the integration in society will keep pace with his. One must continue to expect more surprises from him.

Edmund Pollock, Ph.D., Clinical Psychologist