Army Times
Tom Scanlan : 10/19/1957

Charlie Mingus, a superior bassman, is perhaps best known now as an avant-garde composer and arranger. If your jazz does not have to be “happy” jazz, you might enjoy his latest record, The Clown. The title selection – it is not a “tune” – is narrated by Jean Shepherd, the “night people” disc jockey in New York. The Clown deals with a performer’s sardonic discovery of how to make people laugh. It’s worth hearing.

The other Mingus compositions here also claim to tell stories, Mingus being one who is devoted to the idea that music tells stories. But I wonder if such “stories,” or “feelings” or “hates” are inherent in the music itself. Hear the record and judge for yourself.

Incidentally, on the liner notes talented writer Nat Hentoff in one sentence draws a kind of analogy between William Butler Yeats’ Crazy Jane, William Blake, Leadbelly, and Mingus. Like much of the music here, I surely don’t know what to make of that. William Blake and Leadbelly?

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Billboard : 09/16/1957
Score of 77

Mingus, in his second LP for Atlantic, offers a program more accessible to the non-jazz audience. The material swing, essays typical Mingus impact, and on Reincarnation of a Lovebird, a descriptive beauty. Title selection, an allegory narrated by Jean Shepherd, is a potent brew. Solos by trombonist J. Knepper, and Mingus are to be noted. Good cover, and notes by Nat Hentoff will help sell it.

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Boston Globe
Norman J. O’Connor, CSP : 09/29/1957

The average musician, given the opportunity to tour with Louis Armstrong, would jump at the chance. A trip with Louis would provide enough publicity and attention to take the musician through a lifetime of recordings and concerts.

One prominent jazz player, however, turned down the chance because he was afraid he would lose his life. If you work with Armstrong, at some moment in your journey you are going to be in the South, and there working with segregated audiences and in the manner which is the typical Armstrong performance, Charles Mingus felt sure he would die.

This is a rather strong position to take, but if you listen to Mingus’ music and meet him in conversation, you quickly realize that the above reaction to Louis Armstrong is just too true. From Los Angeles, and with a background that includes such diverse elements as Chinese and Negro, Mingus has been a controversial figure almost since his first performance as a bassist for a jazz combo on the West Coast.

Thirty-fivish, fine looking, married, tremendously talented, Mingus is most likeable, but at times he must drive friends frantic with his no-compromise attitude. He was afraid to travel with Armstrong because he would be sure to encounter a situation in the South of which the only outcome would be death.

Of the men now working in jazz none has so consuming an interest in the somber passages of life as Mingus. If ever you think depth and seriousness are lacking in jazz music, then take a quick look at Mingus and the music he has written.

One of his first was a poem with music called The Chill of Death and one of his most recent is the Haitian Fight Song in which he has an extended bass solo which Mingus says he can’t play “right unless I’m thinking about prejudice and hate and persecution and how unfair it is… there’s sadness and cries in it but also determination… and it usually ends with my feeling: ‘I told them! I hope somebody heard me.'”

This tremendous desire to say something that is important and real makes Mingus go to enormous lengths. Jazz in too much of its history has been a surface medium, concerning itself with rather tawdry emotions and momentary problems. As a result its extension into depth and meaning has been a slow process that not too many people have worked at. This process necessarily has reached into opera, symphony, ballet, movies, painting. Little has been successful and the attempts get fewer as the need becomes greater.

Mingus is typical. A jazz player and a performer for most of his musical life, and yet a musician acutely aware of contemporary classical forms, he has spent much time in trying to forge a voice that will bear the thought he has.

He knows good and evil, he has lived with it; he knows love and hate, he has lived with these too. He knows the hard facts of public likes and dislikes.

He once felt that music wanted too much from a person, so he retired and worked in the New York Post Office and was so successful and so well-liked that he almost stayed. Out of this background he has gathered enough material to keep him busy musically for the rest of his life.

His most recent attempt at forcing jazz into new patterns is a recording called Clown. Clowns have always been puzzling people. They make laughter by being fools and while they perform there is never an unmasking so you can know their real personalities.

Mingus gets all this in his music. You recognize the atmosphere of the circus and the bumbling little creature falling down or stumbling or getting out of the midget car with eight other clowns. Then the contrast is presented and the music assumes the mood and character of the man. Only alto, tenor, bass, trombone, piano and drums are used but yet there is drama and impact despite the small instrumentation.

Then comes the narration and the words that are spontaneously spoken by Jean Shepherd become so distracting and so out of place that you wonder the wisdom of even letting the recording be released.

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Pittsburgh Courier
Harold L. Keith : 09/28/1957

Some months ago Charies Mingus thrust upon the buying public an album called Pithecanthropus Erectus which, in the opinion of this reviewer, had missed the boat.

The latest Mingus cutting is something else. Four numbers are played on the offering with Curtis Porter, Jim Knepper, Wade Legge, and Dan Richmond working as sidemen. The group plays Haitian Fight Song, Blue Cee, Reincarnation of a Love Bird, and The Clown who quite fittingly meets his demise in Pittsburgh.

The entire album sparkles with Mingus’ ode to Parker, Reincarnation, coming through as an inspiring message. Very highly recommended listening.

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San Francisco Examiner
C.H. Garrigues : 10/06/1957

With the poetry and jazz controversy apparently nearing its climax in San Francisco (where it started some months ago) some fresh fuel was heaped on the fire last week by Atlantic’s release of Clown, a new LP by Charlie Mingus which includes one long track of poetry (or at least poetic narration) combined with a lot of solid and effective jazz.

For the uninitiate, let it be said, first, that Mingus is himself on of the most controversial figures in today’s jazz world. Many musicians, particularly those who have worked with him, declare that the man is mad. Others – and many fans, including this one – insist that he is making the most significant contribution to jazz since the days of Charlie Parker and when the ultimate library of Mingus music is collected it will be found that in it jazz reach its full stature for the first time.

The fact is that Mingus, even at 35, is a harsh and bitter man in somewhat the same sense that Beethoven was a harsh and bitter man when he wrote the last quartets. Like Beethoven, he expresses his bitterness in his music but, unlike Beethoven, he possesses the resources of tonality, plus the klangtint of modern brass and bass for his palette. He knows, too, what he is doing; he says: “My music is alive and it’s about the living and the dead, about good and evil. It’s angry, yet it’s real because it knows it’s angry.”

All this is apparent in Clown, both on the narrated title track and in the other, pure music, tracks. The words of Clown at first seem stereo-typed: the story of a clown who only wanted to make people laugh but fell into tragedy when he found they only laughed at tragic things.

But at second and third and fourth hearing it tends to become even clearer how the words are merely the integument that contain the music and that is it the bitterness of the music you have come to hear – not the bitterness of the story.

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San Bernardino County Sun
Jim Angelo : 10/12/1957

This release is a prime example of a progressive musician’s constant search for something different. Mingus differs – not for difference’s sake – but in an honest attempt to achieve something new and worthwhile in his chosen field of expression. This he does. All but the hidebound traditionalists will find much musical interest and significance here. Best side is the second one with an ode to Charlie Parker titled Reincarnation of a Lovebird; and The Clown, which showcases a knocked out, improvised narration by Jean Shepherd that alone is worth the album’s price. Don’t fail to dig this one!

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Washington Post
Paul Sampson : 11/24/1957

This tremendously exciting LP has the stamp of originality and vitality. It extends usual jazz forms and is almost painfully alive in some sections. All of the four extended selections, except the title piece, move forward with unremitting drive and swing. They are played by Mingus, bass; Chris Porter, alto and tenor; Jimmy Knepper, trombone; Wade Legge, piano and Dannie Richmond, drums.

The title piece, a combination of music and narration, doesn’t quite come off, but it has moments of interest, and the other three pieces are superb. The best is Haitian Fight Song, which opens with a moving Mingus solo that drives into the ensemble and ignites it into a series of wild, dissonant passages. Very highly recommended.

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White Plains Reporter Dispatch
Steven H. Scheuer : 10/09/1957

Although Charles Mingus, composer-bassist, is still avidly pursuing his bold experiments on atonality in jazz composition, he has become more accomplished recently in using such chords to punctuate the flow of his ideas rather than to make them an end in themselves.

His new album, The Clown, puts Mingus and the Jazz Workshop group to work on four originals which allow their author considerably more latitude of expression than his intellect ruled concepts of recent years. Now there is more heart, more warmth, more embodiment of the traditional moods we have identified with jazz as a dynamic creative force in our culture.

Charlie plays as if he has something to say, as always, but this time he speaks without expletives. On Haitian Fight Song, for example, with saxist Curtis Porter, Jimmy Knepper, trombone, Wade Legge, piano and Dannie Richmond, drums, as he sails into a percussive, driving demonstration of what folk music would be like if given a modern jazz reading. He freely admits that his solos reflect his thoughts of the unfairness of racial prejudice, hatred and persecution. The proof of our thesis comes from Charlie’s statement in Nat Hentoff’s searching liner notes – “There’s sadness and cries in it, but also determination. And it usually ends with my feeling “I told them! I hope somebody heard me.”

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Down Beat : 11/28/1957
Don Gold : 4.5 stars

The title piece, with its improvised narration by satirist-monologist Jean Shepherd, points apparently to a growing trend to mix the voice more actively with instruments in jazz. On Dot, there is a collection by Chicago’s Ken Nordine which differs in conception from The Clown, but which is still an attempt to work free verbal association into a pattern of music sound.

Here, the effects are less spectacular than on Nordine’s recording because the latter uses the human voice and its spoken story as the dominant instrument. In this collection, Shepherd’s exposition of the verbal theme that humor springs from man’s inhumanity to man is alternated with a musical exposition of the same theme, with Knepper‘s trombone the commenting instrument.

Shepherd has been better on his WOR Sunday night radio shots. But in those cases, his material hasn’t been so set to one theme as it is here. There are some sparkling times when he rockets off on a verbal tangent, pulling in picture images from his past, American cliché-lore, advertising, people, baseball, objects, and even thoughts. He has been hilariously, and often bitingly, funny. This outing is not up to the best in him.

The idea is an interesting one, and the Mingus Workshop seems the logical entry for the experiment. The concept here is an indication to me that Mingus and his musicians are seeking to broaden the scope of jazz, and break the bind of the often static forms into which so many groups fall.

The remaining three tracks on the LP are all Workshop, with Reincarnation a stunningly moving composition. In this probing, quite lovely tribute to Bird, Curtis Porter‘s alto is lyrical and brilliant.

The Fight Song is largely a dazzling display of Mingus’ virtuosity. There are relatively few bassists who can produce such melodic feeling. It’s as if, in Mingus’ hands, the instrument is capable of producing a melodic flow rather than a succession of plucked notes in a melodic pattern.

Knepper’s work throughout is fine, too. His often dour-tones trombone can somehow really sing, when the writing calls for it. Rev Norman O’Connor recently referred to Mingus as one of the “thinking jazzmen” on the scene today. To that, it must be added that Mingus is also one of the sensitive jazzmen on the scene today. Judging by this LP and one forthcoming effort, he is sensitive to the confines which jazz can place upon itself, as well as to the responsibility of a capable musician to constantly seek growth.

Nat Hentoff’s liner essay is about as definitive a picture of Mingus as there is in print.

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Liner Notes by Nat Hentoff

William Butler Yeats‘ Crazy Jane, who felt beneath the “sanity” of conformity, said once that “Love is all unsatisfied that cannot take the whole body and soul; Take the sour if you can take me, I can scoff and lour and scold for an hour.”

And in A Coat, Yeats added: “there’s more enterprise in walking naked.”

When you take Mingus as a man and a man who makes music, it helps to take – or at least try to understand – the whole of him if you want to understand what he and his music is about.

Mingus tries harder than anyone I know to walk naked. He is unsparing of phoniness and pomposity, and is hardest of all on himself when he feels he has conned himself in any respect.

In his dealings with people, he is unpredictable because people are. If you make any attempt at honest communication with him, Mingus returns the word with love. He is an open human being. If he feels his love has been betrayed or exploited or misunderstood, his initial instinct is to strike from his hurt, sometimes physically, sometimes verbally, very often in his music.

Mingus is one of the very few ingenious people I have known, and I remain surprise at how he remains ingenious after all he has experienced and seen in the cities of this country and in the Tonight At Noon that is part of the world of jazz. He doesn’t give up. He continues to trust; to give; to flagellate himself emotionally to be “better” and more understanding of others; to have the courage and the strength to look for help when he feels he needs it.

Mingus feels the slightest draft, sometimes even when no draft is there. He sometimes reacts to an actual or invisible draft with instantaneous, unreasoning emotional directness. And sometimes, he does all he can to avoid a situation he knows will detonate his hurts and rages (for there is not only much love in him but, as in all of us, much of “the sour” as well). I’ve seen him leave the room when a drunken Southerner began to make all too explicit racial allusions. Mingus didn’t want to embarrass his hosts, and he was in the midst of another of his frequent resolutions not to explode, whatever the provocation. The drunk followed him, backed him into a corner, and finally, with a shattering quickness, Mingus knocked him out. He was shiveringly upset, angry at himself more than at the man. “I wouldn’t have hit him at all,” he said, “but I was afraid he was going to hit me.”

Once Mingus has reacted with an emotional explosion to hurt or pressure, he’s able to profit and grow by what he has learned of himself and of others in the situation. He is honest with himself, so far as any one can be, and so he changes and continues to change; and at each stage of his development, he gives all of himself that he can find. Like all vital jazzmen, his music is his autobiography.

Mingus is verbally articulate as well, and it’s illuminating to follow the one immovable, uncompromising line of continuity that connects his development through the years – the line of personal and musical integrity and relentless self-searching. He may have a reputation for being an avant-garde composer, but he knows where he’s come from. In 1951, at 29, he wrote a letter to Ralph Gleason, printed in Down Beat. “There is something to be learned from every score of the great composers, old and modern, each page bears evidence to the musical tight-rope walking that he has looked only at his own tiny rope, not realizing that men have not only walked ropes years before him, but tiny threads – perhaps the water. And can we not all learn one more step while restudying what might possibly aid us in walking the earth tomorrow?”

In 1953, he told me in Boston in an interview for Down Beat: “We’ve now fallen into standardization. Great artists like Bird, Pres, Dizzy, Max Roach, Blanton, and Charlie Christian have worked and suffered to develop their own style. Then the copyists come, singing their praises while stealing their phrases. And worse yet, these copyists have more success than the creative artists from whom they have stolen. Personally, to unmask those who copy, I have no other solution than to write and play my own music in accord with the real emotions of the moment when I am writing and playing.”

And in 1956, in An Open Letter To Miles Davis in Down Beat, Mingus wrote: “Just because I’m playing jazz, I don’t forget about me. I play or write me, the way I feel, through jazz, or whatever. Music is, or was, a language of the emotions. If someone has been escaping reality, I don’t expect him to dig my music… My music is alive and it’s about the living and the dead, about good and evil. It’s angry, yet it’s real because it knows it’s angry.”

In the summer of 1957, Mingus was one of six composers commissioned to write a jazz work by Brandeis University for a concert to be part of that University’s Fourth Festival of the Creative Arts. Another jazzman, pianist Dick Katz, review the concert for Jazz Today, and his review of Revelations, the Mingus composition, transcends the piece in part and tells quite a lot about Mingus’ body of work as well: “It is a powerful piece which began with an almost Wagnerian brooding-like intensity, expressed by way of an insinuating pedal point. It also revealed some beautiful dissonances and ingenious orchestration. I was quite taken by the striking patterns of sound and the way it reached its climax with a kind of centrifugal force. It was a very determined piece of music; and as one of the participating musicians said to me later, ‘when it was over, you really knew something had happened!’ This, I think, is high praise. Mingus is indeed a strong personality and is quite able to express it in his music.”

As for his four originals in this album, Mingus begins by pointing out: “I selected these four over two others that were more intricate because some of the guys had been saying that I didn’t swing. So I made some that did. This album also has the first blues I’ve made on record.”

“Haitian Fight Song, to begin, could just as well be called Afro-American Fight Song. It has a folk spirit, the kind of folk music I’ve always heard anyway. It has some of the old Church feeling too. I was raised a Methodist but there was a Holiness Church on the corner, and some of the feeling of their music, which was wilder, got into our music. There’s a moaning feeling too in those church modes. Try a song like Dizzy’s Woody’n You, for example, and make some changes; fit a church minor mode into the chord structure, and you’ll hear what I mean. I’d say this song has a contemporary folk feeling. My solo in it is a deeply concentrated one. I can’t play it tight unless I’m thinking about prejudice and hate and persecution, and how unfair it is. There’s sadness and cries in it, but also determination. And it usually ends with my feeling: ‘I told them! I hope somebody heard me'”.

“Blue Cee, Mingus continued, “is a standard blues. It’s in two keys – C and Bb – but that’s not noticeable and it ends up on C basically. I heard some Basie in it and also some church-like feeling.”

“Reincarnation Of A Lovebird, Mingus starts to explain by saying: “I wouldn’t say I set out to write a piece on Bird. I knew it was a mournful thing when I was writing it. Suddenly, I realized it was Bird. Then, on developing it, we tried to play little things that would bring back that era.”

“I like the line a lot,” Mingus added. “I think it can be played in different ways. I think it cries. It’s mainly about my misunderstanding Bird. I never thought that he might not have thought he was as great as everybody said he was.”

There had been a desolate, terrifying night at Birdland shortly before Bird died during which the band had included Bird, Bud Powell and Mingus. At one point in the night, Mingus announced over the microphone that he was disassociating himself from the confusion (and that’s a euphemism) on the stand.

“Bird came back later that night,” Mingus can’t forget, “and kissed me on the cheek. ‘I know you love me,’ Bird said. And I did. It was Bird who had called me out of the post office in December 1951, when I almost decided to stay there. And Bird encouraged me about my writing. He never mentioned whether he thought my bass playing was good or bad, but he always thought I was a good writer. In California in the mid-’40s, he heard a poem-with-music I’d written, The Chill Of Death. He heard it in the studio, they never released it. He said that was the sort of thing I should keep on doing, and that I shouldn’t be discouraged.”

“In one way, this work isn’t like him. It’s built on long lines and most of his pieces were short lines. But it’s my feeling about Bird. I felt like crying when I wrote it. If everybody could play it the way I felt it. The altoist did, finally.”

The Clown originated this way: “I felt happy one day. I was playing a little tune on the piano that sounded happy. Then I hit a dissonance that sounded sad, and realized that song had to have two parts. The story, as I told it first to Jean Shepherd, is about a clown, who tried to please people like most jazz musicians do, but whom nobody liked until he was dead. My version of the story ended with his blowing his brains out with the people laughing and finally being pleased because they thought it was part of the act. I liked the way Jean changed the ending; leaves it more up to the listener.”

“We rehearsed once at my house, and then did it in the studio. His narration changed every time. He improvised within the story. As for the musicians, Jimmy is the leader in this piece, behind the narration. We play around what he does. When we do the work in a place where we have no narration, Jimmy is the clown.”

Jean Shepherd, incidentally, is a New York radio bard whose free-association stands on WOR have enlisted behind him a growing legion of “night people” who profess vehement non-conformation with “day people” but manage to be quite conformist within their rebelliousness. He also writes for the Village Voice, and has presided at various New York jazz concerts and Sunday afternoon jam sessions.

Pianist Wade Legge, born in Huntington, WV, and raised in Buffalo, is 23 and has worked and recorded with Dizzy Gillespie and a number of New York-based combos. Jimmy Knepper, 29, was born and brought up in Los Angeles. He’s worked with Charlie Barnet, Charlie Spivak, Dorothy Lamour, Stan Kenton, Woody Herman, Vido Musso, Claude Thornhill, Charlie Parker in Philadelphia for several weeks in 1951, and others. During the preparations for the aforementioned Brandeis concert, Jimmy cut each part on all the works, some of them unusually exacting, with accuracy, sensitivity and strength.

Dannie Richmond, 23, was born in New York, raised in Greensboro, NC, returned to study at the Music Center Conservatory in the Bronx, and then went on the road with rhythm and blues units like Paul Williams and The Clovers and Joe Anderson. Until last year, he played tenor exclusively, but when he decided to leave rock and roll, he switched instruments. “I left rock and roll because it was a matter of walking the tables and lying on the floor, and I couldn’t do what I wanted to do.” Back in Greensboro, he discovered he had a natural ability for keeping time, and became a drummer. Mingus is his first “name” jazz gig.

Curtis Porter, born in Philadelphia, September 21, 1929, grew up in Detroit. His rhythm and blues experience has been extensive, including gigs with Ivory Joe Hunter, Ruth Brown, Paul Williams, and much of the time with the Griffin Brothers. He left the field at the end of 1956, and the Mingus band is the first regular jazz assignment he’s had. “I think,” says Porter, “that more jazz groups should tell stories like Mingus does instead of just playing notes and techniques.”

Another thing Crazy Jane said was that “Fair and foul are near of kin, and fair needs foul.” And she also said, “nothing can be sole or whole that has not been rent.”

I have no idea whether Crazy Jane would have dug The Clown and these other three, but I expect Mingus might enjoy meeting Crazy Jane, who, of course, is no crazier than were William Blake or Leadbelly or, for that matter, Mingus.