Myself When I Am Real

The Life and Music of Charles Mingus
By Gene Santoro
Oxford University Press

The most surprising revelation of Gene Santoro's new biography is that bassist Charles Mingus was barely five foot nine inches tall. It's noteworthy because mercurial Mingus (1922-1979), gave the impression of being someone much larger. Through sheer force of personality, he was able to dominate any ensemble he was in.

Jazz's most distinctive composer after Duke Ellington, Mingus was a gargantuan figure in every other respect. Bearded and massive (his weight frequently edged towards 300 pounds), and as selfish and self-obsessed as he was prodigiously talented, the bassist became famous for his excesses as much as his music.

Light-skinned, but infused with African American pride, the Watts, California-raised Mingus was quick to turn any slight into a racial confrontation and escalate even petty criticism into major donnybrooks.

Settled in New York from the early 1950s, Mingus worked with every major Jazz figures from trumpeter Miles Davis to alto saxophonist Charlie "Bird" Parker. But, by the later part of the decade, he put together bands called Jazz Workshops as outlets for his compositions. In them he single-mindedly spurred to their highest musical levels an ever-shifting cast of characters who ranged from visionary multi-instrumentalist Eric Dolphy to modern gutbucket trombonist Jimmy Knepper.

A strong proponent of musician-control of their own music, Mingus co-founded Debut, a record label; helped organize a counter festival to the "commercial" Newport Jazz Festival of 1960; and rarely let a night club or concert performance pass without needling owners as mob-controlled cheapskates and audience members as noisy, preoccupied dilettantes. Manifestos and angry letters to unfavored critics, editors, unfortunate musicians and even politicians flowed from his pen as easily as compositions. Meanwhile he oversaw groups ranging from big bands to trios; turned out a series of memorable LPs, embraced than rejected the European classical tradition and Jazz's traditional rhythms; turned his hand to piano as well as bass and constantly displayed his deepest feelings and emotions to his audiences.

His eccentricities once caused Mingus to commit himself to Bellevue Mental Hospital and later to have his personal psychologist write the liner notes for one LP. Another time he punched Knepper in the mouth -- ruining his range -- when the skinny trombonist was in the midst of helping him transcribe music for one unsuccessful concert cum recording session. A man who spent more money than he made, Mingus ended the 1960s with his belongings scattered all over the street, as he was forcibly evicted from his Lower East Side apartment/studio. But even that tragedy became part of a filmed documentary about his life.

Shortly after that, when he was in a tranquilizer-induced depression, he finally achieved his ambition of publishing his autobiography, Beneath The Underdog. A Rabelasian tale, Underdog, skewered racists and jazz critics for ignorance, yet was spiced with frankly fanciful sexual detail about mythic Black sexuality, which was as fanciful as Frank Harris' My Life And Loves.

By the time he finally died from the effects of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) a few years later, however, Mingus was back band leading. In fact, he was so revered and -- more notably -- rewarded by the rock music generation which acknowledged the strength of his sound, that on his death bed he agreed to a less-than-successful collaboration with singer/songwriter Joni Mitchell, to help pay for his palliative care.

With a life like this, an exciting biography would seem to practically write itself. Unfortunately Santoro doesn't seem to be able to harness any of Mingus' fabled energy. For a start he has to compete not only with Underdog, but also Brian Priestly's excellent Mingus, first published in 1982, which relied mostly on secondary sources and concentrated more on the music than the bassist's life.

Santoro tried hard, though, sometimes too hard. He seems to have read every article and book relating to Mingus, combed through the bassist's archives at the Library of Congress and Rutgers Institute for Jazz Studies and, most significantly, interviewed most meaningful figures in Mingus' life. He also tries to relate the extramusical tenor of eras with whatever Mingus was composing, playing or thinking at the time.

Yet the book ends up resembling a line from an Incredible String Band song, which goes something like: "you know all the words and read all the notes, but never quite learned the song". Santoro's tome is so overweighed with minutia that he often loses the thread of the story.

There's no fact, no matter how mundane, that he appears able to not mention, no tangent along which he can't get lost, and no non sequitur he won't follow to its illogical conclusion. For instance, at one point, he writes that in 1961 Mingus was talking about signing with Reprise records, which "in the late 1960s became home to rockers like Jimi Hendrix". Elsewhere he notes that in 1975 Mingus played a club in Ohio "A few years later New Wave rocker Elvis Costello would call Ray Charles a nigger from the stage there".

Probably to prove his access to the archives Santoro endlessly reports on the size of Mingus' royalty statements, the dollar amount of his bills that went unpaid or the monetary take at particular nightclub engagements. Moreover, his attempts at pop sociology, placing happenings on the Jazz scene into a broader American context, more often than not fail. Concerns about simplistically defining the conflicts involved in the war in Viet Nam, the civil right movement or recreational drug use, invariably interrupt the narrative flow. Plus Santoro never seems to see a list he doesn't want to reprint.

Despite all this, ignorance, disinterest or just plain bad editing ends up studding the book with very obvious gaffes. One is a characterization of the 1956 Montgomery, Ala. bus boycott that reads as if local Blacks avoided the bus because federal courts ordered the system desegregated.

Additionally, the number of obvious inaccuracies printed here brings into question Santoro knowledge of Jazz in general. Twice he refers to pianist Oscar Peterson as having recorded for Debut when he means bassist Oscar Pettiford, with the second mention more egregious since he's trying to make a point about Mingus' piano playing. Tenor saxophonist Teddy Edwards is referred to as a vibes player; West Coast band leader Gerald Wilson is confused with pianist Gerald Wiggins; saxophonist Lester Young, a star of the pre-war Count Basie is said to "now" be in the Basie band in 1943; pianist Les McCann's name is misspelled; and he calls Candid records, which Mingus recorded for in the 1960s, Cadence records, which didn't come into existence until the 1970s.

Mingus' own work doesn't escape bungling either. New Tijuana Moods, the name of the reissue of a 1957 LP is written about as if it was the original title, while another recording session never issued as Alice's Wonderland is referred to that way throughout the book.

The only time Santoro really seems to have any control of the story is in the final chapter when he movingly reports how Mingus and his family marshalled themselves to cope with the degenerative effect of ALS on the formerly more than self-sufficient man. Nevertheless, this too is more extra musical musings in what should have been a clear overview of a musician's career.

Mingus once characterized a liner note scribe who displeased him as writing like "a cross between a low-rent Tom Wolfe and a dusty academic." One would hate to paint Santoro the same way. But with this book, at least, what should have been a Picasso or a Jackson Pollock, is more the literary equivalent of a beginning art student's efforts.

--Ken Waxman

In Print

Music in My Soul
Noah Howard (Buddy’s Knife)

By Ken Waxman

Metaphorically, alto saxophonist Noah Howard’s musical life mirrored the history of jazz. Born April 6, 1943 in New Orleans, the music’s purported cradle, before his death on Sept. 3, 2010 in Belgium, Howard had travelled to San Francisco and New York, recorded for small labels like ESP-Disk, expatriated overseas, toured Europe, Africa and India, while developing ties with emerging local players. Completed just days before his death from a cerebral hemorrhage, Music in My Soul is written in the artless but competent prose of a constantly working musician with some haziness in chronology, spelling and details.

Still as reminisces about the changes which took place in jazz following the advances of John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman from someone who seemed to be present every step of the way, the book is doubly valuable. Personal reminiscences from musicians who worked with or knew the alto saxophonist over the years are intermingled among the chapters, further elucidating Howard’s journey.

Following military service in the American South, where he experienced pre-Civil Rights era racism, a stint on the West Coast exposed Howard to mind-altering drugs and finally guidance into experimental sounds from trumpeter Dewey Johnson, who later played on Ascension. In New York, Howard’s addition of New Orleans-style rhythm to cerebral sound searching had him recording at 21. Gigging often at the Lower East Side’s legendary Slug’s Saloon, frequently as part of Sun Ra’s Arkestra, which he would sometimes rejoin in Europe, Howard befriended major figures such as Charles Mingus and Albert Ayler, who got him his first international job – in Montreal in winter – and formed lasting alliances with other New Thingers including tenor saxophonist Frank Wright, pianist Bobby Few and drummer Muhammad Ali – eventually forming a co-op working group in Europe.

From that point on Howard reveals his amateur author status. Although he devotes some paragraphs to the factors that influence his compositions and improvisations, most of the volume becomes a recitation of gigs and recording sessions done, musicians and friends met and recalled, plus near-tourist brochure reminiscences of countries in Africa and Asia visited. Finally comfortably settled with his wife of 30 years, a medical doctor, and helming his own AltSax label, Howard begins playing regularly in the US again in the ‘90s, scotching rumours that he was another deceased Free Jazzer. A presence at the Vision Festival, the saxman put out exceptional new CDs with the likes of poet Eve Packer and similarly grizzled drummer Bobby Kapp.

Now Music in My Soul will remain his legacy. Interesting in itself for some of its woollier tales about bringing experimental music to the hinterlands,

--For New York City Jazz Record August 2012

August 6, 2012

In Print

Music in My Soul
Noah Howard (Buddy’s Knife)

By Ken Waxman

Metaphorically, alto saxophonist Noah Howard’s musical life mirrored the history of jazz. Born April 6, 1943 in New Orleans, the music’s purported cradle, before his death on Sept. 3, 2010 in Belgium, Howard had travelled to San Francisco and New York, recorded for small labels like ESP-Disk, expatriated overseas, toured Europe, Africa and India, while developing ties with emerging local players. Completed just days before his death from a cerebral hemorrhage, Music in My Soul is written in the artless but competent prose of a constantly working musician with some haziness in chronology, spelling and details.

Still as reminisces about the changes which took place in jazz following the advances of John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman from someone who seemed to be present every step of the way, the book is doubly valuable. Personal reminiscences from musicians who worked with or knew the alto saxophonist over the years are intermingled among the chapters, further elucidating Howard’s journey.

Following military service in the American South, where he experienced pre-Civil Rights era racism, a stint on the West Coast exposed Howard to mind-altering drugs and finally guidance into experimental sounds from trumpeter Dewey Johnson, who later played on Ascension. In New York, Howard’s addition of New Orleans-style rhythm to cerebral sound searching had him recording at 21. Gigging often at the Lower East Side’s legendary Slug’s Saloon, frequently as part of Sun Ra’s Arkestra, which he would sometimes rejoin in Europe, Howard befriended major figures such as Charles Mingus and Albert Ayler, who got him his first international job – in Montreal in winter – and formed lasting alliances with other New Thingers including tenor saxophonist Frank Wright, pianist Bobby Few and drummer Muhammad Ali – eventually forming a co-op working group in Europe.

From that point on Howard reveals his amateur author status. Although he devotes some paragraphs to the factors that influence his compositions and improvisations, most of the volume becomes a recitation of gigs and recording sessions done, musicians and friends met and recalled, plus near-tourist brochure reminiscences of countries in Africa and Asia visited. Finally comfortably settled with his wife of 30 years, a medical doctor, and helming his own AltSax label, Howard begins playing regularly in the US again in the ‘90s, scotching rumours that he was another deceased Free Jazzer. A presence at the Vision Festival, the saxman put out exceptional new CDs with the likes of poet Eve Packer and similarly grizzled drummer Bobby Kapp.

Now Music in My Soul will remain his legacy. Interesting in itself for some of its woollier tales about bringing experimental music to the hinterlands,

--For New York City Jazz Record August 2012

August 6, 2012

Lest We Forget:

Clifford Jordan (1931-1993)
By Ken Waxman

Two of the milestone discs featuring tenor saxophonist Clifford Jordan can serve as a summation of his musical life. The first, Blowing In From Chicago (1957, Blue Note), split with tenor man John Gilmore, played up his home town legacy. The second, These Are My Roots: Clifford Jordan Plays Led Belly (Atlantic 1965), featured Jordan’s highly personal rearrangement of some of the Texas songster’s uncompromising hollers, chain gang laments and folk songs for sextet augmented by a vocalist and a guitarist. Notwithstanding Jordan’s presence in ground-breaking ensembles such as bassist Charles Mingus’ sextet with Eric Dolphy and pianist Jaki Byard plus pianist Randy Weston’s African-oriented band, his talents were most comfortably expressed through the mainstream bop, blues and ballads that characterized his Windy City youth. “Bearcat”, one of his best-known compositions, first recorded in 1961 on the Jazzland album of the same name, could easily have fit in with among the blues-influenced tunes of his post-war Chicago.

A graduate of the legendary music program of the South Side’s DuSable High School, along with other tenor titans like Gene Ammons and Johnny Griffin, Jordan established himself in Chicago before moving on to New York, where within a short time he was working in the bands of established combo leaders as drummer Max Roach and trombonist J.J. Johnson. After his experience with Mingus and Weston, Jordan’s activities expanded in New York and aboard. From a base in Belgium, he toured Africa and Europe as a single for a time. In New York, Jordan helped found Frontier records, producing LPs for underappreciated musicians such as drummer Ed Blackwell and bassist Wilbur Ware. A faculty member at Henry Street Settlement House, he became a music consultant for Bed-Sty Youth in Action and the Pratt Institute; taught reed instruments and flute; conducted bands for the Jazzmobile School; and in 1975 participated in public schools lecture-concert series for Jazz Interactions. He even played Lester Young – an early saxophone influence – in Lady Day: A Musical Tragedy at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1972.

In demand as soloist with large ensembles such as Germany’s Hamburg Radio Big Band and the Metropole Orchestra of the Netherlands, Jordan never stopped recording – he’s featured on more than 100 discs – or combo work until his death from cancer. Among his long-term associations were membership in the Eastern Rebellion quartet, led by pianist Cedar Walton and in groups featuring trumpeters Art Farmer and Dizzy Reese, pianist Barry Harris and bassist Richard Davis.

Insistent that he would helm a big band before he died, Jordan finally attained his dream with a 16-piece, all-star unit whose most representative disc is on Mapleshade. Fittingly the title of that band’s 1990 release reflected Jordan’s long-time musical philosophy: Play What You Feel.

--For New York City Jazz Record May 2011

May 16, 2011

Lest We Forget:

Booker Ervin (1931-1970)
By Ken Waxman

Most advanced of the fabled Texas tenors, Denison-born Booker Telleferro Ervin II was able to adapt the state’s distinctive bluesy and gutsy tenor saxophone style to the advanced compositions of bandleaders such as bassist Charles Mingus. Yet as the classic mid-generation jazzman, his playing was deemed too traditional by the avant-gardists and too far-out for the mainstreamers.

A late bloomer, Ervin who played trombone in high school, only took up the tenor saxophone during an Air Force stint in the late1940s. He took to it so well that by the end of that decade he was a professional, working with various R&B aggregations throughout the country. Gigging in Pittsburg, he discovered a like-minded player in pianist Horace Parlan, and the two set off for New York, where by the end of the 1950s both joined Mingus’ Jazz Workshop. Ervin would stay until 1963 working alongside players such as alto saxophonist Eric Dolphy and pianist Jaki Byard. Ervin’s heavy-toned, impassioned playing is featured on such classic Mingus LPs as Blues and Roots, Mingus Ah Um and Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus, soloing on tunes like “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” and “Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting”.

After leaving Mingus, the saxophonist was on-call as a valued sideman for leaders such as pianist Andrew Hill, organist Don Patterson, and most notably pianist Randy Weston, who utilized his primitive-modernism on two seminal sessions, Monterey ’66, recorded at the California jazz festival and African Cookbook, which successfully linked modern jazz with its musical antecedents in the Third World.

Ervin recorded as leader for a variety of labels, including Savoy, Blue Note, Candid, Bethlehem – the self-explanatory The Book Cooks – and most notably Prestige. Using some combination of Byard, bassist Richard Davis and drummer Alan Dawson, these Prestige sessions – entitled The Freedom Book, The Song Book, The Space Book and The Blues Book – showcased a mature stylist able to work his way through a tender ballad and a hard-toned blues with the same facility. Plus as someone able to hold his own with the likes of Dolphy, Byard and Mingus, Ervin’s harmonic, textural and rhythmic conceptions were more attuned to experiments than more traditional tenor saxophone giants such as Dexter Gordon, with whom he also recorded.

During the last five years of his life Ervin was among the many jazzmen who found work in Europe as well as North America, although he was never tempted to move overseas permanently. He died of kidney disease at 39 in New York City. His legacy as an accomplished and forthright player was such that Parlan, who put down roots in Europe, recorded Lament For Booker on Enja 1975, which coupled Parlan’s musical meditation saluting his old friend with a blues Ervin recorded himself a decade earlier.

-- For All About Jazz-New York August 2010

August 12, 2010

Ken Waxman’s Top CDs for 2007

[In alphabetical order]
For CODA Issue 337

1. Muhal Richard Abrams, Vision Towards Essence Pi Recordings Pi23

2. Johannes Bauer/Thomas Lehn/Jon Rose, Futch Jazzwerkstatt JW 010

3. Bruce Eisenbeil Sextet, Inner Constellation Volume One. Nemu 007

4. Exploding Customer, At Your Service Ayler aylCD-063

5. Scott Fields Ensemble, Beckett Clean Feed CFO69 CD

6. Frank Gratkowski/Misha Mengelberg, Vis-à-vis Leo CD LR 476

7. François Houle, Evan Parker, Benoît Delbecq La Lumière de Pierres psi 07.02

8. Lucas Niggli Big Zoom, Celebrate Diversity Intakt CD 118

9. Quartestski Does Prokofiev, Visions Fugitives OP. 22 Ambiances Magnétiques AM 171 CD

10. Elliott Sharp & Reinhold Friedl, Feuchtify EMANEM 4133

Plus Two reissues:

• Charles Mingus, Music Written for Monterey, 1965 Not Heard … Played Live in Its Entirety at UCLA Sue Mingus Music/Sunnyside SSC 3041

• Andrea Centazzo Mitteleuropa Orchestra, The Complete Recordings Collection 1980-1981; The Complete Recordings Collection 1982-1983 Ictus Records Special Collection Vol. 1-3, Vol. 4-6

January 15, 2008

LANDING ON THE WRONG NOTE

By Ajay Heble
Routledge

The most recent schism inside the warring Baltic states that make up the landscape of much of present-day jazz, involves the neo-conservatives verses the experimenters.

Neo-cons, characterized by their champion, trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, insist that the music must follow a set of rules and regulations that includes a background in the blues and the necessity of swinging every time a musician plays. Experimenters, among which can be found some of the readers of this magazine, are less doctrinaire. Their playing and compositions welcome other influences, and they aren’t obsessed with producing the “correct” note every time.

As you can tell by his title, Ajay Heble, an associate professor at Ontario’s University of Guelph as well as the founder and artistic director of the highly praised annual Guelph Jazz Festival, falls on the later side of the equation. But the existence of his book pinpoints another conundrum that must be faced now that the music has finally been deemed legitimate by the populace at large. Academics have set their sights on jazz as a proper field of study, so much so that many volumes of theory and critical compendia are crowding jazz histories, biographies and musical analysis on library and bookstore shelves

In his book, Heble is conscious of some of the problems inherent in trying to graft highly complex academic theory onto what is essentially a non-linear, mostly non-verbal music, which is above all concerned with the expression of feelings and emotions. That he often succeeds in melding the two within this tome confirms his skill; that some of the points are submerged beneath the murky waters of specific academic jargon reveals the problems inherent in this approach.

In many ways, the writing in the book resembles the streets of Manhattan. Wander too far away from your beginning point on most New York streets or avenues and you’ll end up in a completely different neighborhood. It’s the same way with the prose here. For instance, a perfectly lucid -- for the layperson -- description of the talents or methods of a certain musician or a key recording will suddenly turn a metaphoric corner and become lost in a thicket of academic prose. Alternately, an obtuse statement or theory buttressed by a snowfall of dense, numbered references and specific conceptual words and phrases whose meaning is buried in the cement of research paper foundations, will unexpectedly appears transparent when a real life example is introduced.

From the beginning, Heble states that “(l)anding on the wrong note … can be a politically and culturally salient act for oppressed groups seeking alternative models of knowledge production and identity formation”. He works to implement his thesis in specific chapters dedicated to such important artists as the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Sun Ra, John Zorn and Charles Gayle, plus discusses the topics of women in jazz, understanding the autobiographies of several important jazz figures, and jazz’s interaction with popular, mainstream culture. Perhaps it’s too large a banquet to try to consume at one sitting.

Although he writes a couple of times that in retrospect he regrets not having personally interviewed different musicians while researching the book, his suppositions and conclusions rely on secondary sources. Additionally, he often attempts to have jazz and its practitioners conform to the philosophies of prominent academics such as Jacques Attali, Theodor Adorno and Edward Said, even if they never examined the music itself, or in Adorno’s case were openly hostile to it. Just as one performer’s musical parody can be taken as a heartfelt tribute by another, so some of Heble’s conclusions can occasionally be seen as too pat or certain.

When the prose can be deconstructed that is. Words such as “adumbrating”, “intentionalist, “fixity” and “situatedness” -- to take a few at random -- stud his writing the way flatted fifths define bebop solos. None of these words are part of the average non-academic’s vocabulary, and there are times when even having a standard collegiate dictionary by your elbow won’t illuminate some of the points or sentences. Heble also indulges in the academic affectation of referring to LPs and CDs as well as books and articles as “texts”.

That’s why the most illuminating parts of the book involve performers like Gayle, who Heble has seen play, or Heble’s experience in trying to balance popularity and innovation when booking acts for the Guelph Jazz Festival.

Bringing the experience from his day job as an English professor to this thesis, he’s most convincing -- if contentious -- when doing a textural analysis of the autobiographies of Charles Mingus, Billie Holiday and Duke Ellington. Insisting that “it would be foolish to simply take what [musicians] say at face value” he relates the so-called truth in fiction expressed in these biographies to improvisers “discovering rewarding sonic possibilities in what … might have been deemed ‘mistakes’ or ‘wrong notes’.”

However, when he posits that Ellington deliberately not mentioning social and racial problems in his autobiography is “best understood through an analysis of the text’s absences”, he seems to be deliberately ignoring the score in front of him. This interpretation of deliberate absence can be especially disputatious since all three cited volumes were either ghost written or heavily edited.

Moreover, wrenching incidents, performances and/or compositions from their historical contexts to make a point doesn’t make a theoretical supposition any more correct than an already accepted interpretation. For example, in dealing with a later, very accessible CD recorded by the Art Ensemble, he seems to tie himself into theoretical knots trying to see it as expressing political dissonance even as it while reaches out to a larger audience.

Another overall deficiency of the book is that despite his real life experience with the Guelph Jazz Festival, Heble has written a volume that deals with avant-jazz as it was, not as it is now. By relating most of his examples and theories to how atonal, improvised music grew out of, and was accepted or not by the African American community, he seems to have not taken into account the fact that 21st century jazz or improvised music is more universal.

Europeans and North Americans of all backgrounds now play a prominent role is so-called left-field jazz, a situation that his Festival has acknowledged in its bookings. Furthermore many neo-trad performers who today follow the lead of Marsalis are Black musicians proud of their background. This disconnects the link between Black consciousness and performers of “wrong notes” or avant-sounds, which appears to be taken for granted by many writers and in places within this book.

With the depth of scholarship and musical smarts Heble has displayed in Landing on the Wrong Note, the hope is that he will create another volume that will try to resolve some of these contradictions. When that happens, if, he doesn’t see it as a sell-out to the popularizers, perhaps he could also use a little more reader-friendly prose.

-- Ken Waxman

December 18, 2001

CHARLES MINGUS

Tonight At Noon
Label M 495723

TONIGHT AT NOON is the most impressive record session that Charles Mingus never made.

That's because the LP -- which was originally released by Atlantic in 1964 -- was pieced together from tunes left off 1957's THE CLOWN and 1961's OH YEAH albums. Still, it's probably a tribute to the talents of both Mingus as a composer and his sidemen that the tunes recorded four years apart hang together so well.

Mingus did have an overwhelming point of view, nonetheless, as many of the stories about him would attest. Considering the bassist's most consistent assistant, drummer Dannie Richmond, and one of his most fluent interpreters, trombonist Jimmy Knepper, are present on all tracks, things are that much more cohesive.

The three 1961 tunes were recorded at a time when Mingus had temporarily abandoned the bass for the piano, so Doug Watkins, an original Jazz Messenger and stalwart hard bopper fills that role. He doesn't get the solo however. That's probably because the rest of the front line was filled out by a regular in the Mingus repertory company, tenor saxophonist Booker Ervin, and the wild card of multi-instrumentalist (pre Rahsaan) Roland Kirk. The 1957 sessions gave ample solo space to alto saxophonist Shafi Hadi, with the piano chair filled by the dependable, unspectacular Wade Legge, best-known as a Dizzy Gillespie sideman.

Everything Mingus recorded in that period was either a major or a minor masterpiece and the compositions here are no exception. The title tune is a variant of the more celebrated "Haitian Flight Song", with Hadi's burning saxophone lines aided and abetted by Mingus' bass ostinato, with some space given over to vocalized screams whose only connection to time telling would be a muezzin's cries. "Passions of a Woman Loved", Mingus' "dance contest" piece, which flits from tempo to tempo like The Nicholas Brothers on the dance floor, offers up another Hadi solo tour-de-force and even gives Legge some space. Mingus dons his Duke Ellington garb for "Invisible Lady" constructing a ballad showcase for Knepper, the way Ellington would have for "his" star trombonist Lawrence Brown.

The out of tempo "'Old' Blues for Walt's Torin" -- a version of which was also recorded as "Pussy Cat Dues" -- and "Peggy's Blue Skylight" are easily the most outside numbers on the date. The later showcases Kirk's tenor saxophone, with which he creates a solo as gutsy and heartfelt as anything turned out by other reedmen who stuck to one horn and a simpler conception. The former gives Kirk's three horns all the space they need so that it appears that an entire reed section has appeared in the studio. More importantly, it showed that Mingus never ventured too far into the future without playing up Jazz's blues and R&B roots. Incidentally the piano solos Mingus unveils here are strong, but much more conventional, rhythmically and harmonically, than his bass work.

All in all, this CD, like nearly everything Mingus recorded in his golden decade plus: 1955 to 1966, is another page in his book of masterpieces. Get it.

-- Ken Waxman

Track Listing: 1. Tonight at Noon* 2. Invisible Lady+ 3. "Old" Blues for Walt's Torin 4. Peggy's Blue Skylight 5. Passions of a Woman Loved*

Personnel: Jimmy Knepper (trombone); Shafi Hadi* (alto saxophone); Booker Ervin^ (tenor saxophone); Roland Kirk^(tenor saxophone, manzello, stritch); Charles Mingus (piano) [tracks 2-4], (bass) [tracks 1, 5]; Wade Legge* (piano); Doug Watkins^ (bass); Dannie Richmond (drums)

March 19, 2001