Charles Mingus
Mingus Ah Um

Sometimes you have to wonder. Why? Why are there years of genuine, pure, shameful, and authentic crap and others that are sublime, crystal-clear, and absolutely essential for the history of music? For example, the number of masterpieces released in '67 would be enough to fill an entire five years of music history, yet they are concentrated in just 12 months. The same goes for '59, a grand year for every jazz listener, and just two titles are enough to understand why: “Kind of Blue” and “Mingus Ah Um.” The first album has already been discussed on these pages, so let's spend a few words on the second.

In '59, Charles Mingus is 37 years old: he's a big, burly man, and more than a jazz musician by manners and speaking, he seems like a dockworker, besides having a bad temper, but this seems to be a prerogative of great band leaders. He began to make a name for himself as a bassist at the age of twenty-one in Los Angeles, where he attended university, but his phenomenon exploded about ten years later in New York, where he set the audience on fire with a series of concerts. However. However, what he plays does not seem to be true jazz, if jazz is the "unpredictable" music par excellence: indeed Mingus writes his compositions in full, leaving very little to the freedom of his musicians, because he wants his compositions to be exactly what he has in mind. But he realizes his mistake: first of all, that isn't jazz, and secondly, no musician, except Mingus himself, can play Mingus's compositions the way Mingus would like. So it's better to return to the roots, our mixed-race thinks, better to give the musicians only a trace on which to move, turning the singularity of each band member into a strength.

Charles Mingus gathers a group of good jazz musicians (neither extraordinary nor well-known: after the quarrels with Thelonius Monk, he would prefer to be the only prima donna) and creates a wonderful jazz album. “Mingus Ah Um” is born. The album (59 minutes of flawless music, not muddling) opens and closes with bass notes, almost emphasizing the importance that rhythm has for this sacred monster: the beginning is entrusted to the dazzling “Better Git It In Your Soul,” which is honestly reductive to define as jazz; it is a joyful gospel, with some surprising rhythmic inventions, that piano moving sinuously and hammering, the trumpets sneaking in, a gay tension held at erotic and scalding levels, the voice of the great Mingus in the background urging his musicians, that hand-clappin' that keeps an unusual rhythm under a magnificent sax solo, the measured and powerful interventions of the drums... what a piece...

The second track of the set, “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat,” an elegy to the recently deceased Lester Young, is a refined melody, romantic and melancholic, nocturnal and tinged with alcohol, carried entirely forward by the winds, which fade almost six minutes later in a way that not even a film noir soundtrack could; “Boogie Stop Shuffle” almost seems ill, dirty, and criminal, at first it can be irritating, but after those (intended) shortcomings, it will become absolutely pleasant and essential. “Self Portrait In Three Colors” is a small composition, an absolutely perfect gem, a daytime and cinematic piece (not for nothing, if I'm not mistaken, it was supposed to be used for a Cassavetes film); “Open Letter To Duke” is one of the three tributes to his masters present on the album, an exceptional track, with the trumpets first rhythmically then suddenly drunk and excessive, which gradually recover like a running train that ends up crashing into twenty-thirty seconds of samba.

The other tribute is to Charlie Parker with a piece titled “Bird Calls,” with the trumpets opening and closing imitating mad birds, then calming down (so to speak, because here jazz and improvisations spin on lightning beats) and giving life to a beautiful and onomatopoeic refrain. It's time for another masterpiece, “Fables Of Faubus,” dedicated to an Arkansas senator known for his racist opinions: and so he dedicates this piece to him, impressionist as never before in sketching a crafty and insinuating man, wicked and not quite right, truly a brilliant track. Is it too true? There's too much meat in the fire, it's already such an enormous album, but it's not over yet, there's still time for “Pussy Cat Dues,” a captivating thing, an essential and captivating blues, with Mingus's bass here in great shape, with the winds keeping the rhythm and him doing whatever he wants for almost a minute and a half; and finally, “Jelly Roll,” an ironic and heartfelt tribute to Jelly Roll Morton, the "inventor" of jazz, a piece that starts from a riff that seems to come straight from the '20s and has the entire atmosphere of those times, closing an enormous, immense, overflowing album, suitable and recommended for everyone, newcomers and not. It’s an album that reminds how jazz can be the most muscular, true, and direct music that should exist and that will indeed, from the first listen, from that bass touch that opens the work, go straight to the heart and the stomach.