Charles Mingus Music

I wasn't even aware of the story behind this album when I started listening to it. Once upon a time, Charles Mingus wrote a huge piece of symphonic jazz entitled Epitaph. He gathered an ensemble in a concert hall and invited an audience to come watch the recording of Epitaph as it was happening.

Well, numerous things were at work against Mingus. For one thing, the piece was not yet finished. The man had a great big picture in his head, but didn't have enough time to write it down for all of the musicians. And because it was not technically finished, it was never properly rehearsed. That night Mingus and his ensemble got up on stage with all of the microphones and proceeded to completely slaughter Epitaph. If you are a musician, you know what it is like to have an "off" night. Well, this is the off night to end all off nights. Mingus stormed off the stage, and locked up the manuscript of Epitaph and denied its existence to his dying day.

The first printing of the Town Hall Concert is supposed to be pretty bad. Roughly put, the tracks were arranged in a very confusing order with many omissions. Years later, Blue Note got ahold of the master tapes and retooled the album to follow the flow of the concert, for what it's worth. They added in the omissions and arranged the order of the tracks to give you a feeling of a beginning, a middle, and an end.

The concert was mud. And no matter how hard you try to polish it, it still comes out mud. Blue Note gives a flattering portrayal of a disasterous event, which places The Complete Town Hall Concert squarly in the middle with a three star rating. If you love Charles Mingus, you are going to get this eventually. But this is no place for a newcomer.

No matter what you do in life, we all know the feeling of having a 'bad day' or a 'bad night'. This was Mingus 'bad night'. Unfortunately, it was recorded and released. Tha band was not familiar with the material, and you can hear it here. There are good moments, specially when Dolphy and Clark Terry takes solos, but it is a difficult listen. Mingus fans need this of course, but if you want to listen to a good symponic Mingus go listen to 'Black Saint and sinner lady' and if you want a good live Mingus go get 'Mingus at Antibes'.

...i first bought this about 8 or 9 years ago, in fact it was like just the third cd i had purchased ever, tryin to transition over from cassette tapes. most of the jazz i had at the time was mostly funk or vocal related (ronny jordan, norman connors, shirley horn, etc.,...), but i was lookin to expand into the more "serious" stuff.
alas, this proved to be too serious for me!
all of that fuss over charles mingus? and this was it!?!
the truth of the matter is that this was just the wrong mingus album to start my interest in.
some of this is "listenable", but i still cant say that i enjoy it. 'ah, um' is a far more acceptable album for us neophytes to begin with. take it slow gettin to know mingus, keep your ears and mind open and you'll find pleasure in most of the music he's made.

This CD, while disjointed and unorganised is a beatiful display of artistic vision. The genius that Charles Mingus was, is displayed here andultered. The music on this cd, while not refined or rehearsed is unbelievable. The first two Freedom movements are worth the price of admission alone. Freedom Part 2 is a true masterpiece of emotional expression. The eery mood created in part 1 is turned into a raging war between the baritone sax and Clarks screaming solo in Part 2. With a good set of headphones this song truly toys with your emotional well being. From his solo the song breaks into suppresed horns and it finishes. Unfortunately the second part of Freedom cannot be found anywhere else, so we are left with only this seemingly unfinished masterpiece. The rest of the record follows this model as well, which is unfortunate, but is great in its own sense as well because it leaves much to our imagination as we're left trying to fill in the blanks of the music ourselves.

most mingus fans don't like 'town hall concert'. they use words like 'unfocused' and 'rambling' and 'dull'. it does ramble, and it does lose focus sometimes, in the same way the best stories wander and explore little side-alleys on the way to the finish.

why take the shortest route between two points?

the compositions do lead in aimless directions. changing tempo at seemingly unnecessary times. the horns and strings are indeed 'out of sync' often. the uninitiated will think this is no better than a high school concert band.

but the attraction, for me, is that the players fall out of time, and then are able to fall back in while i'm still digesting the oddities.

it's a mainstay for me, but probably not a good choice for someone who's never heard mingus.

This album is a great example of Mingus in charge of a big band. It is not the usual combo Mingus, if you are looking for this I would suggest New Tiajuana Moods or The Jazz Experiments of Charles Mingus. This group not only has Hampton and Mingus but also Gerry Mulligan on bari, Danny Richmond on drums and Woody Shaw on trumpet. This album is not revolutionary but is a fine recording of Mingus with a large group.

Composer/bassist/bandleader arrived in New York in the early Fifties after stints with Lionel Hampton and Red Norvo, seemingly a multi-talented and fully-formed musician. Unknown to most was that the musician had a long career in Los Angeles bands dating back to the early Forties. Remarkably, the many recordings that Mingus made in L.A. in the mid-Forties have not been reissued, at least until this historic collection.

Given the minuscule size of the record companies for which he recorded, perhaps it's a miracle that these sides survived at all. Mingus led his own group on most of these sessions, which featured mostly originals compositions. Amazingly, Mingus was already composing unusually complex and ambitious works that reflected some of the harmonic development of the then-current bebop movement, yet the music itself cannot be classified as bebop. Instead, Mingus seems to be exploring the implications that bebop harmonies could have on jazz composition. Tadd Dameron and Miles Davis, among others, would pursue similar ideas in the late Forties, but Mingus, as usual, seems to be moving in his own individual direction.

Given Mingus' musical background, his individualistic approach to jazz composition is hardly surprising. Classically trained, Mingus was writing classical/jazz hybrids even as a teenager. In a more racially tolerant era, he would almost certainly have pursued a career as a classical cellist or composer. Fortunately, jazz gave him a forum to pursue his musical aspirations. These seminal recordings are an intriguing peak at his ability to wed jazz harmonies, instrumentation and rhythms to classically-influenced musical forms. His ambitions were enormous, perhaps only exceeded by Duke Ellington among jazz musicians. If Mingus could be accused of inconsistency in his music, he could never be accused of complacency.

That said, these early works are not the equal of his classic recordings of the mid to late Fifties. Some of these tracks feature vocalists, in an obvious if unlikely attempt at a hit record, while other numbers are interesting experiments at best. Still, it's a revelation to hear so many elements of Mingus' later style already at work in his music. Every serious fan of Charles Mingus will want to hear these recordings, and the compilers of this set have done a magnificent job. The CD comes with an extraordinary booklet.

This disc features the early work of one of jazz's greatest composers, Charles Mingus. The tracks offer a variety of early Mingus tunes, including a few that became Mingus standards. However, the real jewel here is the lovingly detailed 96 page liner notes, which tell you everything you ever wanted to know about early Mingus, with photos to boot: learn while you listen. Hear one of jazz's great minds begining to take shape. Catch Mingus's work back in the days when he was a relative unknown with the self-imposed moniker, Baron. Highly recommended.

This excellent compilation gives us most of the sides made by Charles Mingus under his own name (and a few under others' names) during his long and often frustrating period in California, the 1940s. The reason I only gave it four stars is that, while some of the music is indeed superb and up to his normal high level, we also hear him struggling with compromises to commercialism (such as four takes of a dog of a tune, "Baby Take a Chance With Me," in which only the bridge shows traces of the Mingus style). Nevertheless, the good tracks are very good indeed and point to the more mature style to come in the early-to-mid 1950s. Even better is the booklet, with its fascinating details, rare photos and record labels that makes you feel as if you had purchased a treasure-trove instead of simply a historical jazz CD. If you love jazz and its evolution from a purely improvised music to one in which writing plays an important part, Mingus was certainly a giant in his field and this is a very important part of his story.

That's how I look at this masterpiece, Charles Mingus allow us to be part of the band, one of the guys while listening this cd. I am not going to make the terrible mistake of writing about a track in particular because I do not believe that's fair but I have to say that none of the track are alike.

A masterpiece to have.