Chuckle a pitying chuckle over Allaboutjazz.com's guide "1959: The Most Creative Year in Jazz." Miles Davis's Kind of Blue: "the quintessential jazz album"; Coltrane's Giant Steps: "a major landmark in jazz history"; Brubeck's "Take Five": "one of the most popular tunes in jazz"; Ornette Coleman's The Shape of Jazz to Come: "the essential free jazz album." Mingus Ah Um? "Essential to Mingus fans and jazz aficionados" (emphasis mine).
Poor big-bellied, cigar-loving, temperamental, insecure, misogynistic Charles Mingus. While routinely placed on best-of-genre lists and talked about as one of the preeminent bassists and bandleaders in jazz, his best albums never clump comfortably with anyone else's, or with any particular subset of casual jazz listeners. They're too spirited for cocktail hour, too rough and moody for listeners who revel in crafstmanship, and not radical enough for daredevils.
Then again, Mingus' music never seemed comfortable outside its own world, either. At the dawn of both modal and free jazz, he kept solos short and music composed (even if, as with 1959's Atlantic recording Blues and Roots, the players didn't see the charts before the studio date). In an era where big bands were left behind for small combos or reimagined entirely (as with, say, John Coltrane's late albums), Mingus was a Duke Ellington acolyte who approached his pieces with the formality of an orchestral composer.
"Better Git It in Your Soul"-- if Mingus had his own sound, Mingus Ah Um's opener was it: a warm, striding, Sunday-morning tune carried on moaning horns; a friendly, convivial atmosphere punctuated by hollers Mingus didn't bother suppressing in the studio. Mingus, born to a black father and Chinese-American mother who allowed only church music in the house, embraced blues and gospel in the complex way one embraces a friend they've fallen out of touch with, or their hometown-- cautiously; with a burdened and deep-buried love. The song never struck me as primitive or rootsy, but a comic-book version of primitive, rootsy music-- a form reduced to its most basic shapes and traits; a form almost abstracted.
The album rolls from there. And while "Better Git" is as good a definition of Mingus there is, the album is remarkably diverse: Set pieces like "Fables of Faubus" or "Jelly Roll" (which are a jazz analog to the Beatles's warped, fruity variations on early British pop, like "For the Benefit of Mr. Kite") play alongside factory-pressed bop- and swing-style songs like "Boogie Stop Shuffle" and the mournful, reverent balladry of "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat". Harmonies invoke modern classical music almost as often as blues, and his chosen instrumentalists spend as much effort adding color to the ensemble as personality to their brief solos.
Regarding the product at hand: a 2xCD 50th anniversary "Legacy Edition" with a list price of $25. The remaster is the same one performed by Mark Wilder in the late 1990s and still in print. Along with a couple of alternate takes, the second disc contains Mingus Dynasty, an uneven and far less interesting album recorded later in 1959 and issued early in 1960. The liner notes are slim and strangely conceived (do I need to read that a song on this album is a "grand slam home run" even though I clearly have already purchased it?). The bonus material on the second disc, in PDF format, should've been in the booklet if they're charging $25 for a package that probably didn't demand a lot of work to re-release. That's that.
I'm sure I'm not versed enough in jazz to assess what it is that makes Mingus Mingus, but listening to Ah Um again-- an album I plucked from my dad's collection at age 15-- I remember sitting in my family's basement thinking that I had no idea jazz could be funny. (I hadn't yet heard Thelonious Monk.) I thought jazz was all elegance and poise. I remember reading transcriptions of Charlie Parker solos and wondering if my intellectual awe would translate to a real, visceral love of the music. It didn't-- I felt detached. Mingus was slurring and gestural. His compositions that looked prim on paper sounded rusted and sun-bleached in performance. The fiery ones sounded a little tight-assed and penned-in-- you could almost hear the band bucking with discomfort at the form they found themselves playing in. The music had character; it beamed. Still does.
