7th CD Added to Charles Mingus Limited Edition Collection Featuring Previously Unreleased Music!
October 12, 2012 at 1:35 AM This sounds like it's going to be fabulous ~ I know that there are a lot of salivating Mingus fans waiting for for the big day (Oct 30th, 2012) to get here! Read what Mosaic Records founder Michael Cuscuna has to say about the seventh CD - just scroll down past the Press Release.
PRESS RELEASE
Project Celebrates Mingus' 90th Birthday Anniversary
Listen to a Streaming Track From The Jazz Workshop Concerts 1964-65
Because this is the 90th birthday anniversary year of Charles Mingus, Sue Mingus called last spring to ask Michael Cuscuna whether he might be interested in issuing some of the unreleased Mingus tapes she had in the archives. It didn't take long to make such a decision! "What makes this collection even more appealing is the fact that, of the seven discs in the collection, only one of them has even been available on an authorized CD," explains Cuscuna. "Almost two full CDs have never been available on CD at all, and more than two hours worth of music include new discoveries -- appearing for the first time ever, in any form."
Charles Mingus was always the most incandescent of jazz's few true geniuses, and the mid-1960s was undoubtedly one of the most tumultuous periods in his - and America's - storied history. In Mingus' case, that personal, social and political upheaval was the recipe for some of his most ferociously creative output, represented here by five intense, combustible concerts by some of his most legendary groups with works that range from his interpretations of Ellington, tributes to his musicians such as Eric Dolphy (with "Praying With Eric"), and an enormously ambitious portrait of bop called "Parkeriana," to several of Mingus' own spectacular tunes.
Mosaic Records collects that quartet of masterful performances on the new 6-CD box set Charles Mingus - The Jazz Workshop Concerts 1964-65 (Town Hall, Amsterdam, Monterey '64 and '65 & Minneapolis). The label considers this to be an undeniably monumental epic masterpiece as it chronicles the essential live performances of this genius of modern music as his compositions achieved a depth and complexity music fans would come to know as Mingus' most signature work. Only 47 minutes of the Town Hall concert has been available on an authorized CD. Here a disc and a half worth of music from Town Hall and Minneapolis is being released for the first time in any format.
The line-ups for these concerts includes some of Mingus' most vital collaborators: Eric Dolphy, Charles McPherson, Jaki Byard, Johnny Coles, Clifford Jordan, Dannie Richmond. The repertoire includes some of the bassist/composer's greatest works, along with three never-before-issued compositions.
Taken together, this monumental collection gathers an essential body of music from a time when Mingus was as determined to express his independence as his artistry. They represent the fruits of his famously demanding Jazz Workshop and were intended for his own newly-launched record label. Set producer Michael Cuscuna says, "These five triumphant performances capture Mingus at a peak musically and as an entrepreneur, seeking to control the rights to his own music and his economic destiny."
The 13 months spanned by this collection were remarkably eventful for both Mingus and the country, which was embroiled in the height of the Civil Rights struggle and still reeling from the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. During this period, Mingus assembled his legendary sextet with Dolphy, Byard, Richmond, Coles and Jordan (which appears here on the Town Hall and Amsterdam concerts); suffered the death of Dolphy, one of his closest collaborators; met his future wife, Sue Graham Ungaro; broke off his productive relationship with Impulse! Records; and took his second stab at releasing his own work.
"After a decade of recording for some of the biggest record labels in the industry," Cuscuna relates, "Charles Mingus decided in 1964 to return to the DIY model that he had begun in the early '50s with Max Roach and their label Debut. The Jazz Workshop label was launched in time for his celebrated Town Hall concert and subsequent European tour (represented here by its Amsterdam concert) with his stellar sextet."
Charles Mingus © Ray Avery/CTSIMAGES
The Town Hall Concert constitutes this set's first disc and contains the music originally released by Fantasy/Debut, supplemented by an additional 32 minutes of unissued material. Originally a benefit for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the concert took place on April 4, 1964 (and is not to be confused with Mingus' other Town Hall concert, the big band performance 18 months earlier in which he sought to premier his extended work "Epitaph"). The five previously-unreleased tunes feature a duet with Byard on Ellington's "Sophisticated Lady," a 20-minute rendition of Mingus' "Peggy's Blue Skylight," and an incomplete performance of his Bird tribute "Parkeriana" before the tape ran out. Five tunes from this performance have never been available before.
The sextet, which includes Eric Dolphy, Clifford Jordan, Johnny Coles, Jaki Byard, and Dannie Richmond, reconvenes at Amsterdam's Concertgebouw six days later (April 10, 1964) for the stunning concert that makes up the next two CDs. The date, which revisits several of the tunes from the Town Hall Concert, showcases Mingus' ability to look both forward and back, paying tribute to Ellington, Bird and Dizzy Gillespie (plus a vast swath of the jazz piano tradition on Byard's set-opening "A.T.F.W." referring to Art Tatum and Fats Waller) while displaying his barbed modernity on his own classics "Meditation on a Pair of Wire Cutters" and "Fables of Faubus."
Much had changed by that September when Mingus performed at the seventh Monterey Jazz Festival. Dolphy had passed away unexpectedly in Europe three months earlier and Mingus was leading a new sextet. With the exception of saxophonist John Handy who was replacing an ailing Booker Ervin, this is the group that he would come to dub "My Favorite Quintet." Byard and Richmond remain, joined by Charles McPherson and Lonnie Hillyer, recorded for the first time here. Following an Ellington medley and Mingus' "Orange Was The Color Of Her Dress Then Blue Silk," six more musicians, including John Handy, Red Callender, Buddy Collette and Jack Nimitz, take the stage. The augmented ensemble debuts "Meditations on Integration," the orchestral reworking of "Meditation on a Pair of Wire Cutters."
Accolades poured in for the concert. "Monterey belonged to Charles Mingus," wrote The San Francisco Chronicle. "It was a triumph." DownBeat ranked it among those concerts that "have that rare and delicious moment when the intensity of a performance, its inspiration, is so overwhelming it sets off something akin to an electric shock," while Time Magazine declared that Mingus "must be ranked among the greatest of jazz composers."Newsweek also reported that, "the audience gasped when it suddenly ended and roared their approval over and over as Mingus, pacified, like a big happy bear hugged his musicians."
The first four tracks of disc six features material from Mingus' return to Monterey in '65, a year after his triumph in '64, with an abbreviated set featuring an octet including Hobart Dotson, Jimmy Owens, Lonnie Hillyer, Charles McPherson, Julius Watkins, Howard Johnson, and Dannie Richmond. Of the four pieces here, only two had been previously released on obscure compilations; "Don't Let It Happen Here" in a 1999 Monterey compilation assembled by Clint Eastwood, and "They Trespass the Land of the Sacred Sioux" as a bonus EP with the East Coasting version of a two-LP set from UCLA. "The Arts of Tatum and Freddie Webster" was previously unissued, as well as "When The Saints Go Marching In," which the octet performed as they marched off stage as they were urged by management to cut their set short after only 30 minutes to close the Saturday afternoon concert.
The remainder of disc six, and all of disc seven, represent a "My Favorite Quintet" concert from Minneapolis in May of 1965, demonstrating how far the ensemble had evolved. Originally licensed to Fantasy Records and released as My Favorite Quintet Volume One, the version contained in this set restores 68 additional minutes to the concert which have never been issued before, including two otherwise unrecorded Mingus compositions: "A Lonely Day In Selma, Alabama"and "Bird Preamble." "Copa City Titty," another great rarity now included in this recording, had been recorded only once before on an obscure Japanese big band record.
Finding the leader in high spirits, the date features a medley of standards, an offbeat takeoff on "Cocktails for Two," and Mingus replacing Byard on the piano bench twice: for the intro to "Peggy's Blue Skylight" (during which Byard returns the favor and picks up the bass), and for a brief solo to cover stage time while Richmond's drums were being tended to.
The release of previously unheard and hard-to-find music by a giant of Charles Mingus' stature would be welcome under any circumstances, but these five performances find the legendary bassist, composer and iconoclast at the height of his powers. As the mutating line-ups reveal, this was a period of change and of discovery which would soon draw to a sudden close. As Cuscuna recounts, Mingus "would essentially leave the music world in 1966 for almost four years, only to rise stronger than ever in the '70s."
Listening to the music on these seven CDs, it's hard to imagine anyone, even Mingus, rising stronger than he sounds here. Fiery, complex, gutsy, witty, vicious and tender - all of his passion and intellect are on display here in their most elemental and vital forms, vastly respectful of tradition and simultaneously inspirational to the free jazz movement. Mosaic has recovered, unearthed, and reassembled not one but five masterpieces for a limited edition run of just 7,500 copies of the seven CD box set which includes an essay and track by track analysis by Mingus biographer Brian Priestley, an essay on the history of Charles Mingus Enterprises by Sue Mingus, and many rare photographs from the concerts.
In July, we wrapped on our new set of Charles Mingus's own recordings from 1964 & '65. We had a hole in the 1964 Town Hall concert where the tape on "Parkeriana" ran out after almost seven minutes. Sue Mingus scoured the archives to no avail and we ultimately decided to go with what she had.
Masters were completed. Liner notes by Sue Mingus and Brian Priestley were done and we announced the set. Shortly thereafter, longtime Mosaic customer and jazz researcher Don Frese emailed us that, in fact, the missing Town Hall material was in the Library of Congress sitting in the Mingus archives and it contained the rest of "Parkeriana" and an unissued "Fables Of Fables." So we set about gaining access to that material.
Around the same time, Remco Plas, another longtime Mosaic fan from Holland chimed in that there had been a 1965 Monterey performance that had indeed been recorded and that one track was issued on Sue's East Coasting label and that another track had been on an obscure Monterey Festival Collection on Clint Eastwood's Malpaso label. So we contacted the folks at the Monterey Jazz Festival and Stanford University where their archive sits.
Pushing the parties along as fast as we could, we were able to retool the box, adding some previously released music and making it the complete 1964-65 Mingus-produced recordings with the exception of the 1965 UCLA concert that is still available on Sunnyside.
The set has necessarily expanded to 7 CDs, which of course alters the price and delays release until late October. But we feel that anything produced by Mosaic Records that moves a project closer to perfection is worth the wait. This one has become quite an adventure and we hope you appreciate the results.
-- Michael Cuscuna
