Mosaic Records Adds Seventh CD to
Charles Mingus Limited Edition Collection
Featuring Previously Unreleased Material -
Now Scheduled for October 30 Release
Project Celebrates Mingus' 90th Birthday Anniversary
Charles Mingus
The Jazz Workshop Concerts
1964-65
Release Date:
October 30, 2012
DL Media · (610) 667-0501
Don Lucoff · don@dlmediamusic.com
Jordy Freed· jordy@dlmediamusic.com
Note From Mosaic Records Founder Michael Cuscuna on the Additional CD:
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
***
Press Release:
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."
 |
|
© 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.
For more information on Charles Mingus, please visit mingusmingusmingus.com
This limited edition set is available exclusively from Mosaic Records.
Please visit www.mosaicrecords.com for ordering information,
complete track listing and discography.
Information and press materials (including album covers, promotional photos and bio's)
on all DL Media artists can be found at our new website:
