Charles Mingus

In Paris: The Complete America Session

(Sunnyside)

Charles Mingus, the legendary jazz bassist and composer, possessed spontaneity and a passionate attention to rehearsal in equal measure. But Mingus’ career was also peppered with highs and lows, a direct result of a mercurial relationship with bandmates and a tempestuous relationship with critics and the public.

By 1970, it was widely assumed, Mingus was all done – washed up by personal excesses, an indifferent public, a shortage of new ideas, and lingering sadness over the death of friend and fellow musical traveler Eric Dolphy in June 1964. So much for the conventional wisdom. This just-released recording from in October 1970 shows a Mingus revitalized, working a with a tight five-piece band able to bird-dog his every musical step.

This illuminating two-disc set performs a dual service. First, we get the reissue of an earlier album, with Mingus and company reworking classics such as “Peggy’s Blue Skylight” and “Reincarnation of a Lovebird,” his expansive meditation on the death of Charlie Parker. There’s also “Pithecanthropus Erectus,” a 16-minute manifesto that brilliantly merged blues and gospel themes with jazz.

The re-release would have been valuable enough, but the second disc of this new package contains the alternate takes of virtually everything on the first. Mingus and band give fractious birth in rehearsal to the finished recordings. It’s these half-hearted nice tries that reveal both the agonies and joys of the process of creating music.

We hear Mingus by turns lecturing, hectoring, and caressing his sidemen, including stalwarts Jaki Byard on piano and Dannie Richmond on drums. Sometimes the alternate versions sound fine – then Mingus stops the group to correct a flaw only he can hear. Sometimes we’re left to lament the one that got away: In an incomplete version of Parker’s “Blue Bird,” we’re witness to Byard laying down nothing less than a revelatory pianistic work of art only to hear the track suddenly stop – presumably because the tape ran out.

The result is a document that gives us the backstory to one of Mingus’ more memorable releases. It’s been said that Mingus returned to his full creative glory with this recording, now almost two generations old. This gift from the past smartly extends his reputation into the future.

- Michael E. Ross