Modern Jazz Symposium - Charles Mingus

Dec

27

Modern Jazz Symposium - Charles Mingus

≡ Category: 1950s, Bebop, Cool Jazz, Essential, Free Jazz, Hard Bop, Reviews, Trad Jazz |
≅ Written by: Michael Kydonieus

JAZZBO NOTES ESSENTIAL RECORDING

Rating:

If you’ve never heard Charles Mingus before, Modern Jazz Symposium is a great place to start. It’s utterly accessible, and yet it contains all of the earmarks of what makes Mingus special.

Although free jazz had not officially been invented yet, there are free sections in this music. Mingus’ aesthetic was fluid. In his orchestrations, he’d sometimes go from swing to free to gut-bucket blues in the same composition.

On Modern Jazz Symposium, Mingus has a superb compliment of musicians to realize his ambitions: Jimmy Knepper on trombone, Shafi Hadi on sax, Bill Hardman or Clarence Shaw on trumpet, Horace Parlan on piano, and drummer Dannie Richmond, who would go on to be Mingus’ drummer all the way into the 70s.

All of the tunes on Modern Jazz Symposium are terrific, but my favorite is Scenes in the City, probably the best spoken word/jazz combination ever put to wax. Lonnie Elder narrates throughout, talking about how jazz is the soundtrack of his life. Elder’s narration has special value in that it has the flavor of a distinct social strata — working poor black folks in the New York City of the late 50s. Scenes in the City is by turns wistful, driving, and comic. The whole thing is gorgeous.

The music on Modern Jazz Symposium is very much of it’s time and yet, when you listen to it (or at least the first three selections), you don’t have the sense of “been there, done that” that pervades so much jazz of the 50s and 60s. The reason for that sense of deja vu is that much of jazz from that time period has been completely absorbed by our musical culture. It’s hard-wired into our brains, so that when we hear it, it has lost the capacity to surprise us. Instead, on Modern Jazz Symposium, there is a constant sense of discovery. That is because no one ever took Mingus’ innovations and mainstreamed them. Mingus’ work remains a glorious anachronism.

Halfway through Modern Jazz Symposium, the music becomes more conventional, but that’s okay. You can’t expect anyone, even a jazz composer as great as Charles Mingus, to create jazz history with every note. Besides, the last half of Modern Jazz Symposium swings like mad — it’s great mainstream jazz, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Modern Jazz Symposium stands out from much of Mingus’ other work because of the clarity of the presentation. Another plus is that Mingus didn’t feel constrained to shoehorn in yet another version of “Better Git It In Your Soul” because he hadn’t created it yet. As stubborn as Mingus was, even he wasn’t immune to commercial pressures. When “Better Git It In Your Soul” became popular, he felt constrained to cover it in some form or other on practically every subsequent album.

In my opinion, this is one release that anyone who cares about jazz should own. I feel so strongly about it, I’m including a link to a page with some samples. Check it out.