This centenary year of Charles Mingus’ birth deserves to be a landmark celebrated everywhere creative music thrives, not just in the jazz world that has lauded him since the 1940s. A composing genius and double bass virtuoso, the LA-raised original disrupted jazz insularity with a repertoire that ran from New Orleans street-struts, to hard-swinging blues and bebop, jazz/classical splicings from Stravinsky, Bartók and Duke Ellington and played and spoken themes echoing his civil-rights campaigning.
Mingus also urged every artist he came across to be uncompromisingly themselves – even if it meant his own improvising lineups might wrench his highly wrought materials into unpredictable shapes. Down the years, that legacy has galvanised bands from South Africa’s Brotherhood of Breath, to the Charlie Haden and Carla Bley Liberation Music Orchestra, the UK’s Loose Tubes, and countless more.
Joining this year’s birthday releases – including the jubilant if occasionally ragged 1957 trio set Mingus Three on Rhino/Parlophone, and The Lost Album from Ronnie Scott’s on Resonance – is Celebrating Mingus 100, a concert on 13 April at Berlin’s Philharmonie hall recorded by a classy nonet to mark the composer’s centennial day. Mingus Big Band pianist Danny Grissett and American drum star Gregory Hutchinson partner European A-listers including Austrian bassist Georg Breinschmid, fiery young German altoist Jakob Manz, and coolly poetic French singer Camille Bertault.
Breinschmid’s muscular pizzicato fittingly prefaces the opening Jelly Roll, a hypnotically sultry ensemble opening to Goodbye Pork Pie Hat is developed in Bertault’s softly shimmering high tones, and huge standouts are the barging, multi-thematic Boogie Stop Shuffle, and an exultant windup hustle on Better Git Hit in Your Soul. Mingus’ enthrallingly dark or angry moods are occasionally sacrificed to a coy showiness, but this is a tribute explicitly driven by expertise, gratitude and awe nonetheless.
Also out this month
Sax legend Charles Lloyd launches a trilogy of trio sets running into the autumn, with guitarist Bill Frisell and bassist Thomas Morgan joining him on the first – Chapel (Blue Note), a closely attuned jazz/folk communion captured in a San Antonio church.
Much-lauded African American drummer/composer Tyshawn Sorey brings his sweeping contemporary-musical imagination to the swinging repertoire of Horace Silver, Duke Ellington and others on the trio set Mesmerism (Pi Recordings/Bandcamp).
2022 German Jazz prize artist of the year, saxophonist Charlotte Greve, shows how far her 12-year-old Lisbeth Quartett has come in its chamber-musical confluence of reedily murmuring wistfulness, minimalism, improv outbursts and effortless collective interplay on Release (Intakt).
