Charles Mingus "Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus" (Candid, 1961 reissued in 2022)

The business related to reissues, both on CD and vynil, has a significant impact on the realm of improvised music, experimental music and jazz nowadays, since many of the great masters are passed away or anyway have seen their fluorishing period passing by. Not all the reissued material is always good, but many things reprinted, usually in the jazz fields, are enormous records. It is the case of the first reissues of the 1960s records released by Candid, a label led by the jazz critic Nat Hentoff, one of the great US liberals of those times, along with drummer Max Roach and bassist Charles Mingus.

During those times many were the hidden dangers a jazz cat or a real ‘hip’ could run into. You could record some sessions being payed only for the sessions themselves, I mean with no royalties for the copies the albums would sell, as an example; that’s the reason people like Giuseppi Logan and Henry Grimes, or later on Charles Gayle, decided to play at the margin of the business, which means along the roads asking for alms in exchange of few melodies played in solitude: after all, they were gaining almost the same amount of money.

It is hard, after all, to try to earn a living in a racist country, and now that we know that racism is systemic in our societies, there’s no surprise that such cultured and cultivated musicians had to live in such bad ways for so many years. Obviously people like Mingus and Dolphy, Roach and his wife Abbey Lincoln were very fierce guys, and they decided to create a label, called “Candid” because they were playing with racism, and the first record issued by the label was the masterpiece “We Insist! Freedom Now Suite”, an album echoing in the title the famous Sonny Rollins’ ‘Freedom Suite’ and featuring musicians such as Coleman Hawkins, Julian Priester and Booker Little. 

Highly praised for its artistic merits by such enlightened intellectuals as Amiri Imamu Baraka in his notable book “Black Music”, who underlined how the record had one foot in the African tradition – two percussionists were accompanying Max Roach as a drummer – and the other in the avant-garde – the vocal lines by Lincoln seemed to predict those of a Diamanda Galàs – “We Insist!” is not the only notable record issued by Candid. Other titles include, as far as the interests of the followers of this blog, “Candid Dolphy” by multi-reedist Eric Dolphy, Abbey Lincoln’s “Straight Ahead” and this “Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus”.

The idea for the record, as we can deduce reading another good read, John F. Goodman’s “Mingus Speaks”, has probably come to Mingus thanks to Eric Dolphy. In Mingus’ words, Dolphy, who at the very beginning of his career, as a member of the Chico Hamilton band, was playing ‘just like Charlie Parker’, at a certain point started to fluorish as an individual voice, the one we are accustomed to hear thanks to his beautiful records, and at a certain point he started attending Mingus’ house and reading his music sheet guided by his own curiosity. 

Eric Dolphy at a certain point started to note some details, like a couple of compositions written following ‘All The Things You Are’ and ‘What Is This Thing Called Love’, a couple of jazz standards often played by Charlie Parker and other bebop masters. The new compositions were ‘All The Things You Could Be By Now If Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother’, a complex piece of music originally written for Buddy Collette, and ‘What Love’. These couple of compositions underlined Mingus’ debt with Charlie Parker and bebop, a music that in the same words of the bassist has a spiritual quality that pertain to the men who created it, as if they had a spiritual mission through music.

But the album starts with ‘Folk Forms No. 1’, that, according to Mingus, is a song based on what he was playing with his bass: if Mingus would change, the other musicians had to change. Not only the piece has a characteristic interplay between trumpeter Ted Curson and Dolphy, but it shows the telpathic interplay between Mingus and Dannie Richmond on drums, the musician that thanks to his playing made Mingus believe in God – according to his own words, since he could not understand how he would be able to read his mind and answer musically to him, if not by divine intervention. 

The other enormous piece of music included in this album is ‘Original Faubus Fables’, with Mingus and Richmond reciting an ironic text dedicated to governor Orval Faubus, who ordered the army not to let the black folks enter the school as according to the newly approved national law. Originally recorded for “Mingus Ah Uhm” a year before, without the text and with a less expressionistic approach, this piece is the base for the many live versions recorded by the various Mingus quartets and quintets during the year. A longer and incredible version, mixing ‘Faubus’ with fragments of compositions taken by the masterpiece ‘Tijuana Moods’, is available through the double album “The Great Concert Of Charles Mingus”, but there are many to tell you the truth worth listening to.

Those were the years of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, the years of the beginning of the black avant-garde in music and the various attempts to create a more equal, advanced and creative society. We all know what happened then, but the music comprised in this record is, as Marc Ribot said about some of the earlier Albert Ayler stuff, similar to some strange sacrifices in the room near you. A true time machine, in other words. We cannot but thank Glenn Barros, the new proprietor of Candid Record, for these reissues, and the sound engineer Bernie Grundman for his work on the original masters.