Indigenous Music
Hentoff, Nat
INDIGENOUS MUSIC Nat Hentoff Mingus Unabridged The phone would ring and instead of a voice on the other end, there would be music. Explosive, shouting music but then, sometimes, fragile,...
...There was no way his music could ever be taken for anyone else's...
...The piece was Duke Ellington's theme song, and it was composed by Billy Strayhorn...
...Volume 3/The Tiffany Transcriptions/Basin Street Blues (Kaleidoscope F-20) is now out...
...Box O, El Cerrito, CA 94530) has been releasing a series of sets based on a grand discovery-some 370 songs recorded by Wills and the Playboys in 1946 and 1947 for the Tiffany Music transcription service...
...She ranges from "Paper Moon" to "Theme for Lester Young...
...For sheer fun, something to which Mozart was also not averse, the recordings of Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys have lifted my spirits for well over forty years...
...As one combat veteran put it, "You had to keep stretching yourself while you were with Mingus...
...Given the luminous confidence and spaciousness of her playing, I expect that Mitsuko Uchida will do a lot better than merely surviving...
...She has come in second in two prestigious international competitions and from that experience has developed the comforting analysis that "it is the people who come in second who survive...
...These were players of country music who also loved jazz and black blues...
...The voice and the music belonged to composer-virtuoso bassist-bandleader Charles Mingus...
...Since Laurel has a three-and-a-half octave range (which she does not brandish, being a woman of taste), I'd like to hear her ride along with Mozart some time, for his quintessentially lucid singing lines should lie just right for her...
...Even in public—you've seen it—he'd stop the music if one of us was playing just notes and not playing his own self...
...The whole set costs $25 plus $3.50 for postage and handling from East Coasting Records, P.O...
...The music at times makes you feel as if you were in a hurricane—"Ode to Bird and Dizzy"—and at others as if you were in another age: "They Trespass the Land of the Sacred Sioux...
...He always hated having his music merchandised by the big labels because he figured, correctly, that they didn't have the slightest idea of what it was about...
...Mingus, by the way, would be pleased that this is a venture by an independent label of which his widow, Susan, is a principal...
...And indeed, he was one of the relatively few jazz makers to have created a durable body of original composition in an area populated mainly by improvisers...
...And there is, on every track, that extraordinary Mingus empathy with the most submerged emotions...
...But then, I suppose not too many jazz musicians know all the songs Hank Williams wrote...
...Explosive, shouting music but then, sometimes, fragile, vulnerable music...
...What'd you think of that...
...Anyway, this interplay between jazz and country is a fine antidote for the blues, even when Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys are playing the blues...
...Occasionally, it was something he had written decades ago...
...What that meandering title means is that Mingus, a week before this UCLA concert, had been given only half an hour on an overloaded program at the Monterey Jazz Festival...
...When do you think it was written...
...Annoyed, to say the least, he did not play all the pieces he had written for Monterey and instead played the program at UCLA...
...Don't Be Afraid, the Clown's Afraid Too...
...Mingus was often joyful, witty, and tender as well as withering and publicly unhappy with his players and himself...
...Box 10069, Glendale, CA 91209...
...Box 866, Ansonia Station, New York, NY 10023...
...This package contains a bonus—a Mingus performance at Monterey that year with an octet...
...A set that most accurately and tumul-tuously reveals Mingus at his most alive is Charles Mingus: Music Written for Monterey, 1965/not heard...
...Uchida, in her early thirties, is based in Japan but has performed in Europe, the United States, and Canada...
...He just wouldn't let you coast...
...And it moves...
...Mozart's melodies, of course, also sang when they were not written for singers, as is freshly clear in Mitsuko Uchida's interpretations of Mozart's 2 Sonatas/Sonata in A and Sonata in F, along with his Fantasia in D Minor (Philips 412 123-1...
...Mingus never allowed, in himself or in his sideman, any coasting or jiving or leaning on familiar licks...
...All of these feelings were usually manifest on the same night, which made a "live" Mingus performance unlike any other event in jazz...
...After a few minutes, the voice, usually mischievous, would come on...
...Kaleidoscopic Records (P.O...
...Now Laurel Masse has her first solo album, Alone Together (PR 7154, from Pausa Records, P.O...
...Also to be heard are Mingus's instructions to the musicians, including his banishing some of them at one point to practice backstage...
...played in its entirety, at UCLA, Vols...
...M Choice Cuts Laurel Masse is an unusually graceful, funny, sensuous, lyrical singer who can swing and phrase like a hot cornet but is also a gently insinuating ballad singer...
...Always, it was unmistakably, defiantly Mingus music...
...The tang and easy drive of their "Western Swing" has not been equaled since—except by Merle Haggard when he lets his musicians stretch out...
...And when you were playing Mingus, damn it, you had to be playing who you were playing Mingus...
...She used to be with Manhattan Transfer, which stopped being interesting the moment she left...
...Mingus was playing Mingus...
...I'm A Ding Dong Daddy," "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," and even "Take the A Train" which, however, was not written by Count Basie, as the credits claim...
...At times, the fragment was from a brand new piece...
...1 and 2 (East Coasting Records JWS 0013, JWS 0014, mono...
...Mingus's music was characterized by its passion, the boldness of its melodic lines, the depth of its descents into the intricacies of time, and above all, its honesty...
Vol. 49 • February 1985 • No. 2
