June 28, 2023 / By mobanmarket
I consider Charles Mingus one of the great American composers, at least on par with the most celebrated American classical dudes. With apologies to fans of that music, I’d much rather listen to this record, or any of several other Mingus recordings, than, say, Billy the Kid or Rhapsody in Blue. What makes Mingus great is precisely that, in contrast to Copland and Gershwin, when he explored the vernacular, it wasn’t some pale imitation.
Some jazz records can seem generic, their solos interchangeable. Mingus’s music is rarely generic. Like Thelonious Monk’s, his music is instantly recognizable. And there is real passion in Mingus—joy and anger and devotion and love—all right there on the music’s sleeve.
Mingus may be unique among composers in his ability to harness passion and wildness in service of structured, comprehensible music without taming the wildness. His music also, somehow, looks forward and backward at the same time—forward toward the avantgarde and backward to African-American church music, Dixieland jazz, and who knows what else—in precisely the same notes.
Mingus Ah Um, from 1959, includes some of Mingus’s best and best-known music: “Better Git It in Your Soul,” which echoes an old-time prayer meeting (the same tune was recorded with a different title—”Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting”—on Blues and Roots, on Atlantic Records this same year); “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat,” his elegy for Lester Young, who died two months before the recording sessions that produced this LP; “Fables of Faubus,” which is instrumental here—in the sense of “no lyrics”—because Columbia forbade Mingus from reciting the incendiary words aimed at the Arkansas governor standing in the way of integrating Little Rock, Arkansas, schools. (Mingus would record the song again the following year on Candid complete with astute political commentary: “He’s a fool! Boo! Nazi Fascist supremist!”). Self-Portrait in Three Colors is superb jazz, an underrated classic that suggests Mingus’s gift for holding apparent contradictions in balance.
The only shortcoming of this album is that it doesn’t have Eric Dolphy on it. Dolphy was always at his best when reined in by Mingus, but Dolphy wouldn’t record with Mingus for the first time until 1961, on Pre-Bird.
This reissue is part of Mobile Fidelity’s premium “Ultradisc One-Step” series, which is based on a technical innovation in which the recording goes from lacquer to vinyl via just one intermediate step—called a convert—instead of the usual three (father, mother, stamper); two quality-degrading generations are eliminated. “One-Steps” are pressed on “SuperVinyl,” MoFi’s proprietary vinyl formulation that’s said to lower the noise floor and allow the creation of smoother grooves, indistinguishable from those of the original lacquer.
This boxed set is a work of art—actually, several works of art. The music itself is high art. The engineering is artful. The cover features an abstract painting by S. Neil Fujita, who established Columbia’s design team and brought abstract art to Columbia record covers. (He also designed the cover for Time Out, those far-out Glenn Gould covers, and the dust jacket for the book The Godfather.) There is art inside the package, too: two large, frameable photos of Mingus from the Sony Music archives, by Don Hunstein, printed on high-quality stock.
This Mingus Ah Um reissue is also art of the cubist or postmodern sort, a refraction of the original LP through a high-end–audio prism. In place of a simple 33.3 LP with an inner sleeve and cover, here we have a black box more than an inch thick holding the aforementioned photos, two 12″, 45rpm records in several layers of protection (including inner sleeves thicker than most outer sleeves); a cardboard insert with the album art on one side (with “ORIGINAL MASTER RECORDING” added across the top) and the original liner notes on the other side; a cardboard insert describing the One Step process; and some foam. Frankly, I’d rather listen to a whole album side before getting up to flip the record, and I wish it took up less space on my record shelf, but it’s a beautiful set, and even at $125 provides good value for your money.
Mingus Ah Um has always sounded good. This version, though, sounds substantially better than the other versions. In fact, this Mingus Ah Um is one of the best-sounding classic jazz albums I own, with a big, deep soundstage, visceral images, and tons of impact. The vinyl is dead quiet. It’s nearly perfect.
How much of that sonic superiority is a result of running at 45rpm? I don’t know—some of it, certainly. Despite what I wrote earlier, I am ambivalent about the 33.3-vs-45rpm decision: I do prefer the 33.3 LP format, but I also enjoy the sonic gains provided by the higher speed. I would not want to give up any of this sonic goodness.
1959 was jazz’s annus mirabilis, the year of this album, Kind of Blue, John Coltrane’s Giant Steps, Ornette Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come, Dave Brubeck’s Time Out, Duke Ellington’s Jazz Party, Wynton Kelly’s Kelly Blue, and many others. I’ll be shredded for saying it, but this may be the best of the lot.
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