Charles Mingus

LP version. Mingus Ah Um, recorded in May 1959 and released that autumn, was Charles Mingus's first album for Columbia. It is still the most direct way into his music. Its nine compositions gather much of what he cared about, from the gospel church and the blues to Ellington, Jelly Roll Morton, Charlie Parker and Lester Young. A workshop band that could turn on a cue holds them together, shifting tempo and mood inside a single piece. The Library of Congress added the album to the National Recording Registry in 2003, and it entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2013. The cover painting is by S. Neil Fujita, and Diane Dorr-Dorynek wrote the original sleeve notes.

Teo Macero produced the sessions at Columbia's 30th Street Studio in New York on May 5 and May 12. John Handy, Booker Ervin and Shafi Hadi play saxophones, Jimmy Knepper or Willie Dennis trombone, Horace Parlan piano and Dannie Richmond drums, with Mingus on bass. Better Git It in Your Soul opens with hand claps and shouts, drawn from the gospel singing and preaching Mingus heard in church as a child. Goodbye Pork Pie Hat, written after the death of Lester Young that spring, is a slow blues elegy carried by Handy's saxophone and the low horns. Fables of Faubus mocks Orval Faubus, the Arkansas governor who opposed school integration in 1957. Columbia refused the lyrics, so it appears here as an instrumental, and its lurching theme says enough on its own. Open Letter to Duke and Jelly Roll are tributes, the second a fond, slightly mischievous nod to early New Orleans jazz. Richard Cook and Brian Morton, in the Penguin Guide to Jazz (2008), called the album an extended tribute to ancestors.

This Music On Vinyl edition (MOVLP065, with Columbia/Legacy) is a remastered 180 gram LP first issued in 2010. It carries the full-length, unedited versions of all nine tracks, six of which were shortened on the original LP.