condition (record/cover): EX / VG (heavy ring wear and distributor's stickers on back)

Originally issued in 1956, and the title is a fair description. This is Charles Mingus before the great Atlantic and Columbia records, still working out how to combine written composition with collective improvisation and openly borrowing from twentieth-century concert music while doing it. There are strings, unusual instrumentation, tempo shifts that arrive without warning, and a compositional ambition that the jazz world of the mid-fifties had no idea what to do with. Rough in places and fascinating throughout: everything he would achieve over the following decade is visible here in outline.

Rep Records edition of the 1956 album. Early, experimental and considerably stranger than the records that made his name.