629 Charles Mingus - Mingus Ah Um (1959)

Studio Album - Jazz

About the Act:

Charles Mingus (sometimes known as Charlie Mingus) was a large American Jazz bass, and sometimes keyboard player. His first instrument was cello but he couldn't get classical work because he was black. He played with some very well known Jazz musicians and became well-known himself. He worked for three decades (50s, 60s ad 70s) and then died. He deplored the substance habits of other jazz musicians, married four times and was proud of his sexual exploits, gained a reputation for a fearsome and irascible temper, and died of Lou Gehrig's Disease. His legacy in music, and jazz in particular, is well-known, and his music has been the subject of considerable study.

About the Album:

This is an album of instrumental Jazz.

My History with this Album:

None

Review:

I recognised one track, Boogie Stop Shuffle. I remember hearing it in a film, but I couldn't remember which film, so I had to look it up. It was Absolute Beginners, a bizarre and somewhat camp film with Patsy Kensit and David Bowie. That is far from important in writing a review.

So, look, it's Jazz, and in order to write a knowledgeable treatise about the musicianship I would have to read and understand a whole load of stuff, and then in order for you to understand my knowledgeable treatise, I would have to either explain all that, or you would have to know it, or learn it, so let's not bother with all that. It's Jazz, and the music side of things is complicated. It's small-band stuff, with generally drums, bass, piano and some brass, often sax and trumpet, maybe trombone. It's somewhere on the edge between tunes and random notes. There are some complex harmonies and what sound like discords to me, but seem to follow some sort of form and structure, and kind of make sense but I couldn't tell you why. The standard form of a repeated pattern of something, with improvisations, seems to be in play at least some of the time. Some tracks are slow, some are medium and some are fast, and there is quite a variety of feel going on here. Some tracks have abrupt shifts in them.

As Jazz goes I found it pleasant. I know Jazz is a specialist subject, that gives some people lots of pleasure when they understand it. As a relative outsider it felt like a decent slice of jazz to listen to in the car on a sunny day driving down country roads. It made me feel sophisticated, listening to jazz. I appreciated and enjoyed it, but I didn't really understand it that much. There must be reasons why, out of all of the jazz albums ever recorded, this one has found itself on this list. I could not tell you why.

7/10

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/4Z8nWz3dGybOP7lhMZpcOo

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLiN-7mukU_REK9zBMvZoNERNvhovxnsE5

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mingus_Ah_Um