Peter Gabriel, Plays Live

Gabriel gives a definitive send-off to the sound and songs of his first four albums in his first live record.

Album of the Week, April 11, 2026

Live albums serve a different purpose for a rock artist than for a jazz musician. In jazz you’re documenting the spontaneous magic that happened on a particular night, in a particular venue. With rock you sometimes get that, but more often it’s about getting the sound of a certain era, about all the different ways an artist takes music that originated in a studio into a live performance. And sometimes it’s about summing up an era of an artist’s work, getting all the hits performed in front of a screaming crowd as a souvenir of a particular moment.

This last category is definitely where Plays Live falls, but there are elements of the other motivations as well. In particular, some early songs are revisited and updated, while others faithfully recreate their studio sound. Some of that “faithful” sound might be due to touch-ups; the notes on one of the dust sleeves say, “Although this album was compiled from four concerts in the mid-west of the United States, some additional recording took place not a thousand miles away from the home of the artiste. The generic term of this process is ‘cheating’.” Whatever the means, the album presents music from four concerts in November and December 1982 that show how Gabriel transformed the music from his first four albums into a coherent stage performance, with the stalwart help of Tony Levin, David Rhodes, Jerry Marotta, and Larry Fast.

“The Rhythm of the Heat” is remarkably faithful to the album original, with Larry Fast and Peter playing the same loops and synths used to construct the studio track. Only at the end does the performance deviate from the original, and that’s only because Jerry Marotta only has four limbs; while his drum performance is appropriately climactic, it doesn’t have the apocalyptic frenzy of the polyrhythms played by Ekome on the original track. “I Have the Touch” is slightly looser, with a combination of drums and synth percussion backing up Peter as he swaggers through the song. Peter’s outro has some vocal improvisations that carry the imprint of Motown, pointing ahead to a change of direction in future albums.

“Not One of Us” is another faithful recreation, with Tony Levin’s bass lines prominently front and center and Jerry Marotta’s drums leading into the massive breakdown at the end of the song. A quiet “Family Snapshot” has the epic arc of the original, greeted with respectful applause to close out the first side.

“D.I.Y.” is the first song of the set to have a substantial revision, with synths standing in for Robert Fripp’s guitar but carrying the same rhythmic intensity. “The Family and the Fishing Net” faithfully recreates the spooky quality of the voodoo and wedding rituals from the original, with some extra synth lines adding slightly polyrhythmic accents at the beginning and a massive choral outro with the band singing backing vocals behind. (This is a good time to shout out appreciation for the collective voices of Levin, Rhodes, Marotta and Fast, who create a great backing sound behind Peter.)

“Intruder” is great live here, with Marotta’s drums ably filling in for Phil Collins’ legendary gated reverb and Fast’s synths somewhat less ably replacing the marimbas in the instrumental. But that’s a note-perfect whistle at the end, over some sort of idiophone, presumably played by Marotta, and a massive finale with Peter taking the final line up an octave to great effect.

“I Go Swimming” is a gift of sorts, the only song here not to have previously appeared on a PG album. It’s a fun tune led off by a locked-in groove by Tony Levin, soon joined by the rest of the band as they play in the chromatic intro. Peter’s vocal on the chorus gives a bit of an Al Green feel, which abruptly switches into a more traditional Gabriel verse in 6/8. The song was apparently a leftover from the 1980 PG3 session that became a live staple, and a great break in the set.

Both “San Jacinto” and “Solsbury Hill” hew closely to their recorded versions, albeit with keys replacing the jubilant twelve-string guitar in the latter plus an extended joyous vocal coda. (Okay, not hewn quite as closely as all that.) “No Self Control” gets the most dramatic retooling of all the back catalog numbers, with a moody synth-driven groove replacing the marimba and dueling guitars of the original. Played about 20% slower than the original, it carries less manic intensity than resignation and despair. “I Don’t Remember” maintains the disco-funk brilliance of its predecessor thanks to Tony Levin’s deft playing and a wordless vocal bridge in the extended outro that raises the hackles on the back of the neck.

“Shock the Monkey” is a jittery wonder here, all funky high notes above a relentless, mechanical dance rhythm. It’s also arguably the farewell to an early Gabriel practice—the use of face paint to portray different characters in live performance (and videos). The blue make-up on the album cover (and the insert above) is a simplified version of the elaborate ritual monkey make-up used in the video; photographer Armando Gallo recalls it was actually taken during “Lay Your Hands On Me,” a track omitted from the original LP.

“Humdrum” is a pleasant surprise in the running order, a throwback all the way to PG1. The song offers the opportunity to hear how Peter’s vocals evolved during this first six-year stretch of solo performance. His low notes are richer, his high notes with a bit of sandy grit around the edges but with assurance as he takes rhythmic liberties with the line. The vocals are also mixed much further forward than in Bob Ezrin’s original, allowing the lyrics to be more clearly understood; this might be the definitive version as a result. “On the Air” is a last intense workout, with the band lending it more polish than the dry Fripp-produced original and somehow also carrying a greater intensity throughout. The audience is in it all the way, shouting their response to Peter’s sung “on the air” in the chorus. The band gets a great workout in the outro, with an instrumental workout before Peter sings the final chorus as a great shout.

The album ends, as did so many of his concerts, with “Biko.” Stripped of its opening and closing South African hymns, it plays as a more direct protest anthem, with the crowd’s singing along audible under the third verse and the extended outro. The album ends with a long fade-out as Peter calls “Good night!” and the crowd chants “Peter, Peter, Peter” in response.

Plays Live is unique in Peter’s discography for serving as a perfect punctuation mark at the end of his first four-album run. With five tunes each from the third and fourth albums and the hits from the first two, you could be forgiven for never checking back to listen to the originals. (I would strongly recommend making time for 3 and 4, both of which stand as massive accomplishments.)

In a way it was also a farewell to this portion of his career, as what came after would prove a powerful transformation for his sound and his fortunes. But before we get there, he had one last project, albeit a slightly obscure one, that revisited the sound from this period in a more unexpectedly direct way. And before that, we have one of the collaborations that began to shape his new direction; we’ll hear that next week.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: While “Lay Your Hands on Me,” with Peter pictured singing while crowd-surfing on the back cover, was part of the set for these concerts, it was never issued on a version of Plays Live. That makes this 1983 video from Gabriel’s performance in Copenhagen all the more interesting, if frustrating for its low resolution and high levels of background chatter at the beginning:

Peter Gabriel, Peter Gabriel 4 (Security)

Embracing both musical sounds from around the globe and modern technology produces a pioneering album that is still compelling and strange today.

Album of the Week, April 3, 2026

Two important things happened to Peter Gabriel in the lead up to his fourth self-titled album, which, thankfully for those of us who write or talk about music, his new label Geffen talked him into giving an actual title, Security, in the United States. The first was that the sampling synthesizer, the Fairlight CMI, that he had first encountered in 1979 became more powerful and able to manage up to 64 kilobytes worth of samples in memory. The second was a series of encounters with musicians from outside the UK that led to something that changed his career, and the careers of countless others, forever.

The Fairlight CMI had been invented by Peter Vogel and Kim Ryrie, from an earlier invention by Tony Furse. Struggling to get an instrument that was easier to control than the all-analogue Moog synths which were then the kings of the market, Vogel and Ryrie hit on two important ideas: to use a microprocessor—a digital chip, rather than analog—to control the device; and—a discovery by Vogel while studying the harmonic waveforms of acoustic instrument sounds)—to use samples (short recordings of real instruments) as part of the sonic palette of the instrument. Vogel brought a first-generation Fairlight CMI to Gabriel’s home while he was working on Peter Gabriel 3, and he was smitten, using the sampling feature to record real world sounds—though he used glass breaking and other percussion, rather than piano or strings. Gabriel was so impressed that he and his then-brother-in-law Stephen Paine formed a company to sell the instrument in the UK. It sold like hotcakes, with Kate Bush, John Paul Jones, Trevor Horn, Alan Parsons, Pink Floyd’s Richard Wright, and Thomas Dolby among the early purchasers.1 By 1982, the Series II was released, giving higher-frequency samples. Gabriel famously showed the use of this feature on the BBC’s The South Bank Show in a special on the making of PG4.

The other thread would seem to be the complete opposite pole. Following the release of PG3 and based on Gabriel’s burgeoning interest in African music and politics following the release of “Biko,” he launched the first World of Music, Arts and Dance (WOMAD) festival in 1980. Artistically2 a huge success, it brought performers from India, Burundi, Cameroon and Nigeria together with pop and world music luminaries from the UK.

Gabriel continued to meet with new African musicians, some of whom appeared on his next album. They joined a cast of by-now familiar faces: Tony Levin, Jerry Marotta, David Rhodes, Larry Fast, Morris Pert (here on percussion and Ethiopian pipes)—and also Peter Hammill, who had played at the first WOMAD, and David Lord, who co-produced the album with Gabriel. For this recording they were at Ashcombe House, a 19th century manor in Somerset that had a barn that Gabriel converted to a recording studio, while he rented the main house as a domicile.

The first track, “The Rhythm of the Heat,” combines the synthesizer, sampling, and world music threads of Gabriel’s interests into a single whole. Starting with a sampled loop on the Fairlight, Gabriel utters a cry that seems to swoop from somewhere in a resonant acoustic right up next to the listener, as a giant tone sounds on the tonic against a syncopated beat in the drums. Gabriel sings about losing oneself in rhythm (“the rhythm has my soul”), as neat a summation of the ethos he was exploring in his songwriting from PG3 on as one could hope for. It’s mostly successful here; the rhythms in the main song are careful (“the rhy-thm of the heat”) and feel a little too controlled. But on the last reprise, as he sings “smash the radio… smash the watch… smash the cameras… the rhythm is around me, the rhythm has control/the rhythm is inside me/the rhythm has my soul,” suddenly the heavens break open and an avalanche of drums, courtesy the Ekome Dance Company from Ghana, carry the track away in a massive, reverberating, polyrhythmic frenzy. If Gabriel was looking for transcendence in rhythm, he surely found it.

“San Jacinto” is a different feeling, a careful dance-like pattern in synthesizers that contrasts with the story sung by the narrator, a Native American man feeling despair at the loss of his culture to modernity. Some listeners interpret the lyrics as the narration of a young man coming of age in a ritual involving a rattlesnake bite; I’ve always heard it as the narration of an older man taking his last journey to the mountaintop, where he faces the decision to live or die. The coda (“We will walk on the land/We will breathe of the air/We will drink from the stream/We will live, hold the line”) seems a declaration of revitalized intent in the face of this despair, and is tonally distinct from the rest of the song, almost a hymn to itself.

“I Have the Touch” is one of two more pop-leaning songs on the album, but it doesn’t ease up the thematic intensity; here Gabriel seems to revisit the theme of the outsider that he first explored in the nightmarish “Intruder” on PG3, only this time, instead of maliciously breaking and entering, the narrator is in the street and filled with a yearning for human contact. “I move with the movement and/I have the touch… Only, only/wanting contact/with you”: he finds some respite in the crowd, the “pushing of the people,” but knows that he cannot be happy without true human contact.

The dark reverse of this longing for contact, perhaps the ultimate “be careful what you wish for” song, comes with the last track on the first side. “The Family and the Fishing Net,” which sings of marriage as a dark ceremony that enmeshes the participants through strange rituals, seems to warn of too much of a good thing. In a college poetry seminar I brought the lyrics, with their super-specificity and descriptive language, as an example of pop music as good poetry. I’m not so sure now; the whole thing seems rather over-egged. But “moist as grass, ripe and heavy as the night” is not a good way to describe a bride to be. And the attempted intersection of Christian imagery and voodoo in the last stanza “In the darkness, as the cake is/Cut and passed around/In little pieces/The body, the body and the flesh” doesn’t land for me. Then again, it did for the unmarried me at 18, still anxious about the future, which is maybe all it was supposed to do.

Speaking of anxiety: has there ever been a stranger Top 40 hit than “Shock the Monkey”? With the music track drawing inspiration from Motown and progressive rock in equal measure, there’s a relentless beat driving Peter’s plea to an unknown lover not to “shock the monkey”—that is, not to arouse the creature of jealousy that sits in the core of relationships. But you don’t need to have the psychological background to appreciate the song; it’s a banger, even if it sits uncomfortably high in the vocal range for singalongs. (As the University of Virginia Hullabahoos discovered when they covered it on their first album, years ago.)

In a sort of through-line with “I Have the Touch,” “Lay Your Hands on Me” is a song about finding healing in opening up and being vulnerable to connection with another human. The opening, with skittering percussion and an ominous spoken narrative (that veers into silliness—“fat men play with their garden hoses… sausage speared by the cocktail satellite”), masks a real portrait of alienation, as the narrator seeks to escape the crowds and find solace in being alone, whether out of introversion or fear, or both. But the chorus—“It’s only common sense/There are no accidents round here/I am willing (Lay your hands on me)/I am ready (Lay your hands on me)/I believe (Lay your hands on me)”—roars back into an embrace, literally, of the healing power of touch. Gabriel would ultimately end live performances of the song by standing at the edge of the stage and falling backward into the crowd, trusting them to buoy him up. (I recall reading an interview in the 1980s when one of the band wryly remarked, “We all did it; the problem was, no one wanted to catch the drummer.”) Gabriel has been open over the years about the power of therapy to help heal emotional wounds, and you can hear it starting here—and in true PG fashion it arrives as a massive anthem that delivers an emotional punch with each repetition. And that bass line!

“Wallflower” is in similarly hymnic territory, but with a different subject. Sketches of the melody originated during the recording of PG3, but the lyrics didn’t come together until Peter viewed television programs sponsored by Amnesty International about political prisoners in Eastern Europe and Latin America, particularly the plight of Lech Wałęsa and of dissidents who were imprisoned in mental hospitals. In this way the lyrics feel like a merging of the lyrical concerns of “Lead a Normal Life” and “Biko” and give the former tune an additional layer of universal meaning.

There’s nothing but good times in the closer, “Kiss of Life”—at least in the massive rhythms that spur one to dance in imitation of the “big woman” who dances on the tables at the Easter feast for the fishermen, welcoming each one. And then there’s a turn: in the bridge, we learn that “there’s a body in the sand” which the big woman resuscitates: “With heat from her skin and fire from her breath/She blows hard, she blows deep/In the mouth of death.” Did the narrator have a near death experience? Whatever the narrative truth, there is an inexorable dual meaning in the final chorus of “Kiss of life/kiss of life,” with life and death dancing together—however awkwardly, with alternating 3/4 and 4/4 meter in the opening and outro.

In embracing both modern technology and non-European rhythms, Gabriel found a more consistently adventurous sound that enabled him to span between art rock and pop, and landed him an unlikely top-40 hit—all while staying true to his distinctive artistic vision. It came at a cost: the album was recorded and mixed in sessions spanning from early 1981 through the summer of 1982, with hints of the songs only peeking through in a 1982 WOMAD festival performance in which he premiered seven of the eight tunes. That 1982 performance has recently been released, and is worth a listen in its own right, as the musicians dig into tunes that would seem to be designed only for studio performance and miraculously transform them into riveting live bangers.

Peter’s future albums would gestate even longer, as touring and his growing perfectionism stretched the time between albums further and further. Fortunately for us, his collaborators were also releasing spectacular music in their own right in between these infrequent records, and we’ll hear from one of those next time.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: Here’s what might be the first live performance of “The Rhythm of the Heat,” from the 1982 WOMAD festival complete with the original rhythm section:

BONUS BONUS: “Shock the Monkey” is the most coverable of all the songs on the album, so it takes a lot for a new cover of it to surprise me. This one by Local H with both band members sharing a gorilla costume achieves the goal.

BONUS BONUS BONUS: A sort of cover? Here’s Peter Gabriel with Sting performing “Shock the Monkey” live in 2016:

Footnotes

  1. Horn would famously help to popularize one of the key samples from the Fairlight’s built-in set, an orchestral “hit” called ORCH5, in his work with both Yes and Art of Noise. ↩︎
  2. It might have been an artistic success, but it was a financial flop; faced with substantial debt, Gabriel reunited with Genesis for a single show, which put the festival, and his own finances, back on an even keel. ↩︎

Laurie Anderson, Big Science

The conceptual artist’s first major label album is an unliikely, and highly listenable, artifact from an ambiguous future.

Album of the Week, March 28, 2026

Performance artists do art pieces and get grants. They might release recordings of their work on small labels. They don’t, typically, have singles that hit the top of the charts, and they certainly don’t dedicate those singles to a dead French composer. But then, Laurie Anderson has never been typical.

The story of Big Science starts before You’re the Guy I Want to Share My Money With. Laurie had recorded the song and released it as a single in the UK in 1980 on the small label One Ten Records, in a limited edition of 1000 copies. That’s when BBC DJ John Peel changed the trajectory of her career. Putting it in frequent rotation on his show on BBC Radio One, his championing of the song led a British distributor to request 80,000 copies of the single. Laurie signed a distribution deal with Warner Bros. Records and the single went all the way to Number Two in the UK. On the strength of the single, Warner Bros. signed Laurie to an eight-album deal.

The album was released in April 1982. Produced by Roma Baran, who also played keyboards, accordion and percussion, and featuring installation artist Perry Hoberman on reeds, experimental composer Peter Gordon on clarinet and tenor sax, Bill Obrecht on alto sax, and composer David Van Tieghem on drums, marimba and percussion, the album featured a variety of performances drawn from a long-form show that she would eventually perform and record as United States Live I – IV. The material is much more melodic than the numbers on You’re the One I Want to Share My Money With, but still far from traditional song structures; built on loops, repetition, and open-ended chords, the pieces on Big Science feel like alerts from the future.

“From the Air” starts with a blast of keyboards and saxophones against the drums as Laurie Anderson narrates the increasingly unhinged thoughts of an in-flight announcement: “Your Captain says put your head on your knees. Your Captain says put your head in your hands. Captain says, put your hands on your head. Put your hands on your hips! Heh heh. This is your Captain, and we are going down. We are all going down together. And I said Uh-oh. This is going to be some day.” The repetition and music slowly ratchets up in intensity, and the syncopated drum pattern the sense of uncertainty, until the final verse: “Put your hands over your eyes. Jump out of the plane. There is no pilot. You are not alone. Standby. This is the time, and this is the record of the time.” Anderson’s words here (and elsewhere on Big Science) take on an uncomfortable resonance in the shadow of the September 11th attacks, but even without that massive hole in history lending its gravity, the intersection between order and chaos, the apparent power of the captain that is revealed to be illusion, pulls us in.

If “From the Air” has a sense of claustrophobia, “Big Science” and its synthesized lonely howl bring us to a wide empty space, with echoing handclaps and open fifths adding to the sense of anticipatory emptiness. We hear Laurie’s actual singing voice, a pure soprano in contrast to her normally lower pitched speaking voice, which gives an apocalyptic vision of the future: “I said, Hey pal, how do I get to town? And he said, well, just take a right where they’re going to build that new shopping mall, go straight past where they’re going to put in the freeway, and take a left at what’s going to be the new sports center. And keep going til you get to the place where they’re thinking of putting in the new drive-in bank.… And I said, ‘This must be the place.’” The future here is anticipatory but also hostile: “And long cars and long lines and great big signs/And they all say: Hallelujah. Yodellayheehoo. Every man for himself.” Laurie was listening to the same wavelength as William Gibson, who had written “The Gernsback Continuum” a year before about hallucinatory invasions of alternate future universes from 1930s pulp paperbacks: “The Thirties dreamed white marble and slip-stream chrome, immortal crystal and burnished bronze, but the rockets on the covers of the Gernsback pulps had fallen on London in the dead of night, screaming. After the war, everyone had a car—no wings for it—and the promised superhighway to drive it down, so that the sky itself darkened, and the fumes ate the marble and pitted the miracle crystal…” But here rather than hallucinatory bleed-through the future is just full of totemic emptiness.

“Sweaters” has all the edge of Laurie’s more confrontational early work, here amped up to eleven by Van Tieghem’s stumbling drum work and Rufus Harley’s screaming bagpipes, playing against Laurie’s nonverbal vocalizations and her drone-like violin, all against a series of aleatory declarations of ended love: “I no longer love the color of your eyes/I no longer love the color of your sweaters.”

“Walking and Falling” is a quieter experimental reading against a looped background, a meditation leading into a straightforward reading of a poem ending with the question: “What is behind that curtain?” Then we get the keyboards and marimba of “Born, Never Asked,” in a new reading that is compositionally identical to the version on You’re the Guy… but with much better sound. A voiceover announces “You were born, and so you’re free. So happy birthday,” providing a non-answer to the question of what lies behind the curtain: it’s up to you, apparently, even if that self determination ultimately leads to the desolation of “Big Science.”

Side two opens with the album’s most enduring work. “O Superman (For Massenet)” is so titled because of Laurie’s cockeyed translation of the Massenet aria (from the opera El Cid) “Ô Souverain, ô juge, ô père”: “O Superman, o judge, o mom and dad.” The music is simple: built on a loop of Anderson’s voice on a single note, the vocal melody destabilizes, going from a major key (with the single note on the third) to a minor key with the repeated note on the tonic. Effects on Anderson’s voice make the sung lines sound at once like a Greek chorus and a robot. Even more than “From the Air,” the stark arrangement and openness of the voices fill the listener with a sense of growing unease, ultimately growing to a real feeling of dread: “Hello? This is your mother. Are you there? Are you coming home? —Well you don’t know me/But I know you/And I have a message/To give to you:/Here come the planes.” Anderson has stated that she wrote the song in the aftermath of the failed rescue of the Iranian hostages, Operation Eagle Claw, and the tragic deaths of eight American servicemen, and it continues the message of dependence and violence: “So hold me mom/In your long arms… In your automatic arms/Your petrochemical arms/In your electronic arms.” Other motifs weave their way through the song, culminating in a crescendo of minor-key chord progressions that echo the melody of “From the Air,” rise like the tide to a crashing climax, and fall away, leaving only the “ah-ah-ah.” Listening to it, you understand what would drive John Peel to play the song over and over, and Warner Bros. to sign her.

From the sublime to the ridiculous, “Example #22” announces itself in German as “examples of paranormal voices on tape” (Beispeile paranormaler Tonbandstimmen), interspersed with ringing phones, saxophones, reeds, and an accordion, accompanying what must surely be Laurie’s brattiest vocal. It’s great fun and completely impenetrable.

By contrast, “Let X = X / It Tango” closes out the record with quotably wry wit. “Let X = X” is practically a quotable aphorism in every line: “And I said, O boy. Right. Again. … You know. It could be you. It’s a sky-blue sky. Satellites are out tonight. … You know, I could write a book. And this book would be thick enough to stun an ox. ‘Cause I can see the future, and it’s a place about 70 miles east of here. Where it’s lighter.” The handclaps and marimba tie the arrangement back to “Born, Never Asked,” only in a much lighter vein; they continue through “It Tango,” a stopping and starting argument in search of an antecedent. She closes with a declaration of utterly failed communication: “Your eyes. It’s a day’s work just looking into them.”

Laurie’s first album immediately established her as a witty, thoughtful, highly listenable artist. And a bankable one: it sold 150,000 copies in its first year of release, smaller sales than a typical rock album but not by much (compare to 100,000 copies of Peter Gabriel (1977) in the UK). Her voice would continue to develop over the next few years, and we’ll check in on her again soon, but first we’ll see what kept Peter busy since the 1980 self-titled album.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: The b-side of “O Superman” was “Walk the Dog,” an exercise in odd narrative that leans into a trope from her shows, the “difficult listening hour,” with barking dogs, a voice shifted high in pitch to the edge of squeak, strummed violin strings, and a bashed drum kit:

BONUS BONUS: Laurie Anderson did a Tiny Desk Concert from home back in 2021, joined by Roma Baran and cellist Robin Kodheli, performing “Let X=X” and “O Superman”:

Anderson/Giorno/Burroughs, You’re the Guy I Want to Share My Money With

A dip into the wild world of performance art and avant-garde writing from the dawn of the New Wave.

Album of the Week, March 21, 2026

The name of this segment of my album reviews was originally going to be “art rock.” But while that term has been used to apply to Peter Gabriel’s work, it’s impossibly undefinable, and didn’t really cover the work of one of his collaborators whose story we’ll begin to discuss today. Though Laurie Anderson is undeniably an artist, the “rock” part is an ill-fitting label, and none of her recordings illustrates the challenge as much as today’s recording, a compilation of spoken word, performance art, and poetry that pairs her with two other challenging artists over a year before the release of her debut album.

Laurie Anderson was born in Chicago and grew up in the Illinois suburbs studying art and playing in the Chicago Youth Symphony. She drew comics, made sculpture, and did performance art: her first public performance was a symphony for automobile horns, and one of her best-known pieces from the 1970s, “Duets on Ice,” involved her playing violin against a recording of herself while wearing ice skates that had been frozen into blocks of ice—the performance ended when the ice melted enough to free her skates.1 Also in the 1970s she connected with New York poet and performance artist John Giorno, on whose Giorno Poetry Systems label she released some of her earliest recordings (including some for his groundbreaking “Dial-A-Poem” system).2

Increasingly Anderson was drawn to recorded art, though she never abandoned her more visual instincts, and in 1981 she released two important records. One, a single called “O Superman,” was released in October on a small label and had an unusually strong reception (which we’ll discuss another time). The second was a side (er, a side-plus) of this double album on Giorno Poetry Systems, with which Anderson appeared alongside two even more avant-garde poets: Giorno himself, and William S. Burroughs.

The latter had outlived his early tumultuous years—gay, addicted to opiates, accidental murderer—and had built a solid, if solidly weird, literary reputation as the author of works like The Naked Lunch, a science fiction trilogy (The Soft Machine,3 The Ticket That Exploded, Nova Express) and a great many short stories. He also made a number of recordings on a variety of small labels that featured his distinctive reading of his own works, based on the live readings that he was now giving on the lecture circuit. It was in this vein4 that Burroughs appeared on this recording. All three artists had appeared together in a series of readings and performances dubbed “The Red Night Tour.”

Laurie Anderson’s segment of the album is the most straightforward, and that’s saying something. While parts of the performance were recognizably connected to other things happening in music in the early 1980s (“Doctor Miller” is practically a Kraftwerk song, if you subtract the increasingly anxious PA voiceovers calling for the doctor), others are distinctively and uniquely Laurie’s voice, even (“It Was Up in the Mountains”) when the words are spoken by someone else. If I’m honest, “Closed Circuit” is more interesting than listenable, notable primarily for featuring Laurie’s use of vocal effects to create a deeper timbre for her speaking voice—a trick that she would perfect elsewhere, but here is marred by the lengthy lyric that feels more like a shaggy dog story. The end of Side 1 closes with an eerie instrumental played on a Farfisa, a marimba, handclaps, and Laurie’s brilliant violin; “Born, Never Asked” would appear again.

Side 2 is given over to two John Giorno poems, “I Don’t Need It, I Don’t Want It, and You Cheated Me Out of It” and “Completely Attached to Delusion.” Like Laurie Anderson, he plays with vocal effects, but his use of tape delay and pre-recorded alternate readings of the work is by turns disorienting, exhilarating and overwhelming. But it is a committed and fully out there reading, and there’s a direct line to be traced from his work to poetry slams.

Burroughs gets the next side, giving a series of readings from his novels, including the first appearance of his horrifically funny Dr. Benway (“Dr. Benway, ship’s doctor, drunkenly added two inches to a four inch incision with one stroke of his scalpel… ‘Perhaps the appendix is already out, doctor?’ The nurse said, appearing dubiously over his shoulder. ‘I saw a little scar.’”) But listening to the material one after another, one draws the following conclusions: that half the joy in listening to Burroughs comes from the sheer naughtiness of it and the joy he takes in elongating the sneering tones of protagonist and antagonist alike; that beneath that sneer lurks a pointed and deadly serious battle against inhumanity, stupidity and senseless violence; and that the non sequiturs introduced by Burroughs’ “cut up” method of literally cutting and pasting his writing together into new alearic combinations can sometimes be the only defense against a nonsensical and fragmenting world.

The most unusual feature of the album is its tracklist. Each of the performers takes up a side from 1 to 3, but the fourth side is something else again, featuring three independent grooves about five minutes each. Which one you get depends on where you drop the needle. Laurie’s contribution is a montage featuring two electronic percussion numbers (“For Electronic Dogs” and “Drums”) sandwiching an earnest young man reading a short bit over some cheery library music. “Structuralist Filmmaking” is one of Laurie’s most dryly funny bits; I wonder how much of its narrative was inspired by Burroughs’ cut-up method.

Taken together, the two hours of You’re the Guy I Want To Share My Money With are by turns funny, bracing, moving, and occasionally maddening. The connection from Laurie Anderson’s experimental synthesizers and samples to Peter Gabriel’s increasingly rhythmic art-pop sensibility is hard to see at this stage. But in next week’s album, we’ll see the bridge begin to be built, and it starts with that other 1981 Laurie Anderson release.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: Giorno was one of a group of artists in Burroughs’ orbit when he returned to New York City in the 1970s, and later lived in the windowless apartment (dubbed “The Bunker”) where Burroughs lived and wrote and shot pistols for target practice (!). Here he gives a tour through the Bunker, which was restored to the way it was when Burroughs lived there after the latter’s death:

Footnotes

  1. For those for whom this sort of stuff is fascinating, her 1994 book Stories from the Nerve Bible offers a great look at all the wonderful weirdness of her performance art days. ↩︎
  2. Somewhat to my amazement, not only is Giorno Poetry Systems still online, but so is the web version of Dial-A-Poem. ↩︎
  3. The Soft Machine later lent its name to an English progressive-rock group that included about twenty musicians among its membership in its lifetime, including Rick Wakeman (later of Yes), Andy Summers of the Police, and Peter Gabriel’s occasional saxophonist Dick Morrissey. ↩︎
  4. Pun intended. ↩︎

Peter Gabriel, Peter Gabriel 3 (1980)

In this 1980 recording, a massive drum sound and sharpened songwriting lead to the discovery of a new voice.

Album of the Week, March 14, 2026

It’s the drums that hit you first. The booming sound, enormous and then cut off, of the opening snare on the first track of Peter Gabriel’s 1980 album (also called Peter Gabriel), might be the most iconic of all 1980s percussion sounds, and it immediately arrests your attention—as does the crackling sound of fingernails on guitar strings that follows. You begin to understand why Ahmet Ertegun, founder of Atlantic Records (who had distributed Peter’s first two albums in the States), asked upon hearing the album, “Has Peter been in a mental hospital?” But that rhythm-centered sound and the lyrical unease were the key to unlocking Peter Gabriel’s most successful period of songwriting, and it’s all here in the first few seconds.

Peter was continuing to look for new sounds, and he found them here, starting with the idea that he would write “rhythm first.” Keyboard player Larry Fast had introduced him to the PAiA Programmable Drum Set, which allowed Peter to build his own rhythms so that he could write his songs around them during the songwriting process.

Part of the magic of the album was the cast of musicians. In addition to Collins, the core band of Tony Levin, Jerry Marotta and Larry Fast were all back, joined by David Rhodes, recently of Random Hold. Robert Fripp was out of the producer’s chair but still contributed hot solos on three of the tracks; also in the guest guitarist chair were Dave Gregory of XTC and Paul Weller of The Jam. Jazz artist Dick Morrissey brought saxophone to a number of the tracks. John Giblin, who had joined the British jazz-fusion band Brand X alongside Collins, played a fair amount of electric bass on the album. And appearing on two tracks with guest vocals was Kate Bush (who we briefly met at the end of our discussion of Peter Gabriel 1); at age 21 she had two albums under her belt (including a Number One hit in the UK), and was working on her third.

All together the musicians produced a recording that, while met with puzzlement by Atlantic Records (who distributed Peter’s music in the US and ultimately passed on the release, causing him to switch to Mercury Records), stands as one of his most original and enduring. Let’s dive in.

“Intruder” (with Collins on drums) brings forward all the unique aspects of Gabriel’s songwriting that defined this album: the heavy rhythmic focus, the paranoia and alienation, and the painstaking focus on aural textures. Opening with that immense gated reverb sound in the drums, Gabriel’s narrator confesses to disturbing crimes: “I know something about/Opening windows and doors… Slipping the clippers/Slipping the clippers through the telephone wires.” There’s a new sense of artistic confidence in Peter’s voice; the lyrics are terse, the chords stabbing, and that thunderous drum sound all combine to terrifying effect, culminating in the final verse: “I like to feel the suspense/When I’m certain you know I am there.” Also noteworthy is the percussion part in the midst of the song; Peter has said that he was hugely influenced by Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians and its marimba textures, and the sound of the marimba would feature at several other key points in the album (here played by composer Morris Pert, who had also spent some time in Brand X). The whistled melody at the end is the chilling cherry on top.

“No Self Control” opens with a guitar hook that is panned hard in the stereo mix, alternating between the left and right channels, courtesy Robert Fripp. But the main story of the song is the textures behind the verse: Pert’s marimba, wordless choruses of backing vocals from Kate Bush, an unassuming piano part, and then going into the chorus a massive build up in Phil Collins’ gated snare that sounds like the apocalypse arriving. The lyrics reference compulsive behavior (“Got to get so food, I’m so hungry all the time… Got to get some sleep, I’m so nervous in the night/And I don’t know how to stop”), but the real story may be the connecting thread of implied violence in a relationship, picking up where the last verse of “Intruder” left off: “You know I hate to hurt you, I hate to see your pain/But I don’t know how to stop, I don’t know how to stop.” The song is a superb miniature where all the parts work together

We get a breather from the intensity thanks to the jazz interlude of “Start,” which combines synthesizer and sampling keyboards with a grade-A rock saxophone solo from Dick Morrissey. It builds up to a hard cut into “I Don’t Remember,” powered by Jerry Marotta’s thudding backbeat and a killer guitar sound from Dick Gregory, alongside Tony Levin’s Chapman Stick and a falsetto vocal intro that seems equally influenced by disco and Middle Eastern chant. More alienation here, with verses that could be read both as immigration to a strange land and to interpersonal communications breakdowns: “Strange is your language and I have no decoder/Why don’t you make your intention clear/With eyes to the sun and your mouth to the soda/Saying, ‘Tell me the truth, you’ve got nothing to fear.’”

“Family Snapshot” puts us in the mind of an assassin with a twist. There’s a quiet introduction on the keyboard as the narrator surveys the crowded street awaiting the arrival of his target, and anticipating becoming part of the story: “Today is different/Today is not the same/Today I make the action/Take snapshot into the light… I’m shooting into the light.” The band takes off with excitement as the action deepens: “The governor’s car is not far behind/He’s not the one I’ve got in mind/‘Cause there he is, the man of the hour/Standing in the limousine.” It’s at this point that the song takes a twist as the narrator makes it clear his action has nothing to do with his feelings about his target, but about being abandoned and anonymous. By shooting his victim, he reclaims some part of his own narrative, even through infamy. And then the final twist: “All turned quiet, I’ve been here before/A lonely boy hiding behind the front door… Come back mum and dad/You’re growing apart, know that I’m growing up sad.” Gabriel would later write honest songs about the pain in his relationship with his father; here for the first time he explores that dynamic of interpersonal relationships leading to tragic outcomes in one five-minute epic. It’s deeply moving and instantly memorable. Small wonder that when Gabriel’s nascent Internet fan club asked members to write in their favorites for his 2001 WOMAD performance in Redmond, Washington, that this song made the cut.

“And Through the Wire” stays focused on relationships, this time through the lens of communication and introduced by the crunch of Paul Weller’s guitar lead. Though it has the sharper focus and songwriting characteristic of this higher level of Gabriel’s artistry, its combination of 7/4 and triple meter is a reminder of his progressive rock roots. But with that insane guitar and Marotta’s drumming, you hardly notice the rhythmic complexity. It’s a breath following “Family Snapshot” and an effective closer for a stunning Side 1.

Side 2 doesn’t let up, either. Peter counts in the intro and “Games Without Frontiers” kicks off with a vaguely disco-feeling drum machine, heightened by the combination of David Rhodes’ lead guitar, Marotta’s percussion and, most of all, Kate Bush’s high backing vocals as she sings “jeux sans frontières.” The lyrics are playful with an undercurrent of menace as “Hans plays with Lotte/Lotte plays with Jane” yields to “Adolf builds a bonfire/Enrico plays with it.” But it’s all somehow danceable and weirdly singable, and it yielded his first top 10 UK hit.

“Not One of Us” starts with Peter’s ululating vocals and a Robert Fripp guitar solo that sounds like shredded glass. John Giblin’s bass is a lead character in the song as Peter sings about racism, first telling the immigrant “A foreign body and a foreign mind/Never welcome in the land of the blind,” then telling the racist “All shades of opinion feed an open mind/but your values are twisted.” Between the two verses, the chorus—“You may look like we do, talk like we do/But you know how it is/You’re not one of us”—inverts its meaning. In the coda, the last minute-plus of the song becomes a monster driven by a massive four-note hook in the guitar and bass and Jerry Marotta’s frenetic, polyrhythmic drumming. It’s among the most intense music Peter had ever created to that point, and he would return to it later in the 1980s.

After the climax, “Lead a Normal Life” seems to offer a respite in the cool tones of Morris Pert’s marimba. But the marimba pattern refuses to settle in tonality, playing on an open fifth indefinitely, and the synth lead is similarly unsettled, wandering past but never landing on the tonic. A distorted cry accompanies the bridge but then we return to the music of confinement, which repeats three times and then suddenly drops into tonality. But what initially sounds like a refuge reveals itself to be even more of a trap: “It’s nice here with a view of the trees/Eating with a spoon, they don’t give you knives/‘Spect you watch those trees blowing in the breeze/We want to see you lead a normal life.” And the menacing music of what is now revealed to be an institution returns, with a reprise of the distorted cry, with guitar distortion that subliminally builds in the background into a constant weeping. It’s masterful and deeply discomforting.

The final track, “Biko,” prompted Ahmet Ertegun’s other unfortunate comment about the album: “What do people in America care about this guy in South Africa?” Peter had been deeply moved by the story of the death of anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko in the custody of the South African police in 1977, and wrote the final song of the album as a eulogy. It opens with an excerpt of “Ngomhla sibuyayo” and segues into a massive two-tone drumbeat on the Brazilian Surdo drum (played by Collins), with an emphatic David Rhodes guitar drone above which Peter sings about Biko’s death: “September ’77, Port Elizabeth weather fine/It was business as usual in Police Room 619.” He sings in Xhosa “Yila moja” (Come Spirit), invoking the continued presence of Biko’s cause even as he sings “The man is dead” over the sounds of bagpipes. In the last verse he warns, “You can blow out a candle/But you can’t blow out a fire/Once the flames begin to catch/The wind will blow it higher… And the eyes of the world are watching now.” This first Western protest song against the inhumanity of the South African apartheid system would have been sufficiently noteworthy; its incredible anthemic quality and singability made it a totem of a new movement.

Gabriel found his voice on this third self-titled album, and found a connection to the broader outside world. “Biko” in particular led to performances with Amnesty International later in his career, but it would also bring him into contact with a world full of musicians who would radically shape his music even as he brought them to wider attention. We’ll explore some of those connections in a few weeks. But next week we’ll listen to the work of a future Gabriel collaborator who brought a different kind of artistic sensibility to the unlikely world of pop music.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: Peter had found German audiences receptive on his late-1970s tours, apparently, because he did a version of Peter Gabriel (1980) in German, with him singing translated lyrics over the original backing tracks from the album. Here’s “Keine Selbskontrolle”:

BONUS BONUS: “Biko” became an enduring part of Peter’s musical legacy and has been played many, many times live. Here’s an early one from the very first WOMAD festival in 1982 (about which, more later…):

BONUS BONUS BONUS: Peter’s 2010–2013 project of cover songs yielded a bunch of fascinating Peter Gabriel cover versions of some great songs (Scratch My Back), and some reciprocal covers. In exchange for Peter’s cover of the Talking Heads song “Listening Wind,” David Byrne recorded this fascinating take on “I Don’t Remember” which led off the compilation And I’ll Scratch Yours:

Peter Gabriel, Peter Gabriel 2 (1978)

The second PG album finds him experimenting, with sometimes thrilling and sometimes uneven results.

Album of the Week, March 7, 2026

Looking back at Peter Gabriel’s career, some of the consistent themes are perfectionism and painstaking deliberation. We’re talking about a performer who went from 2002 (Up) until 2023 (I/O) — 21 years between releases of original music. (There was other music of merit in that period, but that’s a different story.) So it comes as a surprise to realize that Peter Gabriel’s second album was released only 15 months after his first. Almost all of that is due to his choice of producer for the second album: Robert Fripp.

Fripp was starting to transition in his career from sideman (most notably for David Bowie on “Heroes”) and leader of the intermittently active King Crimson to producer, on the strength of his ingenious guitar work and technological inventiveness (the unique “Frippertronics” system, the first live looping solution for performers, is the best known example). Peter was looking for a specific sound texture, and brought musicians to the record who could provide it, like the redoubtable Tony Levin, drummer Jerry Marotta, and synth player Larry Fast, all of whom would appear in more PG albums. He also admired Fripp’s more improvisational and brisk working methods; he’s said about the album, “Robert Fripp was very keen to try speeding up my recording process, as many people have been since and failed, but he got closest to it.”

Unusually, the album is the second to be titled Peter Gabriel; Gabriel felt this allowed more attention to be paid to the album artwork by design house Hipgnosis (who also shot the “rainy windshield” on Peter Gabriel (1977)). I’ve also read that he thought of it almost like a magazine or periodical—“here’s the latest Peter Gabriel.” Looking at the entire discography, it’s clear he was never much of a fan of album titles, as we’ll see.

“On the Air” starts in a very different sonic landscape from where PG1 left off. Bright synthesizer lines lead to muscular guitar and bass, backed up by the massive drums of Jerry Marotta. The song is a straightforwardly driving 4/4 until the chorus, which drops into 6/8 for a few bars. And the vocals, while rough—you can hear the strain in his high notes, and his sometimes sandy tenor sounds thin and scratchy—are exciting, especially as he soars up the lines of “on the air” in the chorus. Lyrically, the subject—Gabriel’s Mozo character building a radio transmitter so that he can project his psychic energy out to the world—is obscure but the writing is taut: “Built in the belly of junk by the river my cabin stands/Made from the trash, I dug off the heap with my own fair hands/Every night I’m back at the shack and I’m sure no one else is there/I’m putting the aerial up so I can go out on the air.”

“D.I.Y.,” driven by a throbbing Tony Levin line on the Chapman Stick, is even more tautly wound. Gabriel says he was listening to punk and new wave at this time, and this song shows the influence even though it’s in 5/4 and has a complex chord change in the pre-chorus. It’s another song dealing with the aftermath of his time in Genesis: “You’re still looking for the resurrection/Come up to me with your ‘What did you say?’/And I’ll tell you, straight in the eye.” It’s short and pointed and a great song.

“Mother of Violence” is the only song in Peter’s work with a writing credit by his then-wife Jill. It’s a quiet tune with unusual instrumentation—pedal steel, acoustic piano—and a vocal that sounds a bit like late-1970s Phil Collins and ends with vocalese. It’s all in service of a lyric about difficult family relationships that is one of the more fraught bits of writing on the album.

“A Wonderful Day in a One-Way World” is an odd bit of a song, with a vocal that sounds a bit like a scratch take and a slightly proggy reggae feel, and a lyric that is reminiscent of some of the odder corners of Paul Simon, particularly in the dialog with the old man in the second verse. But it also has some of the better vocal harmonies on the album in the chorus, so that’s something in its favor at least. It’s followed with the frustratingly opaque “White Shadow,” which marries an instrumental track that could have been at home on late-1970s Genesis, circa …And Then There Were Three…. The first verse starts promisingly enough—“Ten coaches roll into the dust/Chrome windows turned to rust”—but then we’re rhyming “spirit died” with “Kentucky Fried.” Fripp’s guitar solo at the end is a thing of beauty, though, in duet with Tony Levin’s increasingly virtuosic bass, and there are hints of a synthesizer sound played by Peter that would become an increasingly familiar backdrop in his other albums.

“Indigo” is a piano-driven ballad with recorder and pedal steel, a story of an elderly man coming to terms with his impending death. The track seems to have a bunch of different ideas that never quite cohere, but the vocal is one of the finer on the album technically, with properly prepared high notes and controlled dynamics adding to the emotional affect. That’s a contrast with “Animal Magic,” which has one of the rougher vocals on the album and a lyric about proving manhood by becoming a soldier, and an anonymous guitar solo that sounds a bit like generic ’70s rock.

“Exposure,” though, is one of the key sonic pieces on the album. Driven by a mean locked in groove from Levin and Marotta, the main event here is the Frippertronics and Peter’s repeated chants of “exposure… space is what I need…” It’s the groove, though, that feels the most like a Peter Gabriel song, and we’ll hear it again in many other contexts.

“Flotsam and Jetsam” is a song of lament for a failed relationship. It’s competently written but ultimately forgettable, thanks in part to indifferent vocal recording featuring one of the few instances of an echo or reverb on the album which only serves to underscore the brevity of the song. Peter seems rather in a hurry to get on to “Perspective,” which feels a bit like a downtown 1970s New York number complete with saxophone on the chorus and a repeated “I need perspective” on the verses. Gabriel sings from the perspective of an industrial businessman to his former lover, who may or may not be the earth (“Oh Gaia, if that’s your name/Treat you like dirt, but I don’t want to blame…”)

That leads us to “Home Sweet Home,” which frustratingly sums up all the off characteristics of this second album. The songwriting feels a bit like Peter’s version of Randy Newman (last heard on “Waiting for the Big One”), the pedal steel seems like we’re in a country song, and we have another one of the indifferently recorded scratch vocals. And it’s about a man whose wife commits suicide, killing his child at the same time; despairing, he gambled with the insurance check and won big, buying a country home far away from his eleventh floor walk-up. The last verse features one of Peter’s most challenging-to-listen-to vocals, as his high vocal obbligato provides an impression of the man’s wordless sobs. It feels dark in an exploitive way. We will get much more earned dark passages in future albums, but here it feels like he’s trying on someone else’s pain.

Ultimately 1978’s Peter Gabriel is a frustratingly uneven album. There are some great songs—both “On the Air” and “D.I.Y.” are in the canon of his greatest songs, and “Exposure” is affecting, but many of the others suffer from the rapid approach to recording and writing. He took more time on the next record, and it showed. We’ll listen to that one next time.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: Fripp connected a series of albums that he produced in the late 1970s, including Peter Gabriel, Daryl Hall’s Sacred Songs, and his own debut solo album Exposure, as a loose trilogy. He re-recorded “Exposure” for the latter album, and it’s … really something, thanks to vocals by Terre Roche of the Roches:

BONUS BONUS: The band for this tour, with Sid McGinnis in for Fripp, was a tight machine. Here’s a German performance of “On the Air” from 1978 that shows Peter had been watching punk acts:

Peter Gabriel, Peter Gabriel 1 (1977)

A former prog-rock frontman steps out of the machinery and begins the long process of reinventing himself.

Album of the Week, February 28, 2026

In 1977, Peter Gabriel was preparing to put a new face forward. He was no stranger to the spotlight; the band he co-founded, Genesis, had released six albums, with their fifth, Selling England by the Pound, reaching Number 3 on the UK Albums chart. Gabriel, the band’s lead vocalist, had become the visible face of Genesis, with elaborate costumes and stage makeup; the rest of the band grew frustrated on the tour for their last album together, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, as fans would bypass the instrumentalists and go straight to Gabriel, praising his theatrics. On Lamb, Gabriel had wanted to tell a coherent story and had taken over writing all the lyrics, where prior songwriting had been more collaborative, raising tensions within the band. Furthermore, the tour for Lamb, consisting of 102 dates, had put a strain on Gabriel’s marriage to Jill Moore. It was time to move on, in other words.

Gabriel took a year off so that it wouldn’t be perceived that he had departed on bad terms. When his self-titled debut album arrived in February 1977, about a week before Mingus and his band entered the studio to start recording Three or Four Shades of Blues, it was a very different kind of record and a different sound than he had achieved with Genesis. Instead of an album-spanning narrative, there were episodes that focused on hallucinatory flashes of insight and personal connections. There was hard rock, arty carnival music, and twisted barbershop that sounded for all the world like Randy Newman. And there was a strange little ditty in 7/4 time.

The musicians weren’t really a band, just a quiverful of studio aces. Producer Bob Ezrin, who was previously known for producing such diverse artists as Alice Cooper (14 albums over the years including School’s Out and Welcome to My Nightmare), Lou Reed (Berlin), Aerosmith (Get Your Wings), Flo & Eddie’s self-titled album, and Kiss (Destroyer)—and later Pink Floyd’s The Wall, would seem to be an odd choice to produce the former Genesis frontman. Ezrin pulled together a group of mostly US studio musicians including guitarist Steve Hunter (who had worked with Ezrin with both Cooper and Reed), Dick Wagner (ditto, also a longtime Reed associate), synth artist Larry Fast, percussionist Jimmy Maelen, keyboardist Josef Chirowski, drummer Allan Schwartzman, and virtuoso bassist Tony Levin, who would go on to a nearly fifty-year career with Gabriel. To this mix Gabriel added King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp, several months before he collaborated with David Bowie on “Heroes.” The London Symphony Orchestra appeared on several tracks as well. A minimalist production this was not.

The opening of the album suggests that this may indeed be an exercise in rock and roll excess, but with a progressive-rock core. “Moribund the Burgermeister” opens with a quietly mysterious verse over squelchy synths, describing an outbreak of disease (possibly St. Vitus Dance) in a medieval village: “Caught the chaos in the market square/I don’t know what, I don’t know why/But something’s wrong down there/Their bodies twisting and turning in a thousand ways/The eyes all rolling ’round and ’round into a distant gaze…” But in the chorus everything swells, the symphony (or at least guitars and synths) enter, and suddenly we’re in the head of the titular burgermeister: “No one can tell/what all this is about/but I will find out.” There’s more than a hint of Dylan’s Mr. Jones in the burgermeister, a figure both threatening and ridiculous, the latter especially in the song’s long fade-out as Gabriel mutters, “I will find out… Mother, you know your son, and you know I will” in an affected deep voice.

And then “Solsbury Hill.” Arguably the most beloved of all Gabriel’s solo work and certainly a highlight of his early career, the twelve-string intro is sunshine and reflection, as Gabriel narrates a story that is either about his transition from Genesis to a solo career, or about a long-stranded extraterrestrial being rescued from a hilltop by his alien friends. Played in 7/4, the longer measures contribute to the sense of reflection, as well as a perpetual feeling of being slightly off-balance.1 It’s not just the 7/4 that contributes this impression; the focal beat shifts within the measure thanks to the dotted rhythm, keeping the listener in motion as Gabriel sings the greatest line ever written about going solo: “I was feeling part of the scenery/I walked right out of the machinery.” But leaving aside all the complex backstory and the prog-rock rhythms, it’s still a joyous anthem to freedom, and clear to see why it remains among his most popular songs.

“Modern Love” feels more like it could have come out of another Ezrin production, albeit one with a love for odd metrical structures (the verse here is set with groups of three measures in common time — or one long 12/4 measure). It features a strenuous rock vocal from Peter, particularly on the chorus (“Ah, the pain! Modern love can be a strain”). According to Ezrin, this was method acting; he thought Gabriel’s vocal was too polite, so he asked engineer Brian Christian to take the musician up a ladder and duct-tape him to a pillar by his armpits to record the chorus vocal.

“Excuse Me” is easily the oddest song on the album. Opening with a barbershop quartet arranged by Tony Levin and featuring Chirowski and Maelen alongside Levin and Gabriel, the song fairly quickly mutates into a British dance hall number, with a chorus vocal that could have been sung by Randy Newman (and only the second appearance in four years of columns of the Acme siren whistle). It’s weird, and maybe the best example of Gabriel’s free exploration of different sounds on the record, once he was freed from the constraints of Genesis.

“Humdrum” feels a bit more like the band he left, if you disregard the samba. There’s a combination of a quiet intro, some Latin percussion which is interesting over the three-quarter time of the verse, odd backing instruments (harmonium!), and sweeping synthesizers on the chorus that take us into a swooning bridge and ultimately into a grand chorus, featuring a grandly disappointing lyric from Peter: “Out of woman comes a man/Spends the rest of his life getting back when he can.” This clunker aside, the rest of the song reads as a moving, if surreal (“Hey Valentina, you want me to beg? You got me cooking, I’m a hard boiled egg”) paean to love.

“Slowburn” gives us a massive Ezrin rock banger that alternates massive verse and chorus orchestration with a pre-chorus that pulls way back to focus on Gabriel’s voice and the piano. The lyrics, seemingly about a relationship slowly being eroded by drugs and each other, are opaque, but they lean into that 1970s guitar sound that Steve Hunter did so well, particularly that diminished 6th that could have been a riff from any of Ezrin’s 1970s production. The song seems destined to be unfinished, going to an unresolved supertonic that fades into nothing, but then Peter returns with an unusually direct plea: “Don’t try to make it easy/It’ll cut you down to size/Darling, we’ve got to trust in something/We’re shooting down our skies…” A sort of clockwork instrumental coda really does fade out into nothingness, leaving the plea unanswered…

… because “Waiting for the Big One” is many strange things, but an answer to “Slowburn”’s direct plea it ain’t. It’s a blues, a barroom song, a showpiece for Ezrin’s hired guns to demonstrate their professionalism, the sound of a drunkard waiting at a bar for the end of the world. Peter’s Randy Newman impression is at its peak here; it’s not one of his finest vocal moments. The instrumental breaks are arguably the best thing about the song, and they’re replete with all the bombast Steve Hunter could summon.

The apocalypse finally arrives in “Down the Dolce Vita,” with chocka-chocka rhythm guitars, the London Symphony, and motifs of drowning amid repeated declarations that “You guys are crazy!” The song is patently part of a larger epic, with characters we never really meet (Aeron and Gotham) trying to charter a boat to make it out of the harbor of a fishing village in a storm. The orchestra adds thrilling musical tension to the number, but ultimately it’s a series of empty visions; the story is too obscure and we’re left to guess at what is happening.

Out of the chaos of “Dolce Vita” comes a sublimely quiet, sad moment. “Here Comes the Flood” revisits the summit of Peter’s apotheosis in “Solsbury Hill” but in a decidedly more apocalyptic mood. The jagged imagery—starfish stranded on a beach, an old trail along a seaside cliff, a nail sunk in a cloud—leads up to the third verse, in which Peter sings of an increase in cosmic energy accompanying the nighttime surge in shortwave radio strength that ultimately leads to the dissolving of barriers between minds and the creation of a mass psychic entity. But you don’t need to know any of that; all you need is the quiet prophetic despair in the chorus: “Ah, here comes the flood/we will say goodbye to flesh and blood/If again, the seas are silent, in any still alive/It’ll be those who gave their island to survive/Drink up, dreamers, you’re running dry.” The first recorded version of the song is full of patented Ezrin bombast, with triumphalist electric guitars and soaring strings, turning the vision into something somehow triumphant. Gabriel ultimately was unsatisfied with this version and recorded it several more times (as you’ll hear below).

The uncanny metal eyeballs in the inner liner are courtesy a pair of mirrored contact lenses.

Part of the impenetrability of the second half of the album is that we’re only getting fragments of a larger story that Gabriel himself hardly knew. The being who catalyzed the departure of the boats and heralded the arrival of mass consciousness was a character called Mozo, a Mosaic figure who didn’t save people so much as inadvertently bring about massive change. Peter played with the narrative for years but never got it into a coherent shape; that never stopped him from including Mozo in several of his early songs. We’ll hear one of those next time.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: Gabriel almost immediately re-recorded “Here Comes the Flood,” this time with Robert Fripp on Fripp’s 1978 album Exposure. This version still has a little of the bombast of the Ezrin version, thanks to Gabriel’s taking the later choruses an octave up, but generally the energy level of the song is more introspective:

BONUS BONUS: In 1978, Peter paid a special visit to Kate Bush on her BBC television Christmas special (which is a good topic for an entirely different post), and stole the show with this stripped down piano and vocal version of “Here Comes the Flood”:

BONUS BONUS BONUS: As any good child of the 1980s knows, Peter did another studio recording of “Flood” for his first greatest hits compilation, 1990’s Shaking the Tree. This one features a freer melody on the verse and is somehow even more pathos-filled:

  1. I’m reminded of Peter Schickele’s line about P.D.Q. Bach’s waltz music, which “suggests that one of his legs was shorter than the other.” ↩︎

Charles Mingus, Three or Four Shades of Blues

An electrifying, bluesy late work from the great bassist takes us on a sort of survey of the many forms of the blues.

Album of the Week, February 21, 2026

Charles Mingus was unwell. The cruel progression of ALS had robbed him of most of his technique on the bass, and of his ability to stand. But he could still play, a bit, and he could lead a band. And so he brought a nonet (and later a, um, tentet) to a New York City studio on March 9-10, 1977 to record tracks for what would become one of his last albums.

Behind the drums sat the redoubtable Dannie Richmond; almost every other musician was a new face for this column, though he had been touring with some of them for years. Jack Walrath (trumpet) and Ricky Ford (tenor sax) were part of his regular touring band, but Bob Neloms was a new face at the piano. Bowing to necessity, George Mraz sat in at bass for the first three tracks, supporting Mingus. Not one but two electric guitarists, Philip Catherine and Larry Coryell, play on the majority of the tracks; John Scofield replaces Catherine on one track and Coryell on another. A second sax player was there too: George Coleman, who after leaving Miles’ band in February 1964 had become an in-demand player, to the point that Coryell is quoted in the liner notes as saying “Is that George Coleman? Is that the George Coleman?” A second piano player, Jimmy Rowles, appears on the long track “Three or Four Shades of Blues,” and Sonny Fortune’s alto sax is on the last number, along with Ron Carter who replaces Mraz.

One could look at the track list, see the first two tunes, and assume that this was another “greatest hits” set with a different band. But there’s a completely different energy here from Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus. “Better Get Hit In Yo’ Soul” gets a better recording of Mingus’s opening bass line, for one thing, which he rips into with alacrity. And the whole temperature is elevated about ten degrees (Fahrenheit) by the two guitarists, particularly Coryell, whose solo is electrifying. There is also, unusually for this tune, a fully sung lyric on the chorus, by the entire band: “He walked on water. He ministered to the blind. He healed the sick. And he raised the dead. Talkin’ ’bout Jesus!” Ricky Ford’s tenor gives a down-home and gutsy R&B solo before taking off into a Trane-inspired series of glissandi over general mayhem in the band. Neloms hammers the keys into the last bridge as the two guitarists play blasts of chords and Jack Walrath lets loose with an apocalyptic squawk. This is Mingus as gateway to the universe; probably why this was the only track of his that made it onto one of my mix tapes as a college student.

“Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” is given a subtler read. George Mraz introduces the tune, arco; and the guitarists play the melody alongside him. The guitarists are playing classical style this time, and Coryell’s virtuosity here is gorgeous but quieter; Catherine’s is practically Spanish in its precision. George Coleman provides an impeccably brilliant tenor solo leading into a key change and Mingus’s harmonically rich exploration. The two guitarists play in duet to close the solo section, leading into the final chorus and a long coda that is both wearily beautiful and impossibly sad.

“Noddin’ Ya Head Blues” takes us into a twelve-bar blues by way of a gospel-inspired Neloms piano solo, punctuated by bursts of Coryell and leading into the melody stated by the two guitarists. Coleman gets a flutteringly beautiful solo that he passes virtuosically to Coryell, who does a combination of Hendrixesque flourishes and dirty Delta blues. Ricky Ford’s solo is restrained by comparison here, but yields to Philip Catherine for a twelve-bar Spanish romp that falls away for Mingus’s slow and low solo, accompanied by Mraz and Richmond up to the final chorus.

“Three or Four Shades of Blues” is programmatic music, with the program helpfully spelled out in the liner notes: “No sub dom Mingus Blues; Old Ellington two-chord blues; Afro-Cuban; Caucasian folk blues; An Ellington form basic blues structure; Count Basie – Walter Page Kansas City bass walking blues; Back to Duke – and Blanton; Super Bebop Blues (Check Bird Out); Back to super bebop line; Then to Mingus, no sub dom, bottom blues line; Then recession, recapitulation, with white folk blues left hanging.” At least three or four shades of blues, indeed. There are some ingenious twists and turns in this music, especially the pivot into Afro-Cuban blues and the cheeky quote of the Mendelssohn wedding march (the Caucasian blues!). For my money this is not one of Mingus’s most essential long-form works, but it might be among his most approachable, particularly in the “super bebop” section.

“Nobody Knows” is credited to Mingus, but it incorporates bits of “Nobody Knows the Troubles I’ve Seen” and “Down by the Riverside” in its brisk melody. Sonny Fortune’s sweet alto soars across the band, leading to John Scofield’s precise blues and Jack Walrath’s trumpet, here brisker and more precise than in his other featured spots. Solos from Philip Catherine and Ricky Ford round out the tune in a valedictory send-off.

Mingus at the White House, June 18, 1978. Courtesy CharlesMingus.com

Mingus recorded two more albums following this one, but his health was going downhill fast. In 1978 he was invited to the White House as part of a ceremony honoring 25 years of the Newport Jazz Festival, where he was lauded by an enthusiastic Jimmy Carter; the moment moved Mingus, now confined to a wheelchair, to tears. He worked in his last days on a project with Joni Mitchell, which she completed after his death as her album Mingus. In late 1978 he traveled to Cuernavaca, Mexico to seek treatment and rest from his disease, and he died there on January 5, 1979. He was only 56 years old.

Mingus stands alone for many reasons: his fierce iconoclasm, his dogged insistence in pursuing his own vision, and the degree to which he succeeded in realizing that artistic direction during his short lifetime. Next week we’ll pick up a different thread that begins with another 1977 album, following the life of another iconoclastic musician who might be as well known for his knack of finding and promoting brilliant collaborators as his own distinct genius.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: A short segment from a longer documentary about the Newport Jazz Festival featured these moments of broadcast video about the White House reception, including a few precious seconds of Mingus, overcome by Carter’s praise of his work.

Charles Mingus, Let My Children Hear Music

The last great composition from Mingus sums up all his contradictions into a single masterpiece.

Album of the Week, February 14, 2026

When we last checked in with composer and bassist Charles Mingus, he was on a career high that was about to enter a downturn. Following Mingus at Monterey, he toured heavily but was without a recording contract, and was evicted from his apartment for nonpayment of rent in 1966. But Mingus seems to have always had the ability to convince the labels to place a bet on him, and the fall of 1971 found him working again with Columbia’s Teo Macero on a big-band recording of all-new compositions.

And what a band! Across six recording sessions between September 23 and November 18, a small army of musicians worked on the recording that became Let My Children Hear Music, including Lonnie Hillyer, Jimmy Nottingham, Joe Wilder, and Snooky Young on trumpet, Jimmy Knepper on trombone, Julius Watkins on French horn, Charles McPherson on alto sax, Jerry Dodgion, Bobby Jones, Hal McKusick and James Moody on reeds; Charles McCracken on cello; Jaki Byard, John Foster, and Roland Hanna on piano; and Dannie Richmond on drums. Teo not only produced but also conducted the orchestra and played some alto sax. And alongside Mingus’s bass were three additional bass masters—no less than Ron Carter, Richard Davis, and Milt Hinton. And those are only the musicians we know about—some remain uncredited on the recording due to contractual issues. Collectively they gave Mingus’s music a sound that he had never gotten on record before, with a combination of power and polish.

“The Shoes of the Fisherman’s Wife Are Some Jive-Ass Slippers” might be my favorite Mingus title of all time, even considering that this is the man who wrote “All the Things You Could Be By Now If Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother.” From the very beginning of the track we get two impressions: this music is ambitious, and this band is tight. The horns and reeds play the opening melody slowly against a chromatic scale in the bass and low instruments; there’s a coda of sorts to this part signaled by an “Also Sprach Zarathustra” timpani roll, a series of chord changes, and then we’re into a brisk waltz that pauses, then shifts into 6/8 time. The horns and reeds introduce a descending motif that keeps interrupting the waltz until the piano signals another transition and a recapitulation of the top melody. This time the band picks up a new version of the slow theme in a fast 4/4 time, that builds in intensity up the chromatic scale until there’s a sudden swoon and lapse back into waltz time. We’re left to wonder how many of the sudden shifts were scored and how many were the product of Teo Macero’s genius editing skills. All throughout the chord progressions and gestures are wild and free (that timpani glissando against the descending motif at the end!) and the band swings as hard as anything Ellington ever did.

“Adagio, Ma Non Troppo” begins with a lone reed followed by a lone flute, playing music that seems birthed from “Sketches of Spain.” There are interludes of piano and guitar, rafts of flutes and clarinets, and a fast dance with three arco basses all soloing at the same time. True to the title, some moments are downright symphonic here; this section is probably the least swinging on the record, but those bowed bass solos keep us grounded at the same time that they reach for the stars. When the saxophones take the theme it feels like a moment from a Keith Jarrett European quartet composition.1 The whole thing is breathtaking in both composition and performance.

“Don’t Be Afraid, The Clown’s Afraid Too” starts in the circus, with recorded lion roars and elephantine trumpet blasts, before the band swings into a circus theme underscored by oompa bass and tuba and a brilliant walking bass line. The simultaneous solos between tenor sax (right channel) and alto sax (left) stretch the brain to hear all the passing harmonies as the players cross over and solo past each other. Another circus interlude and a brisk Mingus pizzicato solo sets up a chorus of twittering bird flutes, and the rest of the track tosses the theme from section to section before returning to the oompa theme once more before returning to the circus again to take us out of Side A.

“Hobo Ho” opens with a gutsy, funky bass line that anchors us firmly in the tonic. The tenor sax sets up the first melody with almost subsonic support in the lowest instruments. There are horn bursts that wouldn’t have been out of place on The Cat. This is music for a rumble, standing alongside “II B.S.”/“Haitian Fight Song” as some of Mingus’s most groove-driven work.

“The Chill of Death” begins with a Mahlerian moment, a tremolo from the basses over a timpani hit and the orchestra. Mingus recites a poem that dates from the beginning of his career; written in 1939, it captures the constant tension in his work between wild life and the fear of being forgotten in death. After the recitation there’s a sustained organ tone and a free alto sax solo by Charles McPherson over a shifting, uneven instrumental background—sometimes marching to the graveyard, sometimes joyfully dancing, sometimes anxiously peering around the corner. The piece ends with a rare audible splice as McPherson plays into a descending glissando and crescendo by the rest of the band; I wonder how much improvisation was left on the cutting room floor by Macero.

“The I of Hurricane Sue” ends where we began, the second piece recorded in the very first session. There are wind effects and corrugaphones beneath a free intro before the band snaps into a tightly wound, swinging melody. The work ends with dueling pianos, Jaki Byard vs. Roland Hanna, as the whirly tube and winds blow us away. This characteristic of alternating chaos and gorgeously played symphonic jazz is what ultimately sets Let My Children Hear Music apart as a work of staggering genius and an apex of Mingus’s compositional career.

The brilliance and tragedy of Mingus’s life wasn’t yet done. He had a few epochal albums for Atlantic Records, Changes One and Two, ahead of him, but he also had a deeper challenge—ALS, which began to rob him of his mobility and his ability to perform. As a composer and bandleader, he still had some milestone records ahead and we’ll hear one last one next week.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: There is an honest-to-goodness bonus track, in the original CD reissue sense, on Let My Children Hear Music. Recorded on the second recording date (September 30) following “Hobo Ho,” “Taurus in the Arena of Life” was first issued in 1992 on the first CD release of the album. It’s a nifty hybrid between a classical sonata in the piano and a blues in the horns, who take a trip to Mexico where things get marvelously strange.

BONUS BONUS: There are a few attempts to play this music live out there, but not many—which is why it came as a shock to find this sextet performance from a jazz ensemble in the University of Virginia’s Old Cabell Hall Auditorium, of all places! I don’t think that’s any of the main faculty up there, but I can’t see the bassist so it just might be Pete Spaar.

  1. Don’t worry, you didn’t miss a week. We’re not to Keith yet, but we’ll get there eventually. ↩︎

Charles Mingus, Mingus at Monterey

From Mingus’s golden year, a spectacular live set with something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue.

Album of the Week, February 7, 2026

Last week we witnessed Charles Mingus solidifying his place in the pantheon with an album that realized some of his greatest compositions with definitive performances (and contractually required placeholder titles). As we noted, Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus marked the reunion of the great bassist and his avant-garde compatriot Eric Dolphy. Mingus took the band on tour to Europe; Dolphy stayed there and died in a diabetic coma.

Given these facts, one could forgive Mingus for falling back to the familiar and focusing on that “greatest hits” repertoire, or from pulling back from touring and performing. Fortunately for us, the way Mingus dealt with challenges was to work and to create. His performance at the Monterey Jazz Festival on September 20, 1964 captured him doing both, with a band that had a rhythm section of Mingus stalwarts (Jaki Byard, Dannie Richmond) and a horn line consisting of Lonnie Hillyer on trumpet, Charles McPherson on alto and John Handy on tenor; Handy, an old Mingus band hand, rejoined at the last minute after Booker Ervin was hospitalized. For the last number, the band expanded into a big band formation, with Bobby Bryant and Melvin Moore on trumpet, Lou Blackburn on tuba, Red Callender on trombone, Buddy Collette on flute, piccolo and alto, and Jack Nimitz on bass clarinet and baritone sax. The performance gives us something old and borrowed, something new, and something blue (and orange).

The “Ellington Medley: I’ve Got It Bad — In a Sentimental Mood – All Too Soon — Mood Indigo — Sophisticated Lady —A Train” is our “old and borrowed” segment, continuing Mingus’s exploration of the compositions of his inspiration, one-time boss and sometime sparring partner Duke Ellington. The band is relaxed; there’s a little stage chatter before Mingus takes a solo intro to “I’ve Got It Bad” with sparse accompaniment from Jaki Byard, and sensitive solos from McPherson and Byard. One Ellington classic flows into the next, all commented on from Mingus’s bass.1 Until, with a sudden break, we are taking the A Train. The band is jubilant to the point of almost unhinging, particularly Lonnie Hillyer’s imaginative trumpet and Handy’s tenor (the only shortcoming in the live recordings: the tenor saxophone is somehow overpowered by Byard’s piano). At the end there’s an unaccustomed solo from Richmond, showing that not only was he frequently the glue that held the adventuresome band’s performances together, but he could also blast a mean drum solo. The end dissolves into almost-dissonance, the band gasping over the final diminished chord. To the enthusiastic applause of the crowd, Mingus notes, “I imagine I should say ‘I love you madly’ at this point… Because, ah, if there is a recording, all the money will go to Duke Ellington, which is about due him; I’ve stole enough.”

Mingus announces “Orange Was the Color Of Her Dress, Then Blue Silk”; it’s a blues introduced with a shivering run in the bass over a stride influenced piano line. The trumpet and alto state the tune (Handy, from Mingus’ announcement, sat this one out because he had only had one day to learn the material!). Then suddenly we’re leaving the blues behind, falling into a woozy delirium that improvises on the chords and promptly lands us right back into the blues. McPherson’s solo continues to explore the tune in free time, but always coming back to the blues at the end, stretching the twelve-bar form to untold lengths. Byard’s statement anchors firmly in stride and the gospel blues, with the band smearing glissandi and shouting behind him, until everyone drops out and he plays something closer to a sonata. The kaleidoscope shifts again; Hillyer is here with something halfway between New Orleans and the Village Vanguard, then the band returns to that stretched out blues once more, leaning into it until the penultimate bar stretches out the seconds, finally turning into an unresolved sigh. (On the two record set, the composition splits between the back half of Side B and into the first half of Side C.)

Mingus announces “We’ll be back with more musicians,” and with the full band on stage launches into the arco solo that opens the premiere of “Meditations on Integration.” Out of a brief tune-up moment comes Mingus’ opening arco solo, sounding like a combination of the Beethoven 9 basses and the hora. The band enters with a busy line that Buddy Collette’s flute flies and darts above; McPherson’s alto answers with an anguished cry above the ongoing Stravinskyan rhythm of Mingus, Richmond and Byard and the stabs of horns from the rest of the band. Things threaten to dissolve into formlessness as Byard thunders on the low tonic and the band plays the chords of the melody in sequence, almost as choral interjections. McPherson returns to the melody as the band recapitulates the opening, rising to a chaotic crescendo out of which a duet of flute and low piano emerges. The band continues in this vein for some time, with Collette’s flute signaling turns in the melody and changes in the solo.

At almost 14 minutes into the tune there is a breathtakingly high bowed bass solo that sounds for all the world like a cello has appeared on the stage. Mingus plays a low stretto on the tonic and diminished supertonic as Byard speaks once more with moments of Liszt and Bud Powell; the duet between the two is an elegy from which Collette’s flute emerges once more, Ravel-like. A tremolo from Byard and rapt applause from the audience seem to signal another shift, but the interplay between Byard, Mingus and Collette continue until Mingus’s high shout calls Hillyer forward. The liner notes report a rehearsal conversation between Mingus and Hillyer, in which the composer tells him, “It’s like a prayer and you’re like the main speaker… Everybody’s shouting to you. You got to chant to them and put them back in condition.” And so the final portion goes, with the whole band hollering and Hillyer’s voice conjuring order forward. When the final chord comes, the audience gives Mingus a thundering standing ovation, the first in the entire history of the festival.

1964 was a career peak for Mingus; unfortunately, tough times were ahead. In 1966 he was evicted from his New York home; the only recordings to appear for the rest of the decade were older session recordings (Tonight At Noon, from 1957 and 1961 sessions for Atlantic records, is a classic) and live recordings from tour dates in Europe and America. That long drought would end in the early 1970s with a recording we’ll listen to next time.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: Mingus’s tour of Europe with Eric Dolphy yielded early performances of “Meditations on Integration” and “Orange Was The Color of Her Dress, Then Blue Silk,” including this audio recording from the Salle Wagram in Paris on April 17, 1964:

  1. I believe one of the inspirations for Mingus’s bass technique is the contrabass recitative at the beginning of the fourth movement of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. Like Beethoven’s basses, he was always observing the performance and the melody closely, and always, always opining. ↩︎

Charles Mingus, Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus

An illuminating revisitation of some of the bassist’s greatest compositions.

Album of the Week, January 31, 2026

As we mentioned last week, Charles Mingus felt that he had found a sympathetic producer and label when he recorded The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady with Bob Thiele on Impulse!, and stated in the liner notes, “I intend to record it all over again on this label the way it was intended to sound.” Today’s album, Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus, is the fulfillment of that promise, with many of the same players who appeared on the earlier album and a set of career-defining compositions (and one memorable cover) filling out the grooves.

Indeed, of the band, Jaki Byard, Jay Berliner and Dannie Richmond were back (though Walter Perkins actually played drums on most of the tracks). Of the horns and reeds, almost all (Charlie Mariano, Jerome Richardson, Dick Hafer, Quentin Jackson, Don Butterfield, Richard Williams, Rolf Ericson) were returnees from the prior album, but a few new-to-us faces appeared: Britt Woodman on trombone, Eddie Preston on trumpet. And returning to the band were Booker Ervin and Eric Dolphy.

Ervin began playing with Mingus in 1958, and appeared on almost all the great bassist’s records between that year and 1961, including Mingus Ah Um and Blues and Roots, before going his own way for a few years. He played with Randy Weston and released almost 20 albums as a leader across Bethlehem, Savoy, Candid, Pacific Jazz, and most of all Prestige before his untimely death in 1970. And Dolphy, whose departure from Mingus’ band had informed the composition “What Love?” on Charles Mingus Presents, had played with Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, John Lewis, Oliver Nelson, and a whole host of other musicians before returning to Mingus’s working band for this record; he rejoined the band in earnest in early 1964.

For publishing and copyright reasons many of the tunes on the album appear with different titles than on their first appearances. Accordingly, “II B.S.”—a retitling of “Haitian Fight Song” from Mingus’s early recordings Plus Max Roach and The Clown—begins the album in swinging form, with Mingus’s fierce bass playing over a skittering of stick hits in the drums. The horns build up section by section over the bass melody, play countermelodies underneath, pull back under Jaki Byard’s piano solo, re-enter with a chugging rhythmic pulse, and then return with the slow burn once more until they build to a screaming climax.

“I X Love” is a reworking of “Duke’s Choice” from A Modern Jazz Symposium of Music and Poetry. It’s a swoony, gorgeous ballad, introduced by cluster chords and an out-of-nowhere guitar run, spotlighted with melodic solos from Dolphy and Mariano on alto sax and from the trumpet trumpet as the rest of the band splash out in seemingly (but not actually) random harmonic directions all around. There’s a spectacular clarinet moment from Dick Hafer before the lower brass take us back to the top once more. Throughout, the combination of Butterfield on tuba anchoring the bottom of the chords and Mingus’ nimble bass solos yields a deeply satisfying sonic landscape with deep harmonic range, nowhere more so than at the very end leading into the final alto cadenza.

“Celia” originally appeared on Mingus’ 1957 record East Coasting, in a sextet performance with none other than Bill Evans at the piano. Here it appears to continue the slow dance of “1 X Love,” until suddenly the corner turns and the band humphs into a fast groove led by Dolphy’s alto sax. The two modes of the tune continue to alternate, now with a tuba melody line, now with Mariano’s alto, always with Mingus’ steadfast walk alongside Richmond’s rhythmic outbursts. The work winds to an end with the lowest possible rumble from the tuba lending a faint edge of madness to the concluding chords.

“Mood Indigo” is the sole non-Mingus original on the album. In the liner notes Mingus states, “It’s absurd to put Ellington in polls. A man who has accomplished what he has shouldn’t be involved in contests. He should just be assumed to be in first place every year.” (Apparently there were no ill feelings after the drama of Money Jungle.) The arrangement is deeply felt, starting with a quiet horn chorus under Mingus’ sensitive bass; the horns drop away for an unhurried bass solo with splashes of piano and quiet brushed cymbals. The band returns for one more quiet chorus before finding their way through the end of this deeply felt tribute.

“Better Get Hit In Your Soul,” making its memorable debut on Mingus Ah Um as “Better Git It In Yo’ Soul,” is opened with Mingus’ solo bass and then the reeds playing the melody. It’s Jerome Richmond’s baritone that gets the chorus part, accompanied by wordless yells from Mingus way down in the mix that are just barely picked up by his bass direct mic. That’s Walter Perkins on the drums on this one, coming as it does from the September session that makes up the majority of the tracks. The brilliant bit of this arrangement: after Mingus sings the tag line, “Better get hit in your soul,” and the band stops, they recapitulate everything in an extended coda, this time in a swinging 4/4 rather than the fierce 6/8 of the melody. They seem likely to do it again, too, as Mingus trails pizzicato and Byard plays into the fade-out.

“Theme for Lester Young” follows “Better Get Hit” as it did on Mingus Ah Um, when it was titled “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat.” Written as a tribute to Young a few months after his death, the song proceeds as a series of statements from each of the horns over the noir-ish charts. The tune feels as familiar as a worn suit, given new life by the depth of the horn section and by Byard’s extended chords at the end.

Last, “Hora Decubitus” appears in a new title, having originally been “E’s Flat, Ah’s Flat Too” on Blues and Roots. This is blues all right and a fast one, swung by Mingus and Richardson, then the rest of the band joining in. Dolphy’s solo switches out of time for a minute before he’s joined by the rest of the group. It’s a joyously swinging dance with each member of the group improvising across the tightly arranged charts, and a coda that calls to mind all the high points from the album as Mingus gets the last word.

Mingus kept a subsection of this band together for the next year, recording a few concerts and taking a tour to Europe where they met much acclaim. At the end of the tour, Dolphy told Mingus his intention to remain in Europe. He had a series of dates booked, traveling to West Berlin on June 27, 1964 to play the opening of a jazz club called the Tangent, but he fell severely ill and could barely play. On June 29 he fell into a diabetic coma and died; stories vary as to whether doctors gave him too much insulin, causing insulin shock and death, or whether they assumed that he was on drugs and left him to die in his bed. Mingus, bereft, carried on. We’ll hear another milestone performance from after the band’s return to the States next time.

You can listen to this album here:

BONUS: The Mingus-Dolphy European tour of 1964 yielded a number of memorable performances recorded for television. This one, recorded in Belgium, has some spectacular moments of interplay between Mingus and Dannie Richmond, and truly spectacular moments between the horns and Dolphy on flute, plus a truly fantastic bit where Mingus plucks the strings of the piano in what appears to be an avant-garde improvisation until we realize, no, he’s taking a tuning break.

Charles Mingus, The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady

The composer’s masterpiece is a cry of despair and a dance of freedom (or maybe vice versa).

Album of the Week, January 24, 2026

Given the challenges with labels that we’ve seen other jazz geniuses have (cf: Miles’s contractual obligations with Prestige, Trane’s back material being issued for years (again by Prestige), Monk’s contract being bounced around by Riverside until their bankruptcy), it’s remarkable to contemplate Charles Mingus’ seeming ability to record on any label he wanted. Managing to record on Atlantic and Candid simultaneously, doing a few releases on Columbia, bopping over to United Artists, it’s interesting to note that he wanted even more label time—and with Bob Thiele and Impulse!, he found it, at least for a while.

Thiele was a few years into his stewardship of the Impulse! label, and had recorded four major Coltrane albums—Coltrane “Live” at the Village Vanguard, Coltrane, Duke Ellington and John Coltrane, and Ballads—by the time that Mingus entered the studio. Mingus’s session, held January 20, 1963 at the familiar Atlantic studio in New York, was to be both in a line with these great records and totally different. While the session was, like the string of Coltrane Impulse! records, a career-defining work of genius, considered along with Mingus Ah Um to be the summation of his compositional powers, it was different in that it was composed for a much larger group, an eleven-piece jazz orchestra.

Effectively it was someone else’s orchestra. Bob Hammer, a pianist who had performed with Mingus on his totally bonkers A Modern Jazz Symposium of Music and Poetry and would later play with Johnny Hartman, had formed the orchestra only to have Mingus take it for a run at the Village Vanguard for six weeks, during which time he worked out much of the compositions of the album. In addition to Hammer’s arrangements, the group also featured the redoubtable Dannie Richmond on drums, Don Butterfield on tuba, Jerome Richardson on soprano and bari sax and flute, Charlie Mariano on alto sax, Dick Hafer on tenor sax, Rolf Ericson and Richard Williams on trumpet, Quentin Jackson on trombone, Jay Berliner on classical guitar, and Jaki Byard on piano. Byard, hailing from Worcester, Mass, had played professionally from age 16, was drafted into the Army at age 19 (where he mentored the Adderley brothers), then returned to Boston where he played with musicians including Sam Rivers and Mariano. Byard joined Mingus’ band with his legendary Town Hall concert in 1962 and played regularly through 1964, and off and on in the bassist’s bands through the end of his life.

Mingus himself writes astonishingly complete (and verbose) liner notes describing the composition; I’m going to restrain myself to impressions.

“Solo Dancer” opens with a a flourish from Richmond and a solo voice on the alto sax (Mariano) crying in the wilderness against a pedal point of Jerome Richardson’s baritone, Don Butterfield’s tuba (both in the right channel) and collective improvisation by the group against a III – IV vamp—which is to say, a thick cluster of sound out of which solo voices pop. Richardson’s soprano sax solo against a cluster of trumpets grinds deep into that vamp, until the piano calls an end to the dance.

“Duet Solo Dancers” opens with that piano, finally taking us out of the repeated two-chord vamp into something like an Ellington ballad. The movement is subtitled “Hearts’ Beat and Shades in Physical Embraces,” and one imagines the dancers sharing a tender moment before suddenly a pulse in the tuba signals a shift in mood; an argument perhaps? The tempo ebbs and flows as though the fight is picking up volume, until a climax is reached; the fight music returns, this time in a note of regret, until the dancers reconcile and the ballad returns once more.

“Group Dancers,” subtitled “(Soul Fusion) Freewoman and, Oh, This Freedom’s Slave Cries,” opens with the piano (played by Mingus) introducing the third theme, a descending trill from the fifth down to the tonic and then up to the submediant. After some conversational interjections from the band, they pick up the new theme and try it out. The piano returns, playing a segment of Ravel-esque beauty complete with moments of parallel beauty, and then the band picks up the theme once more, with the trumpets, then the flute, then the other instruments picking up the descending theme. Ultimately a new theme (the “freedom’s slave cries?”) emerges, with layers of themes in a long vamp for the entire orchestra, as Mingus’s bass urges the ensemble forward, controlling the tempo as it surges forward and ebbs back. A closing note from the alto leaves us in a cliffhanger going into the second side of the record.

“Medley: Trio and Group Dancers/Single Solos and Group Dance/Group and Solo Dancers” is a single long track that comprises the second side. Opening with conversations between the instruments followed by a soliloquy from Mingus on the bass, the muted trumpets lead us into a sort of cockeyed ballad once more. The dense structure is broken apart by Jay Berliner’s Spanish guitar flourish; one imagines a dancer in full flamenco garb taking the center stage for a moment. The ensemble is not so easily brought into this new sound world, and a tumult follows as they improvise over a theme that slowly reveals its similarity to the “Los Mariachis” theme from Tijuana Moods. Another break from the piano (this time by Jaki Byard) introduces a recapitulation of the descending theme from “Group Dancers,” followed by a Liszt-like cadenza and the descending theme’s return.

A series of solos follows, with the alto sax leading into the group and solo dance “Of Love, Pain, and Passioned Revolt, Then Farewell, My Beloved, ’til It’s Freedom Day.” The love theme from the Duet Solo Dancers returns, introducing a new theme, built atop a major-key vamp, that slowly accelerates as the revolution gains momentum, until the whole ensemble reaches a sort of exhausted collapse, only to start all over again. Ultimately the band reaches a jubilant climax punctuated by the shouts of the different instruments, then returns to an echo of the opening music, as if to say “Look out, folks, we aren’t done yet.” A massive final saxophone solo points at an angle into the sky, as if to promise better days lie yet ahead.

Mingus came to Impulse! following the near-disaster of his Town Hall concert, at which he premiered what eventually became his long-form composition Epitaph in a “jazz workshop” model, with the players working out ideas on stage. In the liner notes, he thanks producer Bob Thiele (who had become the lead at Impulse! following Creed Taylor’s decampment for Verve) for “for coming to my Town Hall session, hearing the music, liking it, and hiring my band to record for your company when the critics scared the pans off the people for whom I wrote the music.” He found the experience congenial, noting, “This is the first time the company I have recorded with set out to help me give you, my audience, a dear picture of my musical ideas without that studio rush feeling, Impulse went to great expense and patience to give me complete freedom…” He also said “Throw all other records of mine away except maybe one other. I intend to record it all over again on this label the way it was intended to sound.” We’ll hear the result of that session next time.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: There have been a few attempts to essay a live performance of Mingus’ great composition. This 2013 performance by the Nu Civilization Orchestra in London is worth a listen:

BONUS BONUS: The Nu Civilization Orchestra has kept the work in repertoire, and recently brought the work to the Barbican, along with dancers!

Duke Ellington/Charles Mingus/Max Roach, Money Jungle

Legendarily tense and extraordinarily beautiful, this rare Mingus trio album repays close listening.

Album of the Week, January 17, 2026

If you listen to enough music, you’ll inevitably hear about those albums that almost never happened because of drama during the recording sessions. The bands who come up in this kind of conversation might be the Beatles, Metallica, or Fleetwood Mac; it’s less common to hear about jazz players coming to blows. And then, there’s Charles Mingus. Never an easygoing guy at the best of times, Mingus’ legendary temper almost ended what turned out to be one of his most legendary sessions prematurely.

It started with the logistics of the session. In 1962 Duke Ellington came to producer Allen Douglas, who was then working at United Artists Records, to see about doing a piano trio session. Douglas was excited and suggested Charles Mingus, who had been in Ellington’s band, as the bassist; Ellington agreed, and Mingus suggested bringing in Max Roach, with whom he had worked in Charlie Parker’s band, as drummer. Ellington didn’t have a recording contract at the time, so they used Mingus’s contract. Ellington suggested to the men that they think about what tunes they might like to record, and said they needn’t be Ellington compositions.

On the day of the session, Ellington came in with a sheaf of scores, including four new tunes written for the occasion. History doesn’t record Mingus’s reaction, but one suspects he could feel the session slipping away from him and he was frustrated. As the session got more and more tense with each song, he reportedly argued, with Ellington, Roach, or both, eventually leaving the studio. Stories vary about whether Ellington caught up with him at the elevator or the street, but Mingus was eventually persuaded to return and finish the session.

To say you can hear the tension in “Money Jungle,” the opening track in the album’s running order as released,1 is an understatement. Mingus opens with four bars, opening with the low subdominant of the minor scale followed by two hard pizzicati an octave up. Hard is also an understatement; he bends the strings so hard that the pitch distorts. Ellington follows with explosive, dissonant chords as Roach plays a circular pattern on the drums. Eventually all the players lock in on a blues, but it’s not an easy journey. Mingus alternates more conventional walking parts, stuttering stabs, and high runs on the bass as Roach drops snare rolls, fills and other surprises in his part. At the end, Mingus abandons any pretense of conventional playing, hammering a series of suspended chords; the pianist waits him out eventually tolling a series of low notes to signal the end. If Mingus was attempting to assert dominance, Ellington appears to have showed that he could go toe-to-toe with him. (It’s thought that Mingus attempted to quit the session after this number.)

Which makes “Fleurette Africaine” all the more surprising. Like the opener, it was written for the album; unlike the opener, it’s a classic Ellington ballad. Mingus plays much more sympathetically here, but still adds new dimensions to the composition, playing shuddering arpeggi to which Roach reacts with polyrhythmic heartbeats and fills. Mingus plays alternate harmonies under the bridge, and the whole thing comes together just above a hush. It’s gorgeous.

“Very Special” is another twelve-bar blues, this one far less combative. Here Mingus’s bass improvisations are primarily in the space at the end of the twelve-bar repeat, or under Ellington’s third and fourth solo verses. That’s not to say he’s not innovating; some of the rhythmic patterns are quite striking, and the trio locks in on an improvised secondary rhythm during the bridge. But compared to the apocalyptic feel of “Money Jungle” it’s left in a supporting role on the album. It’s followed by “Warm Valley,” with the first verse played solo by the pianist. A classic Ellington composition, named after a landscape feature he saw from the train in Oregon that reminded him of a reclining woman, here it’s a duet with the bassist, with only subtle brush work by Roach adding atmosphere.

“Wig Wise” is the last of the newly written works for this session. A classic Ellington tune, it unfolds at first like a Bach improvisation, all pieces in place, but slowly Mingus starts to sound as though he’s slipping a gear, shifting the emphasis on the beat, leaving deliberate holes in the texture, moving the rhythm. He finds a second melody entirely in the bridge, and responds to the gap left by Ellington at the end of each verse with a different fill each time, finally ending the tune with a plucked glissando up to the highest note on his fingerboard.

“Caravan” was written by Juan Tizol, he of the fight that got Mingus kicked out of the Ellington band. It’s unclear whether it’s the association with Tizol or the fact that the number was recorded late in the session, with temperatures already high, but this one also feels like a raised-voice discussion between Ellington and Mingus. The bassist is imaginative in his fills, but there are places where he continues to run in his pattern rather than following the changes in the music, and at the end he and Ellington alternate attempts to close the track out. This is probably Roach’s high point on the album, with explosive statements from the drums and a variety of tonalities from his kit. (I included this track on an Exfiltration Radio show featuring noteworthy bass performances a few years ago.)

The set closes with “Solitude,” again with Ellington opening the tune solo. Whether to offset the explosive nature of the rest of the recording, or just as a reflection of the innate quietude of the track, it feels almost like an interior monologue at the beginning. Mingus supports the pianist with single notes in the second chorus, but as he modulates the tune into another melody the bassist falls silent, rejoining along with Roach as the composer reenters the melody, now forthright and triumphant. At the end, Mingus plays a rolling fanfare over Ellington’s final chords; Ellington puckishly refuses to resolve the harmonies so Mingus finally does it for him as the album draws to a close.

Whatever the tension in the room, Money Jungle is a complete artistic success, a portrait of music being made amid conflict and frustration. It’s also an opportunity to hear Mingus as a performer, apart from his compositions and his band, and to hear his rhythmic and harmonic imagination at play. Next week we’ll hear those qualities in the context of his compositions once more.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: The great drummer Teri Lyne Carrington played the whole Money Jungle album live during the 2014 Internationale Jazzwoche (jazz week) in Burghausen, with a sextet that included Aaron Goldberg on piano, Tia Fuller on saxophone, flute and vocals, Antonio Hart on saxophone and flute, Claus Reichstaller on trumpet, and James Genus on bass. Here’s the title track:

BONUS BONUS: “Fleurette Africaine” has entered the repertoire, with recordings by Gary Burton, Horace Tapscott, Vijay Iyer, and many others. Here’s a 2017 version with Norah Jones on piano and vocals, Brian Blade on drums, and Chris Thomas on bass, from Ronnie Scott’s jazz club in London:

  1. A 1980s reissue sequenced the album by recording order and added alternate takes and bonus tracks; this version is what’s available on the CD. ↩︎

Charles Mingus, Tijuana Moods

A turbulent, magnetic stroll through the border town streets in one of the great bassist’s early long-form suites.

Album of the Week, January 9, 2026

The hazard of writing about jazz records is that you inevitably hit the question: do you write about the records in the order they were released? Or in which they were recorded? This makes a big difference in the order, as many labels would sit on recording sessions for years. Prestige practically made a business plan out of this, recording many sessions with Miles, Trane and others and then releasing the albums when the artists had grown famous—sometimes years later. The same thing happened with today’s Charles Mingus session; recorded in 1957 by RCA Victor, it didn’t see the light of day until June of 1962, following one of his most eclectic and eccentric albums, Oh Yeah.

The group heard on the album is a mix of Mingus stalwarts, including Dannie Richmond on drums, Clarence Shaw on trumpet, Jimmy Knepper on trombone, and Shafi Hadi on alto and tenor sax, all of whom performed with Mingus through the 1950s and 1960s; and percussionist Frankie Dunlop and pianist Bill Triglia, both of whom racked up their sole Mingus recording credits on this album. Special note should be made of the contributions of actor and playwright Lonnie Elder, providing “luxury casting” in the blues singing on “Los Mariachis,” and especially Ysabel Morel, playing castanets and providing yelps and cries as a flamenco table dancer in her sole recording credit. The album provides a phantasmagorical journey through the South of the Border town through Mingus’s originals and highly idiosyncratic arrangements.

“Dizzy Moods,” a Mingus re-arrangement of Dizzy Gillespie’s “Woody’n You,” opens us up with a cockeyed horn fanfare followed by short solos from Mingus, Richmond, and Triglia. The band plays the first verse together, getting an atmosphere highly reminiscent of Mingus’s “Haitian Fight Song” in places. Knepper, Hadi and Shaw all turn in ripping solos, but what ultimately what sets this apart from other large-ensemble jazz of the 1950s (especially Miles and Birth of the Cool) is the feeling that the group’s playing might edge into chaotic noise at any moment. Indeed, there’s enough menace in the playing to recall Mingus’s penchant for fighting, whether the story about him and Juan Tizol that we talked about last week, or his turbulent relationship with other musicians—including some on this record.

“Ysabel’s Table Dance” is a tequila-tinged tour de force of a composition, the rhythm alternating between Morel’s castanets, sounding like a sped-up toreador battle, and the band’s more relaxed swing temp0. Mingus accompanies Morel’s initial foray with an emotive solo, played both arco and pizzicato like a large cello. There are what seem to be hard cuts from one section to another,1 as Hadi, Shaw and Knepper all take brief statements of the melody at something approaching warp speed. A melancholy solo from Triglia stops time, and the band returns in a swinging slow four. The final few minutes find a synthesis of the band’s melody and Morel’s Iberian dance, with Mingus accompanying the castanets with a col legno riff of his own.

“Tijuana Gift Shop” opens with a brisk riff by Richmond and Dunlop, followed by a playful melody in the horns that seems to embrace the wild energy of the town; Mingus’ notes state it was inspired by a tapestry that he “bought off the walls of an old ‘gift shop.’” The band engages in some inspired collective improvisation, with hardly any single-horn solos until Hadi’s lovely melody at the end, sounding a closing cadence reminiscent of Miles’ Sketches of Spain (still three years in the future when this album was recorded!).

“Los Mariachis” evokes the visitors walking through the streets of town until they are stopped by a group of horns playing a sad ballad. Mingus’s bass propels a slow blues beat into motion, with Shaw and Knepper limning the blues melody as Lonnie Elder provides an inchoate blues cry. There’s an abrupt shift of mood courtesy of Shaw’s trumpet as the band strikes up a more traditional mariachi melody, albeit one with the horns playing in multiple musical motifs all at once. We return to the ballad once more before launching into a more modern dance, which becomes a tender moment scored by Knepper and Triglia. The blues and the modern dance alternate through to the end of the track, but ultimately the blues wins out.

Ted Grouya’s “Flamingo,” given a far more expansive reading here than when I last wrote about it on Wynton’s Standard Time Vol. 3, has its melody sketched out by Shaw and Hadi in a completely free moment, the players pulling the melody out of the late night air. Knepper plays a heartfelt solo on the bridge, punctuated by a dissonant blast from the horns as the tune turns the corner into the chorus. The overall impression is of a quiet early morning rendezvous, with the romance punctured by bursts of sound spilling out as a door opens and a patron reels into the night air, bringing Mingus’s tour of the wild town to a close.

Mingus is said to have stated, on the occasion of Tijuana Moods’s release in 1962, that it was “the best record he’d ever recorded.” While that is highly debatable (Mingus Ah Um, anyone?), it does provide a highly coherent, if kaleidoscopic, view of his compositional talents in these longer-form songs. As noted, many of the musicians began longer journeys with Mingus with this album; Dannie Richmond in particular had switched to the drums from the saxophone shortly before this recording. Not all the relationships would last; Mingus notoriously punched Knepper in the mouth during an argument later in 1962, damaging his teeth and his embouchure, an injury that affected his playing and required years for him to recover from. We’ll hear another notoriously argumentative—but brilliant— Mingus recording next time.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: There are relatively few live performances of the material from this album, making this 1964 Copenhagen performance of “Ysabel’s Table Dance” (minus Ysabel, and castanets!) highly interesting:

  1. A 1986 reissue notes that there are hardly any complete takes from the original sessions; the tracks were assembled from something like 21 takes of the five songs. ↩︎

Charles Mingus, Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus

We begin our survey of the great bassist and composer in midstream, with a spectacular performance from the last days of one of his best bands.

Album of the Week, January 3, 2026

There is a danger, with larger-than-life musicians (or really any public figures), that you remember them as caricatures, not for the balance of what made them great but for the quirks that stand them out from the crowd. Such a figure is Charles Mingus, about some of whose albums we’ll write about for the next little bit. Undeniably a genius and a great composer and performer, it’s tempting to remember him for his rages1, for the impenetrability of his performances,2 and for his wild Epicureanism that launched such monuments of excess as his legendary eggnog recipe. As always, the curative is simple: let’s listen.

As I’ve lamented before, the scope of this series of posts about music is limited, by design, to the contents of my vinyl collection. If that were not the case, we might start with a different Mingus recording: Pithecanthropus Erectus, for instance, or certainly his 1959 masterpiece for Columbia Records, Mingus Ah Um. But neither of those records is on my shelf at present, so we’re going to start with a slightly unconventional choice, a record that Mingus made at a time when both Atlantic and Columbia were releasing his albums but that he chose to release on the small Candid Records label, to give a less filtered view of his work.

Candid, founded in early 1960 by parent label Cadence Records owner Archie Bleyer, had as its A&R director jazz writer and critic, and civil rights activist, Nat Hentoff. He sought out sounds that, to him, reflected the jazz of the dawning 1960s. The second album the fledgling label released was Max Roach’s milestone civil rights suite We Insist!; Mingus, Roach’s former rhythm section partner in Charlie Parker’s combo, released the fifth album in the series with a pianoless quartet consisting of multi-instrumentalist Eric Dolphy, trumpeter Ted Curson, and drummer Dannie Richmond. Though recorded in the studio in October 1960, Mingus sought to present the illusion that the performance was happening live in a nightclub, going so far as to introduce the first tune with the admonition not to applaud between tracks and to refrain from ordering food and drink during the recording. Generally speaking, his approach to the album (as indicated by the title) was to take control of the way his own music was typically presented to the public.

The first tune is titled “Folk Forms, No. 1;” the “folk form” in question is the blues. Mingus had a complicated relationship with the blues; he was clearly conversant with the form and the feel of the blues, but just as clearly resented the insistent demands that he play more blues and less of his own music.3 However he felt about it, this is a deep blues. Mingus starts the song solo, with a rhythmic figure in the bass that is slightly reminiscent of the opening to his great tune “Better Get Hit In Yo’ Soul.” Richmond follows him, listening to his rhythm and replicating it in snare and hi-hat. Dolphy follows with an essay at the melody, and Ted Curson plays a counterpoint to the melody; the two horns trade ideas and thoughts as though executing a complex fugue, but the lines are all improvised, the group turning on a dime as Mingus proposes different phrases and rhythms in his solos.

“Original Faubus Fables,” a retitling of the 1959 “Fables of Faubus” for contractual reasons, is the most clear case of Mingus presenting his music the way he wanted it to be heard. The original version of the tune had lyrics that were highly critical of Arkansas governor Orval Faubus, who legendarily called out the Arkansas National Guard to prevent Blacks from enrolling in Little Rock High School following the 1957 federally mandated desegregation order. Columbia Records was legendarily cowardly about putting out any records that would offend the Southern buyer, and requested that Mingus present the song as an instrumental; this conflict and others possibly led to Mingus not extending his recording contract with Columbia beyond the two records released in 1959. The lyrics are not exactly epic poetry, but they resonate:

Name me someone who’s ridiculous, Dannie
Governor Faubus!
Why is he so sick and ridiculous?
He won’t permit us in his schools!
Then he’s a fool!

Boo! Nazi Fascist supremists!
Boo! Ku Klux Klan (With your Jim Crow plan)

Name me a handful that’s ridiculous, Dannie Richmond
Bilbo, Thomas, Faubus, Russel, Rockefeller, Byrd, Eisenhower!

Don Heckman has commented that Mingus doesn’t let his portrait of Faubus give the politician too much power; he keeps the music on a light, satirical level, poking fun at Faubus rather than demonizing him.

“What Love?” is an original composition that approximately combines “You Don’t Know What Love Is” and “What Is This Thing Called Love?” Hentoff’s liner notes position this deep dark ballad as being inspired by a personnel crisis in the band; after many months together, both Dolphy and Curson had decided to move on from Mingus’ band, and Hentoff cites some of the melodic choices in “What Love?” as conversations between the bandleader and his saxophonist, alternately cursing the choice to leave and imploring him to stay. Dolphy plays some far-out music on the bass clarinet in this number in conversation with Mingus’s angry, imploring, and ultimately resigned pizzicato solo.

The final track, “All The Things You Could Be By Now If Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother,” is a complete free-for-all, introduced by a complex melody played by both Dolphy and Curson in harmony before the trumpeter takes the first solo, followed by Dolphy, with Richmond banging things out underneath both. This performance shows Mingus at his most far-out. There isn’t much of his genius for melody or harmony here, just him and his three players going flat-out in a wunderkammer of improvisational magic.

Mingus’s many facets as a musician included the ability to collectively improvise with his band at the highest order, and …Presents Charles Mingus is a great example of that. But he might have been even more effective and innovative as a composer of longer works, and we’ll hear one of those next week.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: This quartet doesn’t seem to have too many live shows recorded, but an expanded version of the band, adding Booker Ervin on tenor and the amazing Bud Powell on piano, played the Antibes Jazz Festival on July 13, 1960, five days before the quartet entered the studio to record …Presents…. It’s a monster of a live recording; here’s “I’ll Remember April” from the French TV presentation of the concert.

  1. Mingus was legendarily fired from Duke Ellington’s band in 1953 over a confrontation with trombonist Juan Tizol. Accounts differ as to what happened exactly; Mingus’s autobiography Beneath the Underdog claims Tizol impugned his musical abilities while using the N-word, while other onlookers claim Mingus was insulted when Tizol called him out for flubbing a note. It is pretty clear from all accounts, though, that Mingus rushed after Tizol with either a pipe or a fire axe in his hand. ↩︎
  2. Mingus premiered his major work Epitaph in 1962 at Town Hall in New York City to mixed reception. Again, accounts differ as to what happened, but poor sound at the venue and a general state of under-rehearsedness on the part of the band appear to have doomed the original performance. The concert was later released on Blue Note Records in the 1990s, when I was first expanding my jazz horizons; I thought it was pretty good. ↩︎
  3. In the liner notes to his 1960 Atlantic Records session Blues and Roots, Mingus noted, “This record is unusual— it presents only one part of my musical world, the blues. A year ago, Nesuhi Ertegün suggested that I record an entire blues album in the style of ‘Haitian Fight Song,’ because some people, particularly critics, were saying I didn’t swing enough. He wanted to give them a barrage of soul music: churchy, blues, swinging, earthy. I thought it over. I was born swinging and clapped my hands in church as a little boy, but I’ve grown up and I like to do things other than just swing. But blues can do more than just swing. So I agreed.” ↩︎