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.” ↩︎

Mingus on eggnog

I can’t believe that in all the time I’ve been blogging about music and cocktails, I’ve never written about Charles Mingus’ eggnog recipe. Pointed to it, a few times, but never discussed it.

That might be because it’s A Lot. Two shots of liquor per serving, plus whatever 151-proof rum makes it through the preparation of the eggs. One begins to understand why Mingus was prone to firing shotguns inside his apartment.

Still, aside from the sheer volume of booze to be had in each glass, the rest of the recipe—eggs, milk, cream, nutmeg—doesn’t seem that far-fetched. Well, except for the addition of ice cream at the end, but that only if you set it out at a party, to keep it chilled.

The recipe, as it was transcribed by Mingus’ biographer:

  • Separate one egg for one person.  Each person gets an egg.
  • Two sugars for each egg, each person.
  • One shot of rum, one shot of brandy per person.
  • Put all the yolks into one big pan, with some milk.
  • That’s where the 151 proof rum goes.  Put it in gradually or it’ll burn the eggs,
  • OK. The whites are separate and the cream is separate.
  • In another pot– depending on how many people– put in one shot of each, rum and brandy. (This is after you whip your whites and your cream.)
  • Pour it over the top of the milk and yolks.
  • One teaspoon of sugar.  Brandy and rum.
  • Actually you mix it all together.
  • Yes, a lot of nutmeg.  Fresh nutmeg.  And stir it up.
  • You don’t need ice cream unless you’ve got people coming and you need to keep it cold.  Vanilla ice cream.  You can use eggnog.  I use vanilla ice cream.
  • Right, taste for flavor.  Bourbon? I use Jamaica Rum in there. Jamaican Rums. Or I’ll put rye in it.  Scotch. It depends.
  • See, it depends on how drunk I get while I’m tasting it.

We’ll see if I get sufficiently inspired this holiday to actually make a batch of the stuff. But I think I’ll leave the experiment until we have a working dishwasher again (ours having bit the dust just before Christmas).

Amanda Whiting, A Christmas Cwtch

Gather your eggnog and sit by a warm fire. This latter-day classic has all the warmth of its namesake and an impeccable lineup of Christmas presents for the listener.

Album of the Week, December 27, 2025

A Christmas what? Well, the Welsh word cwtch means a hug, but also a hidey-hole—it’s something close and intimate with implications of protection as well as comfort. It’s a perfect name for this modern Christmas jazz album, which combines covers of Christmas songs with some Christmas-adjacent jazz material—Vince Guaraldi but also Bill Evans—in a dreamy harp reverie.

Yes, harp. Amanda Whiting came across my radar with her albums for Jazzman Records; if you’ve read my music reviews, you know that a cover of Freddie Hubbard’s “Little Sunflower” is always going to get my attention, and her first Jazzman EP starts there. Before beginning her jazz career in 2013 with her earliest solo release, the Welsh musician had trained as a classical harpist, and her attention to performance and composition stands out in this set of Christmas and Christmas-adjacent tunes.

The album starts and ends with solo harp renditions of “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town,” but fairly quickly settles into a fireside mood with “In the Bleak Midwinter.” Amanda’s arrangement settles into a minor mood, riding diminished chords to strike a Guaraldi-like mood accompanied by cellist Lucia Capellaro, a meditative bass line from Aidan Thorne, and brushed cymbals courtesy of drummer Mark O’Connor.

The mood continues with a pair of Guaraldi covers, with “Christmas is Coming” striking a brisker note with the trio and “Christmas Time is Here” a more meditative counterpart. “Christmas is Coming” gets a proper harp solo that does more than just echo the improvisations that Guaraldi performed on the original, as Whiting’s harp seems to float up to a suspended ninth and stay there for an extended time, rocking back and forth across chordal boundaries and settling into an extended groove. Meanwhile, “Christmas Time is Here” gets more of a late night chat feeling with the dialog between the harp and Thorne’s bass—also a feature of Guaraldi’s original performance with bassist Monty Budwig.

Whiting picks up other threads of Christmas harp-lore, providing a meditative trio “Sugar Plum” à la Tchaikovsky. (It’s worth noting, for those budding harpists out there, that this and other tracks are based on harp arrangements that Whiting has published and that featured in her harp classes at Trinity College London.) Her arrangement doesn’t swing as hard as Ellington, but it definitely still swings and pulses with Thorne’s high bass solo and the rolling rhythms that O’Connor sets up.

Guaraldi’s “Happiness Theme” predates the Christmas special; it was one of the first Peanuts tunes that he wrote, alongside “Linus and Lucy,” “Oh, Good Grief” and “Pebble Beach,” all of which made repeated appearances as character themes and motifs throughout the animated specials. I have always had a soft spot for this wistfully beautiful tune, which here gets an atmospheric workout that evokes “Christmas Time is Here” and the notes of sleet against the windowpane.

“Little Elfy” is a brief original, a romp through snow drifts with someone who’s as likely to pelt you with a snowball as to bring you a present; it’s a good feature for the harp and an imaginative landscape to close out side 1. With “Skating” we return to Guaraldi once more, with the arpeggiated runs that gave even the pianist trouble seemingly unrolling without a ruffled hair from Whiting’s fingers.

Whiting released the next track, a cover of Bill Evans’ “Peace Piece,” as a single—never an unwelcome request. Here the meditative opening notes, so familiar from Evans and Miles Davis’ recasting of them for “Flamenco Sketches,” seem to spin an aleatory reverie as though they are spreading ripples in an open pond. The pond seems to freeze and crack in the air as Whiting digs deeper into the simple alternating chords. This one could have gone on forever for me.

The second half has a run of more ordinary Christmas carols that drift into reveries. The harp solo in “Deck the Halls” seems to take a side step toward a brown study for a while, while “The Christmas Song” pulls one inside just with the strength of the Mel Tormé/Robert Wells melody. “O Christmas Tree” bridges the ordinary and the Guaraldian worlds with its evocation of the pianist’s cover version, the bass and drums providing welcome rhythmic structure. And “We Three Kings” gives us a McCoy Tyner inflected take on the old carol, with plenty of low end to back it up. At the end we drift away with Santa Claus once more.

The thing about jazz harp albums is that the good ones contain unfathomable depths. You can think you’ve just put on a record to de-stress you and accompany that second glass of eggnog, when suddenly you find yourself contemplating the interplay between bass, harp and drums as a clue to the rhythmic foundations of the universe. Or maybe that’s just the eggnog! Next week we’ll pick up a new series on a notorious musician who would be sure to tell you that it’s both his music and his eggnog talking.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

The album is also streamable from Bandcamp:

BONUS: Amanda did a live charity concert earlier this month featuring much of the music on this album and from her other works; you can watch that here:

A musical lookback over 22 years

Two years ago today, I was writing about the Virginia Women’s Chorus Candlelight Christmas album.

Three years ago today, I unleashed one of my most recent Christmas playlists, “Tinsel covered Christmas blues.” You can check out my Christmas playlists (three hours worth!) on SoundCloud today if you want to have some music to wrap presents by:

Fifteen years ago, I wrote about some Glee Club research (I was still putting the history together and hadn’t started writing Ten Thousand Voices). “The impracticability of carrying out successfully any college enterprise without the cordial support of all the students!” Indeed.

The Virginia University Magazine, Vol. XXXV, No. 3 (December 1891), p. 270.

Sixteen years ago, I posted a handful of pointers to some useful Excel statistical tricks, and some intriguing looking font games that alas don’t seem to be around any more. Sic transit gloria mundi.

Seventeen years ago, some useful networking tips and tricks and more links to a bunch of stuff including wishes for Larry Grogan at Funky16Corners. Larry no longer posts to that blog but is still doing radio shows for WFMU. Respect.

Twenty years ago, I had just finished my very first run of Holiday Pops with the Boston Pops and we were hosting my sister for Christmas.

Twenty-one years ago, I was apologizing for not blogging. I had missed three days. If only I knew… More or less the same message twenty-two years ago.

And twenty-two years ago, I was eulogizing Joe Strummer.

That I’m still writing on this blog all these years later still feels like something of a Christmas miracle to me, even if the frequency has diminished and the word count per post has gone way up. Hope you all have great holidays! There will be at least one more post between now and the end of the year.

Boston Camerata, A Renaissance Christmas (1986)

A childhood favorite Christmas record, filled with songs familiar and strange and featuring the voice of an old friend.

Album of the Week, December 20, 2025

I have written about several Boston Camerata Christmas records: Sing We Noel, A Medieval Christmas, even an early A Renaissance Christmas from 1974. And each time I do, my friend Frank Albinder, formerly director of the Washington Men’s Camerata and member of Chanticleer, and current director of the Virginia Glee Club, says, “I used to sing with them! I recorded a Christmas album with them!” And: Yes, Frank, you did! This week’s post is for you.

Frank’s sojourn in Boston as a music grad student came in handy when Joel Cohen was assembling the musical forces for the 1986 release A Renaissance Christmas (true to the group’s name, the album was a local Boston production, recorded in Trinity Church in Copley Square in December 1985). Vocally speaking, there are no carryovers from Sing We Noel, the Camerata’s prior Christmas album—but there’s an eight-year gap between those two recordings, and one presumes that a great many Camerata members were, like Frank, graduate students who were passing through Boston on their way. One notable exception to the rule is soprano Anne Azéma, who began her recording career with the Boston Camerata with 1984’s La Primavera and is still with the Camerata today as its artistic director. (Along the way she married Joel Cohen.)

It is Azéma’s voice that leads off the album, with the 15th century English carol “Nowell: Dieus vous garde.” (Yes, English: Richard Smert wrote the carol in a mixture of English and Norman, as was appropriate for the court at the time.) The quartet of voices plus viol sings one of my favorite non-traditional Christmas carols, an early invocation of Father Christmas, with purity and compelling melodic line. The reverie is followed by “Gaudete, gaudete”, sung with vigor by the ensemble; this is one of the carols from the album that can be widely heard on other recordings, but the performance here blends expertise with vigor in a hallmark of these Camerata recordings.

Following a recitation in broad Middle English (here the narrator is tenor Edmund Brownless) that gave my family the in-joke “Hail, Mary, full of fescue,” we get the Kyrie from Guilliame Dufay’s “Ecce ancilla Domini” Mass, with Brownless, countertenor Kenneth Fitch, and bass Albinder providing the solos. Fitch’s voice is delightfully balanced and resonant, lacking some of the eccentricities of the countertenors on the 1970s Camerata recordings, and the overall impression is magnetic, particularly, when the ensemble cuts out at the end leaving the trio to provide the final “Kyrie.” We make our first stop in Spain with “E la don don,” performed with sparkling briskness, and then return to France with two instrumental settings of “Une jeune fillette.”

“Une jeune fillette” (in alteration with “Joseph est bien marìe”) leads us into the next set, with the women’s voices led by Azéma singing the latter carol with interludes of the former in a beguiling arrangement. A brief instrumental bridge of “Joseph, lieber Joseph mein” leads to the highlight of the first half, a performance of Joseph Galliculus’s “Magnificat quinti toni.” Sung bits of chant alternate with hypnotically fugueing renditions of familiar Christmas tunes in an astonishing reverie.

The second half is much more carol-focused, with Frank’s unaccompanied solo on “Esprits divins” leading off, followed by a reading and the original harmonization of “Es ist ein Ros’ entsprungen,” with lute and voice. An appropriately swaggering “Riu, riu chiu” follows, unaccompanied save for antiphonal handclaps until the final choruses.

Cohen constructs a mini-Praetorius set (Michael and Hieronymous) around the visit of the Magi. Michael Praetorius contributes the more familiar “Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern,” followed by a reading and the Hieronymous P. setting of “O vos omnes,” mourning Herod’s crime against the firstborn.

The set that follows celebrates the shepherds at the cradle, and is in some ways the most adventurous part of this adventurous record. Opening with a reading and a 16th century Italian dance played on the ocarina by Marilyn Boenau, the ensemble then plays a set of vigorous music from the French, Catalan and Provençal traditions. Nicholas Martin’s “Nouvelles, nouvelles” gives us a beautiful melody led by Azéma, while the Catalan “Tau garçó, la durundera” is all rhythm and close harmonies. Finally, the Provençal “Tura lura lura, lo gau canta” provides a high spirited and faintly comic call-and-response between Cohen and the men of the ensemble as they tell the story of a shepherd afraid to make the pilgrimage to Bethlehem.

Lastly, we get a trio of Renaissance masterworks, beginning with the final reading from Luke and the Tómas Luis de Victoria “O magnum mysterium.” The latter is far and away the most famous of the liturgical music on the record and is given a gorgeous reading by the Camerata. A pair of works by Michael Praetorius concludes the record, with Azéma trading phrases in call and response with soprano Roberta Anderson in “Singet und klinget, ihr Kinderlein” and the ensemble singing a Provençal text from 17th century Avignon to a dance melody by Praetorius in the final setting, “Bransle de Poictou/La bona novella.”

The Boston Camerata at this stage of their development was a remarkable ensemble, doing their own research and constructing programs that both instructed and enlivened the ear. A good many recordings have followed, even after Cohen’s retirement, and the ensemble itself carries on. (In fact, I’m taking the family to hear them perform some early American Christmas music tomorrow.) The individual musicians on this recording also had a variety of careers; viol and recorder player Jane Hershey recorded for many years with Hesperus, soprano Roberta Anderson with Boston Baroque, and both countertenor Ken Fitch and bass-baritone Albinder would go on to greater fame and fortune with Chanticleer.

Next week we’ll swerve back to something closer to jazz as we draw the mystery of the holiday to a close.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

Samara Joy, A Joyful Holiday

A contemporary Christmas jazz classic from a young vocalist with an old soul.

Album of the Week, December 13, 2025

In my memory it was the middle of the pandemic (it actually turns out it was January 2022), and I was doomscrolling through TikTok. And I stopped in my tracks, because here was a TikTok user who was singing jazz. And she was good. A low alto, her phrasing reminded me of Ella, and she knew classic ballads. I just scrolled through her whole timeline, and with each video I grew more convinced that she was the real thing. She seemed impossibly talented, and impossibly young.

I was a little late to the bandwagon, because her first album, Samara Joy, had come out the previous summer, and Joy (then performing as Samara McLendon) had won the Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition in 2019, when Christian McBride described her as a “once-in-a-generation talent.” But I got on the bandwagon before she got to the majors; she signed with Verve Records later in 2022 and released her second album, Linger Awhile, which won the 2023 Grammy Award for Best Jazz Vocal Album and won her a Best New Artist award (beating out Wet Leg, among others). And that winter she released this EP, featuring guest Sullivan Fortner (whom we’ve seen accompanying Cécile McLorin Salvant) on piano and Hammond organ, drummers Kenny Washington and Charles Haynes, bassists David Wong and Eric Wheeler, pianist Shedrick Mitchell, and Antonio McLendon.

“Warm in December” is a lesser-known composition by Bob Russell, better known for co-writing “Concerto for Cootie” with Duke Ellington as well as lyrics to dozens of tunes including his last hit “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother.” With Sullivan Fortner, Kenny Washington and David Wong backing Samara Joy on this performance, a strong argument is made that the song ought to enter the holiday repertoire. A gentle out-of-tempo introduction by Joy and Fortner is followed by a swinging verse with Washington and Wong in cheeky form. Samara Joy’s vocals are at once intimate, requiring the listener to lean in, and knowingly smiling in the way of the best of Ella’s performances. Sullivan Fortner again proves he is the best living accompanist of great jazz vocalists with his sensitive introduction and jubilant solo.

“Twinkle Twinkle Little Me,” co-written by Ron Miller and William O’Malley and originally performed by the Supremes in 1965 and Stevie Wonder in 1967, is here performed by Samara Joy and Sullivan Fortner as an aching ballad. Joy’s vocal control is marvelous, with a single high note underscoring the promise “If you give unselfishly/I’ll always shine for you.” It’s no wonder this performance won Joy and Fortner the Grammy for Best Jazz Vocal Performance.

“The Christmas Song” is as warm a performance of the Mel Tormé/Bob Wells classic as you’re likely to find. Joy’s vocal style here demonstrates several signatures of her style, including her quiet volume, careful use of glissando, masterful control of her low range, and phrasing behind the beat in the best possible way, to say nothing of her sense for the finely timed key change at the very end. It also offers an opportunity to hear the steady, forthright sensibility that young bassist David Wong brings to the session; nothing extraneous, just forward motion with his deeply resonant notes.

“Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” is the last of the numbers featuring Washington and Wong, here joined by Italian guitarist Pasquale Grasso, who collaborated with Joy on her first two albums. He proves every inch as sensitive an accompanist as Fortner, easily following her shift from a slow waltz time into a swinging double-time across the song’s bridge. On the last verse, as she sings “Until then, we’ll have to muddle through somehow,” she imperceptibly crescendoes to her loudest forte of all the small-combo numbers, then finishes on a stunning barely-sung high note sustained with impossible clarity.

I am not the world’s biggest fan of “O Holy Night”; I find most performances overwrought and triumphalist in a way that feels inappropriate for the hushed miracle of Christmas Eve. In that regard, Joy’s choice to perform here with her father Antonio McLendon (who brings a gospel richness to their harmonies) and her gospel-singing legend grandfather (Goldwire McLendon co-founded the Philadelphia gospel group the Savettes) seems inspired. The outro, with its modal choir building slowly to a climax and a rare Samara Joy high note, might be my favorite part of this Christmas album. She finishes the EP with another collaboration with Antonio, “The Christmas Song (Live Duet),” with Charles Haynes, Eric Wheeler and Shedrick Mitchell backing, which is lovely for many reasons, including father and daughter shouting each other out during the applause at the song’s end.

Not everything on A Joyful Holiday is an instant Christmas classic, but enough of it is great that it’s well worth seeking out. Also: great1 new Christmas albums from young artists are rare enough that I recommend grabbing them when you find them. And going to hear them perform, as well. (You can imagine my dismay when I was unable to perform this year’s Boston Pops concert for corporate sponsors, only to learn that the guest artist was none other than Ms. Samara Joy.)

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: Here’s a version of Joy with Antonio McLendon and pianist Luther Allison performing “O Holy Night” live for Vevo:

BONUS BONUS: A slightly funkier live version of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Me” from Joy’s YouTube channel still carries the intimacy of the recorded version:

  1. Mediocre ones, on the other hand, are a dime a dozen. ↩︎

Kenny Burrell, Have Yourself a Soulful Little Christmas

A cool Yule is in the brilliant and sure hands of this master guitarist.

Album of the Week, December 6, 2025

The dirty little secret of Christmas albums is that a lot of them sound the same. You tend to hear the same arrangements, or arrangements of the same arrangements, of the same Christmas carols and holiday songs over and over again. When an original voice comes along in the genre, it’s a welcome improvement. Such is the case of Have Yourself a Soulful Little Christmas, the sole holiday album by guitarist Kenny Burrell, released on the Cadet label (home of Ramsey Lewis) in 1966 and arranged by bassist, composer and producer Richard Evans.

We’ve encountered Kenny Burrell many times, all in the company of Jimmy Smith so far. But the guitarist was so much more than a sideman. As a leader, he recorded sides for Blue Note, Prestige, New Jazz (with John Coltrane!) and Verve before recording his first record on the Cadet label (formerly Argo Records, the jazz subsidiary of Chess Records) in 1966. This holiday album followed the same year. Backed with an uncredited orchestra, Burrell’s performances over Davis’s arrangements give both blues and soul, but also unexpected tenderness.

“The Little Drummer Boy” is an unlikely opener, combining the familiar Harry-Simeone-via-Trapp-Family-Singers carol with a steady rhythm section that is, honest to goodness, a direct lift from Ravel’s “Bolero.” Burrell gives us a fairly straightforward reading of the tune, but the solo soon stretches out into a bluesy groove as he takes the guitar higher and higher, with splashes of soul jazz piano and a horn section that grows in prominence but never overwhelms. It’s a masterpiece of a slow burn, with the cool hand of Burrell at the center of it all, right up to the fadeout.

“Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” is a quieter, more introspective take on the dark side of this familiar Hugh Martin/Ralph Blane tune. Burrell’s playing is absolutely straight here, with the subtlest of string arrangements underscoring the melancholy of a Christmas song whose original lyrics ran “One day soon we all will be together, if the fates allow/Until then, we’ll have to muddle through somehow.”

It surely took a fair amount of gumption to assay a jazz version of “My Favorite Things” in 1966, following John Coltrane’s definitive rendering of the tune in 1961. Burrell and Evans take the tune to a bluesier place, starting with the time signature, a swinging four-four instead of the waltz. But there is some of the transcendence of the Coltrane version in the brief few measures of the bridge before Burrell’s guitar rips through a series of fiery blues licks up until the fade-out.

“Away In a Manger” begins with a solo prelude by Burrell, into the first verse which is played entirely by him and a string section. The bass joins on the second verse; the entire thing is played like a quiet offering, with just enough gospel around the edges to make it a delight.

“Mary’s Little Boy Chile” was not exactly a Christmas-album mainstay even in 1966, but was still widely recorded elsewhere. Introduced by Harry Belafonte ten years earlier, it was written by the great composer and arranger Jester Hairston, who was also responsible for the spectacular arrangement of “Amen” that appeared in the Sidney Poitier film Lilies of the Field. Here the arrangement is simple, just Burrell with percussion and a restrained string section, allowing the calypso to shine forth. The woodwinds join in the last chorus to add a little more gentle oomph.

Burrell’s “White Christmas” is cool and relaxed, with an extremely laid back bassist, piano, and brushes on the drums the only accompaniment. But it carries power and intensity through its simplicity, closing out side one.

“God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” is a more full-bodied opener for side two, with touches of “Greensleeves” (which Burrell had just recorded earlier that year with Smith) in the arrangement. Burrell’s playing here is cool and precise against a steady backbeat from the rhythm section, but the overall arrangement moves along. “The Christmas Song” has a similar vibe but with more varied instrumentation; French horn and xylophone curl cosily at the edges of the strings, leading into a double-time solo by Burrell that raises the heartrate a good 10-15bpm before relaxing back into a chair by the fire.

“Children, Go Where I Send Thee” is another less traditional choice in a spectacular arrangement. The tune is played with equal parts gospel—every bit as much of a rave-up as the Fred Waring version with full choir—and Blues Brothers-style R&B, with a Hammond organ peeking through the horns.

“Silent Night” gets a mighty gospel arrangement, anchored by the bass and a rolling gospel piano. Burrell’s solo sings without shouting, using chords and octaves for emphasis and power without ever losing the tenderness at the heart of the tune. The “Twelve Days of Christmas,” by contrast, is playful, Burrell’s guitar breakdown on the second day mercifully taking us away from the monotony of the repetitious arrangement. The playing is enough fun that one regrets the band only goes through four days (and three key changes).

“Merry Christmas Baby” is an R&B Christmas song written by Lou Baxter and Johnny Moore; the latter’s Three Blazers recorded the tune with Charles Brown providing vocals and it’s since become a staple of blues and R&B Christmas recordings. Here it provides a purely blues closer, with piano, Hammond, bass and drums providing the accompaniment for the first two verses and the horns building a mighty crescendo under the third and fourth. Burrell’s bluesy guitar gets the last word, bringing the album to a close.

Burrell, remarkably, is still with us. The former Director of Jazz Studies at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music, he still appears on new recordings, the most recent a collaboration with Teri Roiger, John Menegon and the late Jack DeJohnette released last year when Burrell was 93, despite health challenges and some controversy about the funding needed to pay ensuing medical bills. This album is a spectacular testament to his playing and his taste, but there are many more worth seeking out—that collaboration with Coltrane for starters. Next week we’ll stay in the jazz lane, with a joyous recent recording by an emerging artist.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: From ten years ago, a great trio performance of “My Favorite Things” from Westwood Music.

Jimmy Smith, Christmas ’64

One more organ record—maybe the best known of them all—brings us into this year’s holiday season.

November 29, 2025

Remember how I signed off last week saying we were going to “take a break for some seasonal music,” bringing this run of articles on the jazz organ to a close? Wanna know who our first purveyor of seasonal music is? (Squints) Oh yeah, Jimmy Smith. Had I planned better I could have set this up as a great segue from the organ combo articles into the holidays, but as it is you’ll have to settle for an absolutely spectacular album of both jazz organ and holiday music.

Jimmy Smith in 1964, on Verve, was at the height of both his musical powers and his bankability, and Creed Taylor was not the sort of producer who was above stretching the popularity of his artist for some additional revenue via the time-honored tradition of the Christmas album. Coming off his one-two punch of The Cat and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, you’d be forgiven for expecting that Smith would take things easier on this holiday album. But with a band consisting of many of the musicians who made those great recordings, including Kenny Burrell (and Quentin Warren) on guitar, Art Davis on bass, Grady Tate (and Billy Hart) on drums—plus a whole orchestra that included Jimmy Cleveland on trombone and the elusive Margaret Ross on harp, among others—and charts by Billy Byers and Al Cohn, there was no room for slacking here. This is a seriously hot record, and a fantastic Christmas album to boot.

“God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen (Big Band version)” begins in big band fashion indeed, with a low-brass processional full of pomp and accompanied by the timpani, right up until “tidings of comfort and joy.” At which point the trumpets call a blue fanfare and Jimmy rolls in. The band continues with a “Slaughter on 10th Avenue” style take on the tune for one more verse, but then Jimmy takes the reins and plays a clean organ trio verse with Kenny Burrell and Grady Tate that is telepathically tight and funky. The horns rise up behind the trio like an incipient ambush until they take one more verse, but Jimmy gets the last word.

“Jingle Bells” is a fine and mellow tune for the trio. Check Grady Tate’s subtle explosions behind the band as well as Jimmy’s understated organ part. The slow crescendos on the two held arpeggios are the only loud part of the arrangement, which fades out just as it gets going. It’s cool—something that can’t be said for the opening of “We Three Kings of Orient Are,” which sports a full symphonic brass arrangement that’s well-nigh Mahlerian, courtesy of saxophonist/arranger Al Cohn. But then it turns the corner into a gospel shouter and we’re really off and running. I would have been pleased to hear a side-long take on the middle bit of the arrangement, but here it’s bookended by an outro version of that opening.

“The Christmas Song” is more swinging, with both Jimmy and the band in a laid back mood. The horns are swinging so hard they’re practically a beat behind, and Jimmy happily burbles bits of mood before playing a doggedly on-model melodic solo as the horns provide chromatically oracular pronouncements. A high chorus of trumpets brings us into a double-time solo wherein Jimmy stretches out over a frantic bit of Grady Tate drumming, then back to the chorus which slowly builds to a massive climax, punctuated by a chime before the final chorus.

The trumpets give us a “White Christmas” opening that could be played by the Boston Pops, key change and all, before Grady Tate takes us into bossa nova land. Jimmy’s solo is low key, in the baritone range, at least until the horns take it up a notch, at which point we get a little happy double time arpeggio, a final chorus, and a little “Jingle Bells” quote to wrap it up.

“Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” is a trio number with Quentin Wells and Billy Hart, featuring Jimmy and Quentin trading off licks. The stereo separation (guitar in the left channel, organ in the right) is the only thing that helps to piece apart the players at the beginning, so close is the harmony, especially since Jimmy is soloing without much vibrato. Quentin Wells is a bluesier player than Kenny Burrell and he leans into that here, both in his solo and in the stabs of chords he plays under Jimmy’s solo. Jimmy starts out mellow but builds intensity through his usual tricks, particularly leaning on the tonic and playing bursts of arpeggios around the edges of his solo, all the way into the fade-out.

It’s another Pops-style arrangement for “Silent Night,” complete with bells and flugelhorn, then a handoff to Jimmy and the trio who do what they do best, a brisk, unsentimental swing through the tune. The horns make like “The Cat,” briefly, in the climax of their accompaniment to Jimmy’s solo—indeed, the only thing to criticize here is that they actually overwhelm the organ for the only time on record.

“God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen (Trio Version)” starts right in, sounding a bit like Jimmy’s version of “Greensleeves.” The trio with Quentin Warren and Billy Hart swings convincingly, with Billy’s snare work so powerful that it causes a secondary rattle somewhere between the snares and the ride cymbal. Jimmy spools off riff after riff in his solo, as Quentin Warren walks around the chords, keeping the rhythm going strong. At several points, it sounds as though the group will fade out, but the producers wisely keep rolling tape as the trio lands the hottest number on the whole record at the very end. Finally as the trio returns to the opening vamp, the engineers bring down the sliders and fade it out into the dark.

About the only thing wrong with Christmas ‘64 is the title; though it wasn’t the only Verve album to include the year in the title, it was clearly not a good choice for a title for a holiday album, which tend to sell between Thanksgiving and Christmas but can continue to rack up sales for many years. Retitled and with a new cover, the album had a long life under its new name, Christmas Cookin’, including in its CD reissue which included two other tracks, “Greensleeves” from Organ Grinder Swing and “Baby It’s Cold Outside” from Jimmy and Wes: The Dynamic Duo.

The better known cover and title for this week’s album as reissued in 1966, courtesy Discogs.

Next week we’ll stay in the jazz lane, with a holiday album by one of the players on this week’s set. You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: This album and its related tracks cast a long shadow over holiday jazz records. The late great Joey DeFrancesco included a rearrangement of Jimmy’s “Greensleeves,” as “What Child is This,” on his superb 2014 album Home for the Holidays: