This is big music, not just in the size of the band but in the music's emotional power. This is music with movements, like Mozart or Beethoven or any of the finest classical composers, music that moves you like the best jazz combos, music that draws your emotions to the surface like the most sultry torch-songs, music that lives on outside time and touches everyone who listens. If classical music had not ossified at the end of the Nineteenth Century, leaving only a few so-called modern composers to move it forward, this is what that music would have become.
In 1965, I was listening to new music by Charles Mingus on long-playing vinyl records released by specialized jazz labels. For me, the music was new and wonderful. I revelled in this innovative, powerful jazz that seemed to be moving the music forward. This new release of music written by Mingus and recorded in a live 1965 concert takes me back to that time but also allows me the perspective of hindsight. It's through this prism of time that I'm now hearing this music.
After forty-some years, I can hear the influence of Mingus in the music of so many other great artists, not just in jazz but across the spectrum of popular and more academic styles. More exciting is that today the music sounds just as fresh and exciting as ever, and every bit as innovative as it did so long ago. This refreshing music may continue to influence composers and performers for many decades to come, not just in America but around the world.
Although this release includes only 11 tracks of music, 19 total tracks if you count the bits of speech between the music, it gives the listener almost 90 minutes by one of America's finest composers and his band. To listen is to be entranced by the beauty and power of this music as it carries the listener through highs and lows and from mood to mood. It's electrifying and it's elequent and it speaks to the world with the voice of America.
Like Ellington, Copland, Grofé, and only a few others, Charles Mingus has discovered the heart of America and set it to music that transcends time and space. This is the new music of the American spirit, the transition through the Twentieth Century, into the Twenty-First, and into the future. Jazz music will never be the same again.
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