Charles Mingus - Jazz Workshop 1957-1958 [2CD Set] (2009)

Charles Mingus was a major performing jazzman, composer and theorist when he recorded East Coasting in August 1957, and A Modern Jazz Symposium of Music and Poetry in October that same year. Both albums are proof of the great strength he possessed, essential for the kind of pioneer effort he had undertaken in using his compositional prowess to expand the perimeters of jazz in structural terms. Nothing in this music is contrived, clumsy, or intellectual. Instead, it is the product of an enormously gifted talent who, as with all vitally inventive thinkers, drew on the honest experience of mind and soul of his age for artistic sustenance.

The Mingus group here is first rate. In addition to Jimmy Knepper, a vital part of Minguss music, these sessions featured the thoughtful talents of Bill Evans and Horace Parlan, and outstanding sidemen such as Shafi Hadi, Clarence Shaw, or Dannie Richmond. In those days Minguss workshop groups had considerable live experience with jazz-poetry and beyond, and undoubtedly he succeeded in merging his complex musical ideology with the spoken word. Scenes in the City is narrated by Melvin Stewart, while on the last two tracks Langston Hughes reads his own poems. The inspired supporting music helped to make these sides among the most successful of their kind.