You just heard altoist Jackie McLean, a man with the (actually very common) distinction of playing with and having his teeth knocked out by Charles Mingus, one of the greatest composers and bassists in jazz history, and a great friend of Joni Mitchell (that’s not a euphemism).
The story goes that Mingus yelled at McLean mid-solo, as he was wont to do (he thought McLean was imitating Charlie Parker too much, such a bugbear of Mingus’ that he once wrote a song called ‘If Charlie Parker was a gunslinger, there’d be a whole lot of dead copycats’) and McLean handed in his notice. Mingus then punched the saxophonist, who retaliated by stabbing him in the stomach.
Both musicians can be heard on the Atlantic record Blues & Roots (1960), an album that distils Mingus’ notorious temper into blues that swings as hard as his fists. From a mixture of African, Hispanic, Native American and Chinese heritage, Mingus was acutely aware of racism on all sides, and was told he wasn’t black enough to play the blues. This album would very much prove them wrong.
To find the roots of this record we need to go back to the bassist’s 1957 masterpiece The Clown, whose opener ‘Haitian Fight Song’ is one of the most forceful examples of this political, violent Mingus Music (he disliked the term ‘jazz’). He was urged to write a whole album in this style, “because some people, particularly critics, were saying I didn’t swing enough.”
Blues & Roots contains none of the Ellingtonian romance or avant-gardism found elsewhere in Mingus’ vital discography. “It presents only one part of my musical world, the blues,” he writes in the liner notes. “A barrage of soul music: churchy, blues, swinging, earthy.” The album delivers six of these numbers, ranging from the reverential (‘My Jelly Roll Soul’) to the downright raucous (‘Moanin”).
It kicks off with ‘Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting’, a turbulent, gospel-tinged belter in the vein of ‘Haitian Fight Song’. “I heard this as a child when I went to meetings with my mother,” Mingus says of the track that sounds as much like a saloon as it does a church.
Last year when Lana Del Rey tweeted an angry response to a negative review (“My gift is the warmth I live my life with,” whatever that means), I couldn’t help but think about Blues & Roots, and how nothing shuts down criticism like a good old-fashioned demonstration.
Head to our ‘Bosses Of The Bass’ playlist for more low-end listening.
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