John Handy and Shafi Hadi (alto sax), Booker Ervin (tenor sax), Jimmy Knepper (trombone), Horace Parlam (piano), Charles Mingus (bass) and Dannie Richmond (drums). From the album Mingus Ah Um (1959).
This album is one of the most important in the history of modern jazz. The performance is great, the recording is perfect and the swing is endless. Charles Mingus alternates between brilliant dissonance and incredibly beautiful sound, he is soft and understandable, but bold and fresh. He is an integral, complete musician, enormous composer and daring arranger who was able to combine the deepest jazz tradition with the theoretical sophistication of the European cultural legacy.
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This first theme is inspired by the singing and preaching of the gospel of the kind that Mingus would have heard as a child. “Godbye Pork Pie Hat” is dedicated to Lester Young, who died shortly before the recording, “Open Letter to Duke” to Duke Ellington and “Jelly Roll” to Jelly Roll Morton. “Fables of Faubus” is a protest against the Arkansas Governor Orval E. Faubus, who in 1957 sent the National Guard to prevent the integration of nine African-American teenagers into Little Rock Central High School.
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After a short introduction starts the exposition of the theme, which has a cheerful and festive atmosphere. The first one to perform his solo is Ervin following the blues harmonies while Handy, Handi and Knepper make a sound mattress underneath. Then the piano plays a phrase repeatedly and the wind section joins him with a different phrase. Then Handy enters to do his solo while the other members of the group accompany him clapping their hands. The musicians return to their instruments and Handy plays faster phrases that could resemble a sermon. Richmond then exchanges eight-bars solos with the wind section until finally the group re-exposes the theme and ends up saying amen.
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