Self-Portrait in Three Colors

Shafi Hadi and Booker Ervin (tenor sax), Willie Dennis (trombone), Horace Parlan (piano), Charles Mingus (bass) and Dannie Richmond (drums). From the album Mingus Ah Um (1959).

In ten years, Mingus recorded thirty albums, ten of them as a leader. In 1956 he recorded Pithecanthropus Erectus, in which he found himself as a composer and leader, mixing the best elements of jazz’s past and present, and making his way into the free jazz of the future. In 1957 he recorded The Clown, the first album to feature Dannie Richmond on drums, which remained with Mingus until his death. The two men formed one of the most versatile rhythmic sections of jazz and both sought to expand the limits of their music while remaining true to its roots.

In 1959 he recorded Mingus Ah Um and Blues and Roots, which was released the following year. Mingus witnessed Ornette Coleman’s controversial performances at New York’s Five Spot jazz club in 1960 and initially expressed his doubts about his innovative music. However, Mingus formed a quartet with multi-instrumentalist Eric Dolphy, trumpeter Ted Curson and drummer Dannie Richmond accepting the challenge of the new standard set by Coleman, and recorded two albums.

This theme is one of Mingus’s romantic Ellington-style ballads, complexly voiced with contrapuntal lines. First the piano is played and then the rest of the group joins in. The beautiful melody transports you through time and space with each of the members of the wind section playing different and intertwined phrases until the end inevitably arrives.