Charles Mingus – Presents Charles Mingus (Remastered)

180-gram vinyl

Remastered by Bernie Grundman

Tip-on jacket

Early ’60s improv jazz and blues titles on Candid return to print!

Reissue program starts with five expertly remastered albums of jazz and blues

The original Candid record label lasted a mere four years, from 1960 to ’64, and its 30-some LPs played a worthy role in fusing the period’s music — mainly modern jazz but also blues — with the burgeoning civil rights movement.

The label’s catalog has been acquired by Exceleration Music, whose reissue program starts with five expertly remastered albums: We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite (featuring Coleman Hawkins, Olatunji, and Roach’s wife, Abbey Lincoln), Lincoln’s Straight Ahead, and Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus plus, from the blues, Lightnin’ Hopkins in New York and Otis Spann Is the Blues. The reissues include prescient notes by the original label’s producer and A&R man, noted critic and author Nat Hentoff.

The American Candid label has achieved a near legendary status among the critics and the International jazz and blues public. The series was born in 1960 when Archie Bleyer, owner of the Cadence label decided to indulge his love of jazz and blues and create his own line — called Candid. Bleyer recruited Hentoff to produce the series.

Back on Columbia Records, bassist Charles Mingus hadn’t been allowed to put vocal passages caricaturing controversial Arkansas governor Orval Faubus on his 1959 LP Mingus Ah Um, so he made its “Fables of Faubus” an instrumental. Of course, he could say it all on Candid’s Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus, here retitling the piece “Original Faubus Fables” due to contractual concerns involving Columbia. Temperamental Mingus is quoted, “(A) lot of jazz records don’t make it because guys almost unconsciously change their approach in a studio from what they do every night. I finally wanted to make an album the way we are on the job,” so the studio recording is presented as a stage show with Mingus even instructing the nonexistent audience and bar staff on proper behavior during his performance.

As for “All the Things You Could Be by Now if Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother” (which borrows from “All the Things You Are”), Mingus once remarked, “The title probably came from the way the audience was reacting one night.” With his ensemble’s ever-shifting lineup, Mingus was a kind of Lee Strasberg of jazz in Hentoff’s words. Here he’s backed by Ted Curson on trumpet and Dannie Richmond on drums, with Eric Dolphy (who’d soon leave Mingus) on alto sax and bass clarinet.

In the late 1980s, Black Lion Records in England bought the Candid catalog, subsequently selling it to U.S.-based Exceleration Music, where jazz drummer Terri Lynne Carrington is involved with A&R.

Format : Vinyl Record

1 Lp