Charlie Mingus - Tijuana Moods - RCA Victor - 1962 - 1st UK Mono RD-7514 - VG++
£
44
$
58
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Description
Tijuana Moods (1957) was ahead of its time, a "concept" jazz album in which the great bassist combined improvisation and composition to make a 36-minute suite that still sounds immediate and abrasive. It anticipates both the sophistication of Kind of Blue and the rawness of 1960s "new thing", yet it languished unreleased for five years while RCA concentrated on Elvis.
Mingus didn't need stars to make his music work. Trumpeter Clarence "Gene" Shaw (born just a few weeks after Miles Davis) could play ballads with a cool tone and add fiery virtuosity at fast tempos. Shafi Hadi (aka Curtis Porter) was an exciting, soulful saxophonist. The two horn players, like pianist Bill Triglia, are hardly known beyond a handful of Mingus records, yet they made a vital contribution to one of the great masterpieces of jazz.
Nominally expressing a piece of laddish tourist excess (self-mythologised in Mingus's unreliable memoir Beneath the Underdog), the music is much more than a mid-life crisis with tequila and castanets. Mingus was a master of form, whatever the materials. Tijuana Moods comprises two ten-minute tone poems - Ysabel's Table Dance and Los Mariachis - framed by two idiosyncratic standards (Dizzy Moods, adapted from Gillespie's Woody'n'You, and Flamingo) with the short but labyrinthine Tijuana Gift Shop in the middle. The longer pieces draw on jazz's Spanish tinge to evoke the illicit excitement and corruption associated with the US/Mexico border town, the tradition of "cash in hand from yankee man", as Mingus puts it.
This is jazz composition of the highest order, in which improvisation - wild, controlled, sublime - is an integral part of Mingus's scores, with their complex part-writing, extended harmonies and constant variation of tempo and feel. Mingus's music was notoriously difficult to read, so he abandoned written manuscripts. "He'd teach us four bars at a time," said trombonist Jimmy Knepper. "He wanted you to play like you just thought of it yourself." Secure in a near-telepathic relationship with the young drummer Dannie Richmond, Mingus steers, cajoles the band from his bass - always swinging but never cliched.
Review from The Guardian (of which, I'm not usually a fan, however this piece is on the money).
Records well packed in professional mailers.
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