Day 40: Charles Mingus - Pithecanthropus Erectus

Dear Nathaniel,

Hello my angel, I hope you're having a great time my love. I miss you my angel.

Tonight I wanted to go back to Jazz, I should probably have chosen something a bit more standard but I felt like I needed something more off the wall after Led Zeppelin before we settle back into the standard. This is one of my favourite Jazz albums, recorded in the middle of the hard bop era this experimental style was quite far ahead of its time.

 The interesting thing about jazz is the concept of band leaders and members of that band, while a band leader generally has the most influence over the recording given the improvisational nature of the band a lot of the brilliance comes from the members involved with the recording. Mingus himself contributes the bass on the album which while important doesn't have the same role at the forefront as the piano or saxophones, however his influence and direction is clearly evident and easily distinguishable as being his style.

Of course Mingus also created a lot of the compositions that are played, or at least the arrangement of them. One of the finest examples of his direct composition is the title track which tells the story of human evolution and subsequent devolution. However the concept of the band leader I find quite important. It is quite rarely that you will find someone playing on a strong record that haven't served as a leader themselves.

The Jazz scene at the height of hard bop was rife with collaboration and a huge amount of music was created, thankfully. It's incredibly easy to link all the great artists together, for example Charles Mingus has played with Bud Powell, my favourite jazz pianist, Miles Davis, one of the absolute greats of jazz and Duke Ellington who can simply be described as the Duke. Miles Davis himself has played with Coltrane, who we have already had a small listen of, and a huge list of other musicians.

We're going to listen to some Miles Davis tomorrow and will definitely be revisiting Mingus as well at some point. I think over the next week we'll be exclusively be playing jazz before moving into the jazzier side of Progressive Rock and the Canterbury scene and then we'll start to focus a bit on fusion with Miles Davis' later work, Mahavishnu Orchestra and Weather Report probably starting with Soft Machine to bridge the gap between prog and fusion. It will also be a great excuse to play some more Zappa.

I absolutely love this style of jazz, it really showed the potential of the piano outside of classical music, and probably one of the last ways in which the piano was still relevant as a main player on a whole album, with Billy Joel of course being the exception. It was of course mostly replaced by the keyboard and the Hammond organ in relation to progressive rock especially, the same can be said for the saxophone which has unfortunately been relegated as a novelty instrument in pop songs.

I hope you've enjoyed this album as much as I do my angel. Sleep well Nathaniel.

Love from Dad.