Charles Mingus debut on Impulse from 1963 is one of his two best albums, and arguably the best jazz orchestration ever made. It seems all the reviews I’m reading about this albums have accolades to spare, but they also warn not to take it lightly: this is a complicated album coming from the mind of a complicated man. In fact so complicated Mingus invited his psychotherapist to add some blurb to the liner notes.
The album might also have been a frustrated reaction to what happened a year earlier. In 1962 Mingus tried to document the process of a jazz concert, a live jazz workshop. Bad sound, constant interruptions, lack of recording time and bad scheduling resulted in disaster. The album was released, but no one was happy with it. Tom Yorke of Radiohead said about it: …just fucking chaos. There’s this incredible tension and it was the most formative record of the whole time. Formative, right: it led to this emotional trash bin.