The Mojo Collection. Various Mojo Magazine
the trio will grow in the direction of simultaneous improvisation,’ he had said, ‘if the bass player, for example, hears an idea that he wants to answer, why should he just keep playing a 4/4 background?’ After a few false starts (he lost several potential collaborators due to poor treatment at a club supporting Benny Goodman), Bill ended up with responsive drummer Paul Motian and a remarkable young bassist, Scott LaFaro, who was willing and more than capable to fulfil Bill’s vision of concurrent invention. ‘Ideas were rolling out on top of each other,’ Evans said of LaFaro, ‘it was like a bucking horse.’
The trio made two fine studio albums: December 1959’s Portrait In Jazz and February 1961’s Explorations, but with the tapes rolling all day Sunday June 25, 1961 at New York club the Village Vanguard (‘a relatively painless way to extract an album from the usually foot-dragging pianist’ said producer Orrin Keepnews), two and a half hours of glorious, symbiotic music was taped. It was a rich, delicate summation of the trio’s matured conception of interplay. Ten days later, 25-year-old LaFaro was killed in a car crash.
Shattered at the loss, Bill Evans stopped playing the piano for months. The sessions – emerging over three albums of which Sunday At The Village Vanguard is the first – are generally regarded as Evans’s finest and among the most important recordings in all of jazz.
Ray Charles And Betty Carter
Ray Charles And Betty Carter
Masterly easy jazz vocal duets between the Genius Of Soul and Betty Bebop.
Record label: Atlantic
Produced: Sid Feller
Recorded: Hollywood, California; August 23, 1960– June 14, 1961
Released: 1961
Chart peaks: None (UK) None (US)
Personnel: Ray Charles (p, v); Betty Carter (v); Jack Halloran Singers (bv); David ‘Fathead’ Newman (s); Marty Paich (ar)
Track Listening: Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye; You And I; Goodbye – We’ll Be Together Again; People Will Say We’re In Love; Cocktails For Two; Side By Side; Baby It’s Cold Outside; Together; For All We Know; It Takes Two To Tango; Alone Together; Just You Just Me
Running time: 57.27
Current CD: WEA RHI752592 adds: Ray Charles’s 1961 album Dedicated To You: Hardhearted Hannah; Nancy; Margie; Ruby; Rosetta; Stella By Starlight; Cherry; Josephine; Candy; Marie; Diane; Sweet Georgia Brown
Further listening: Ray Charles: Modern Sounds In Country And Western (1962); An Audience With Betty Carter (1979)
Further reading: Brother Ray (Ray Charles and David Ritz Da Capo, 1992); Ray Charles: Man and Music (Michael Lydon, 1999)
Download: Not currently legally available
In the late ’50s, Ray Charles was an R&B star with Atlantic records enjoying million-selling success with What’d I Say. ABC offered Charles better royalties, profit sharing, eventual ownership of his masters and, significantly, a production deal. Charles signed with them to the dismay of Atlantic. Given his own label to play with – Tangerine – Charles set about ‘trying to share something with his fellow man’, as singer Jimmy Scott remembered. Scott himself got to record Falling In Love Is Wonderful (‘the best record I ever made’) under Ray’s guidance but contractual difficulties prevented its release. No such problems for Ray’s duet album with Betty Carter.
Carter was an uncompromisingly bold jazz singer whose inventive, musical way with a song had precluded wide appeal, but recommended to him by Miles Davis, Ray took her on tour and used his new entrepreneurial leverage to heighten her profile. The arranger Marty Paich was known for his super-hip, cool-school dektette work for Mel Torme but fashioned a more straightforward set of charts for the playful, romantic setting Charles had in mind. There were even the glutinous Jack Halloran Singers on a few of the cuts – much to the chagrin of some critics – but most of the resulting album bursts with relaxed, musicianly banter and sexual chemistry. Charles is growling and suggestive, Carter squirrelly and coy, and it remains one of the all-time great duet sets.
Baby It’s Cold Outside was a massive hit and Charles went on to sustained popularity, starting with his huge-selling Hit The Road Jack. Carter enjoyed a degree of attention before temporarily retiring to bring up her family, re-emerging in the late ’60s to build a reputation as the most fearsomely inventive singer in all of jazz, while admitting to ‘fond memories’ of the easy listening album of duets with Brother Ray.
Charles Mingus
The Black Saint And The Sinner Lady
Some say it’s the best jazz record ever made. Mingus thought it was folk music. Whatever it is, it’s brilliant.
Record label: Impulse!
Produced: Bob Thiele
Recorded: New York; January 20, 1963
Released: April 1963
Chart peaks: None (UK) None (US)
Personnel: Rolf Ericson, Richard Williams (t); Quentin Jackson (tb); Don Butterfield (tuba); Jerome Richardson (soprano sax, bs, flute); Dick Hafer (ts, flute); Charlie Mariano (as); Jaki Byard (p); Jay Berliner (g); Charles Mingus (b, p); Dannie Richmond (d)
Track listing: Track A: Solo Dancer, Stop Look And Listen, Sinner Jim Whitney; Track B: Duet Solo Dancers, Hearts Beat And Shades In Physical Embraces; Track C: Group Dancers (Soul Fusion) Freewoman And Oh, This Freedom’s Slave Cries; Mode D: Trio And Group Dancers, Stop! Look! And Sing Songs Of Revolutions!; Mode E: Single Solos And Group Dance, Saint And Sinner Join In Merriment On Battle Front; Mode F: Group And Solo Dance, Of Love, Pain And Passioned Revolt, Then Farewell, My Beloved,’ Til It’s Freedom Day
Running time: 37.37
Current CD: Impulse! IMP11742
Further listening: Mingus, Mingus, Mingus, Mingus, Mingus (1963)
Further reading: Beneath The Underdog (Charles Mingus, 1971); www.mingusmingusmingus.com
Download: iTunes; HMV Digital
Charles Mingus decided in 1963 that henceforth his outfit would be known as the Charles Mingus New Folk Band. This rich, compelling work is closer to the metropolitan, symphonic jazz of Duke Ellington than anything a casual listener would recognise as folk music but, thinking about it, you can see his point – there’s something very ‘of the people’ about this music, as sprawling, crowded and buzzy as a city, multi-faceted and teeming with life.
Superficially it has the sleazy, urban feel of an Elmer Bernstein film score; lots of conversational muted horns and slurring, rubato saxes, which, during recording, Mingus set in a V shape with the tenor at the fulcrum, furthest away from the mic. Such careful positioning gives the sound a theatrical sense of space – the brass interplay resembles dialogue. In this, though Mingus describes the music as a dance, it’s more operatic. The use of overdubbing was unusual in jazz in the early ’60s, but its employment here helps a modest-sized band sound busy and imposing.
Mingus, who’d spent some time as a patient in New York’s Bellevue mental hospital, was never one for explaining himself rationally; his sleeve notes for the album were pell-mell. Starting to describe the action and then quickly digressing into a rant about critics, he asks the listener to ‘throw all other records of mine away except maybe one other’. The track names weren’t much help, and a review of the album by Mingus’s psychiatrist tells us we’re in the presence of mischief. Dr Edmund