Weather Bird by Giddins Gary;

Author:Giddins, Gary;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2004-08-30T16:00:00+00:00

84 Weird and Forgotten Dreams

(Charles Mingus / Helen Carr / Herb Jeffries / LH&R / Sarah Vaughan)

Reissues usually get their due at year’s end, when they come gift-wrapped in cloth or steel boxes with fancy prices and hyped-up art direction, but record companies stay alive and keep their distributors happy by recycling old records all year long. Many classic LPs remain unissued after 20 years of digitalization and a trunkful of 78s that never even made it to LP waste away like Edmond Dantés in the vaults, awaiting their second acts. Yet now that most of the better-known product has returned in two, three, and more CD incarnations, labels are burrowing deeper, proving that wondrous unearthings are still possible.

The year’s most remarkable recovery has produced Charles ‘Baron’ Mingus, West Coast, 1945–49 (Uptown), 23 sides made under Mingus’s leadership for five fly-by-night labels that couldn’t distribute farther than their car trunks. The names alone smack of Central Avenue postwar optimism and desperation: Excelsior, Four Star, Dolphins of Hollywood, Fentone, Rex Hollywood. Some of these platters were so hard to come by that the Smithsonian abandoned an attempt to create such a collection in the 1980s; they are cited with errors or not at all in Mingus discographies and biographies. Research by co-producers Robert E. Sunenblick, whose blindingly detailed notes make up the bulk of a 96-page booklet, and Chuck Nessa correct a number of long-held assumptions. For one thing, Mingus is not the cellist on “He’s Gone”; it’s Jean McGuire, one of many people Uptown interviewed. For another, the long-sought mystery record, “God’s Portrait,” made for Fentone, was never issued. Ralph J. Gleason either pretended to review it in 1949—on Mingus’s say-so, the producers suggest—or heard a long-lost test. In any case, Gleason’s comments sent a generation of collectors on a wild goose chase for a record that does not exist, when, in fact, Mingus did record the piece a few weeks later, for Rex Hollywood, as “Inspiration,” which turns out to be an early version of his trademark melody, “Portrait.” (As a work of scholarship, Charles ‘Baron’ Mingus is marred only by the inexplicable absence of Gene Santoro’s Mingus biography, Myself When I Am Real, from the bibliography.)

The music will fascinate Mingus buffs, Central Avenue buffs, and 1940s buffs, and some of it is actually very good. A cursory examination suggests a parallel to Sun Ra’s The Singles. The range is surely comparable, from r&b and jump to Ellington and Kenton to bebop and ballads to classicism and an ur-Mingusian mess, “The Story of Love,” which prefigures Tijuana Moods, complete with tambourine and “Night in Tunisia” derivation. Indeed, much of this work is derivative. Mingus’s r&b ballad, “Baby, Take a Chance with Me,” recorded three times, is so generic one is startled to find his name on it and realize that it wasn’t a hit. Vocalist Charles Trenier is a brazen chameleon who affects Eddie Cleanhead Vinson’s high glissandi on one number and Herb Jeffries’s froggy croon on another, while tenor saxophonist William Woodman blusters with the rote authority of Bumps Meyer.

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