Charles Mingus - Essential Works 1955-1959

Diggers Factory Charles Mingus - Essential Works 1955 - 1959 (2LP) Vinyl Record released on 08 July 2022. American jazz double bass player and composer. An instrumentalist of exceptional technique and talent, he made his debut with Louis Armstrong (1941-43), then playing in the orchestras of Lionel Hampton (1946-48) and Duke Ellington (1953), alongside Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell and Max Roach ( Toronto concert, 1953) and therefore on his own. His music, characterized by a pregnant contrast of violence and sweetness, started from Ellington's lyrical reminiscences and from an original use of gospel and blues; he came to express, in an existential key, the tension between whites and blacks in wide-ranging works such as Pithecanthropus Erectus (1956) and The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady (suite for ballet, 1963). Endowed with extraordinary "catalyst" skills, M. was the animator of small groups that he himself constituted: his collaboration with Eric Dolphy was particularly significant in the 1960s. In 1989 Gunther Schuller transcribed and recorded the posthumous work Epitaph with an orchestra of 30 musicians.