Charles Mingus - Pithecanthropus Erectus (1976 Japanese Atlantic Mono Vinyl LP)

Charles Mingus - Pithecanthropus Erectus | Vinyl LP - 1976 Japanese Atlantic Mono Reissue (P-7508A, Warner-Pioneer Corporation, silver obi)

Pithecanthropus Erectus is where Charles Mingus arrived as a composer. He had spent years as one of the best bassists in jazz and a restless bandleader, but this 1956 record is the one where the writing caught up to the ambition. The title piece is a ten-minute tone poem in four movements, Mingus's own account of humankind rising from the swamp to hubris and then to destruction, and he had his musicians learn it by ear so they would play it rather than read it. Jackie McLean's alto and J.R. Monterose's tenor cry and claw at the edges of the harmony, Mal Waldron anchors it from the piano, and the band conjures a far bigger sound than five players should manage. Elsewhere he turns Gershwin's "A Foggy Day" into a small comedy of car horns and fog signals, and "Love Chant" stretches past fourteen minutes of slow-building collective improvisation. It is the sound of a musician deciding jazz could carry any idea he gave it.

The record announced the shape of everything Mingus did next. The programmatic writing, the barely contained collective improvisation, the way feeling was allowed to overrun form, all of it fed the run of albums that followed, from The Clown to Mingus Ah Um to The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady. Critics have long heard in the title track a first glimpse of the freedom jazz would reach for in the 1960s. Mingus kept returning to its themes for the rest of his life.

This copy is the 1976 Japanese mono reissue on Atlantic, made by Warner-Pioneer Corporation under licence with replica black Atlantic labels, catalogue number P-7508A, complete with the silver obi and the foldout insert.