Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus & Max Roach - Money Jungle (1976 Japanese United Artists Vinyl LP)

Vinyl: VG+
Sleeve: EX
Obi: None

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Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus & Max Roach - Money Jungle | Vinyl LP - 1976 Japanese United Artists Reissue (GXC-3131, King Record Co. Ltd)

The title track opens with Mingus doing something violent to his bass, scraping fingernails against the strings and snapping them until the instrument sounds more percussive than melodic. Ellington comes in with dissonant, clanging chords that sit nowhere near the elegant, orchestral piano he was known for. Roach drives underneath with an intensity that pushes both of them harder. This is not a polite session. During the afternoon of September 17, 1962, Mingus picked up his bass, put the cover on it and walked out of Sound Makers Studio. Accounts of what happened next differ. Producer Alan Douglas recalled looking out the window and seeing Ellington chasing Mingus up 57th Street. Ellington's own memoir says he stopped Mingus at the elevator. Either way, Mingus came back, and what the session produced is one of the most celebrated piano trio albums in jazz. "Fleurette Africaine" sits at the opposite end of the spectrum from the title track. It's quiet, spacious and atmospheric, with Ellington playing delicate, ringing chords while Mingus bows underneath and Roach uses brushes and mallets rather than sticks. "Caravan," the Juan Tizol standard Ellington had been playing since 1936, gets rebuilt into something fiercer and less predictable than any big band arrangement.

Ellington brought four new compositions to the session alongside three of his older pieces. "Very Special" is a medium-tempo blues. "Warm Valley," originally a Johnny Hodges feature from 1940, is recast as a trio ballad. "Solitude" closes the album in a reflective, winding reading that runs past five minutes. The friction throughout the date is real, but what makes the album work is that all three musicians are too good and too stubborn to let the tension collapse the music. Mingus and Roach had both played in Charlie Parker's groups. Mingus had briefly been in Ellington's orchestra in the early 1950s before being fired after a backstage altercation. Both men idolised Ellington, and it's that mixture of reverence and creative resistance that gives the session its charge. Alan Douglas produced for United Artists, Bill Schwartau engineered, and George Wein (founder of the Newport Jazz Festival) wrote the liner notes. This is the 1976 Japanese reissue on GXC-3131 from the Jazz Library 1500 series, manufactured by King Record Co. Ltd with a light blue United Artists label.