Beyond the art of those men, Mingus was deeply touched by high quality popular songs, flamenco, and European concert music and film scores. It is also true that he was a great admirer of Art Tatum and had been impressed by certain of Lennie Tristano’s ideas. Much of the vision of epic artistry resulted from his having played with Louis Armstrong, Lionel Hampton, Duke Ellington, Red Norvo, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Bud Powell. This created a desire in his audience to see Mingus “go off.” No matter, that aesthetic conception remained grand enough to be called epic. This was not always true because he could go crazy if things were too much for him to take, which sometimes caused the anarchy brought on by his frustration to overshadow his artistry. Mingus was an inventor in every direction and he was also an experimenter, which made his output uneven because he, like all true adventurers seemed to bet everything on the work at hand and seemed prepared to face whatever resulted. When what had been provided by the conventions of his time was insufficient to meet the demands of the composer’s goals, he went right ahead and invented whatever he needed. He did not want something less comprehensive than what he had made of his experience as a working musician. As Duke Ellington said, “Remembrance of things past is important for a jazz musician.” Mingus knew this well and, due to his ambitions, he chose to avoid developing a style that was predictable in its approach. Mingus foresaw much of what has happened in jazz over the last forty or so years because he was, like all of the greatest artists, in a profound dialogue with his predecessor. The depths of contrasting feeling, the heights of majesty, and the purity of melody made indelible by its lyricism and harmonic originality are plentiful in the art of Charles Mingus. It could only have been produced by Charles Mingus and it could only have come from an American as talented, complex and contradictory as the great innovator was. However entangled Mingus’s music was in the myth and the methods of the man, it is one of the most luminously substantial bodies of American music. That is exactly what this recording represents because it is one of the finest gatherings of music by Charles Mingus and achieves what some once thought was impossible – truly powerful performances without Mingus himself playing bass and exhorting the musicians.Īny music that has the benefit of an impassioned virtuoso performer and composer will be uniquely thrilling, but if the music is great, it will exist beyond its creator and become part of the aesthetic legacy of the art for which it was produced. This means that all great jazz music, like all great drama, is as contemporary as the vitality of its performance. This is the most recent masterpiece produced by the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, a masterpiece in part because the band has the uncanny ability and the scope to live up to its credo: all jazz is modern. If a work of art cannot always live in the present “To me, there is no past or future in art.