Mono Mondays: Charles Mingus, Blues & Roots
If you’ve been following our weekly Digital Roundup feature, then you’re already fully aware that, as of a few months back, we’ve gotten into the occasional habit of starting off the week by dropping a new Mono release into our digital catalog, but in the past, we’ve just casually slipped the announcement of these releases into the opening lines Digital Roundup. Now that we’ve got a few of ‘em under our belt, however, we’ve decided that we’re going to institute a regular Mono Monday feature, and – as you might’ve suspected from the title of this piece – we’re kicking it off today with Blues & Roots, by Charles Mingus.
Originally released in 1960, Blues & Roots is about as aptly titled as albums get, revealing some of Mingus’s more unexpected musical influences...or, at least, they’re unexpected if you think the man grew up listening to a diet of non-stop jazz. As Mingus explained in the album’s liner notes, the record came about as a result of Nesuhi Ertegun suggesting that he record an entire blues album in the style of “Haitian Fight Song” (which made its debut on Mingus’s 1957 Atlantic album, The Clown) in order to silence critics who were saying that Mingus didn’t swing enough. “He wanted to give them a barrage of soul music: churchy, blues, swinging, earthy,” wrote Mingus. “I thought it over. I was born swinging and clapped my hands in church as a little boy, but I've grown up and I like to do things other than just swing. But blues can do more than just swing. So I agreed.”
On that front, Blues & Roots would seem to have been a success: the All Music Guide says outright that “it ranks as arguably Mingus’s most joyously swinging outing.” It’s also worth noting that Elvis Costello cited the album in a Vanity Fair feature where he put together a 24-hour soundtrack for his life: “8 A.M. The day is picking up pace. Mingus is playing loud in the kitchen, something is boiling. It's Blues & Roots or the excellent Thirteen Pictures: The Charles Mingus Anthology.” (Maybe one of these days we’ll bring the latter back into print. That was a pretty darned good collection, if we do say so ourselves.)
So there you go: Blues & Roots, now in the digital catalog in glorious mono. Before we sign off, though, we thought we’d give you a chance to play catch-up with these Mono Monday releases by putting together a playlist, one we'll switch out whenever there's a new addition to the series. For now, that means you can also spin Albert King’s King of the Blues Guitar, Archie Bell & The Drells’ I Can’t Stop Dancing, and Aretha Franklin’s I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You, but rest assured that there’ll be more to come in the very near future.
