CHARLES MINGUS
Pre-Bird (Verve)
Reviewed by Shaun Dale

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Charles Mingus gets the Verve Master Edition treatment for Pre-Bird, his 1960 recording of music that he had written in the earliest days of his career as a composer, along with some brief blowing tracks of non-original material, before his introduction to and influence by the bop sounds of Bird and Diz. The most obvious influences that emerge among the eight compositions on Pre-Bird are Duke Ellington and the sanctified church of his childhood, but the influences are only hinted at in most cases. Even in his earliest work, Charles Mingus had an original style and a vision that would come to ultimate fruition on this album.

Pre-Bird gave Mingus the chance to work these compositions out with a nonet and an expanded 25 piece big band, using some of the top players available. The sax players alone included Eric Dolphy, Yusef Lateef, Booker Ervin, Joe Farrell, John LaPorta, William Barron and Danny Bank. Other names of note among the players were Clark Terry, Jimmy Knepper, Ted Curson and Slide Hampton. And, of course, there's Charles Mingus.

This is a marvelous record, beautifully remastered and released in a high resolution 24 bit format. I do have a minor packaging quibble, if anyone at Verve is listening. I truly appreciate the full original notes to the Mercury release, the later release (as Mingus Revisited) on EmArcy and the new notes for this reissue. I also appreciate the photographs from the sessions. If I had to pick one, though, I'd definitely pick the notes in a slightly larger font so they could be read without magnification. And if they couldn't be just a bit bigger, maybe colored print on a colored page could be avoided in the future, OK? The myopic among us thank you....

Track List: Take The A Train * Prayer For Passive Resistance * Eclipse * Mingus Fingus No. 2 * Weird Nightmare * Do Nothin' Till You Hear From Me * Bemoanable Lady * Half Mast Inhibition

(C) 1998 - Shaun Dale