Charles Mingus - 'Peggy's Blue Skylight'

Charles Mingus is a legend in this household. So much so that my daughter – not I, mark you – named the larger of our two cats Mingus. The jazz titan was a large character in every sense of the word. One commentator talks of having seen him live twice: 'He had an aura about him, like he was 50 feet tall, a force of nature.' There was something very apt, too, in the fact that, after starting off on the trombone and cello, he settled on the double bass. He also played another outsized instrument well enough to justify an entire solo album: Mingus Plays Piano.

A big man with big appetites, Mingus had a prickly personality to say the least. He had a fearsome temper: one of the most notorious of several incidents throughout his career was his response to heckling at the Five Spot club in New York by smashing his double bass, said to be worth around $20,000 – which makes Pete Townshend's guitar wrecks seem like child's play. In Thomas Reichman's 1968 documentary, he is seen firing a rifle at the ceiling of the apartment from which he is to be evicted. Perhaps most notoriously of all, in a fit of pique he punched his favourite trumpet player, Jimmy Knepper. He broke Knepper's tooth, which ruined the trombonist's embouchure. Like Miles Davis and Frank Zappa, though, two other 'difficult' personalities, Mingus inspired considerable loyalty. Significantly, Jimmy Knepper would go on to lead the tribute band, Mingus Dynasty, after the death of his former troubled leader.

Blessed or cursed with an ego commensurate with his temper, Mingus was also keenly aware of jazz history and his place in it. Some of his compositions referenced giants like Jelly Roll Morton, Fats Waller, Charlie Parker, Lester Young and Duke Ellington. Before moving from Los Angeles to New York as a young man to seek fame and reputation, he would sometimes call himself 'Baron' Mingus, more than a tacit nod to the duke who influenced him more than any other. He played briefly with Ellington and earned the distinction of being one of the few musicians fired by the Duke himself – for violent conduct. He would go on to make Money Jungle with his idol and frequently performed the Duke's virtual theme-song, 'Take the A-Train'. It's generally acknowledged that if Duke Ellington was the greatest jazz composer of them all, Mingus and Monk and possibly Wayne Shorter ran him close.

There's a lot of choice on YouTube, as befits someone so revered. Too much choice. In the end it boiled down to one between this version of 'Peggy's Blue Skylight' and an elongated version of the song for which Mingus is arguably best known, 'Goodbye Pork Pie Hat', his elegy to Lester Young originally recorded on what, for me, is still the finest of his top-notch albums, Mingus Ah Um. The former video features what Mingus' almost ever-present drummer, Dannie Richmond, dubbed the 'First Band In Jazz', while the latter features what was in his opinion 'something like the Second Band.' It's recorded at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1975, with the 'second' band of Mingus, Richmond, pianist Don Pullen, tenor saxophonist George Adams and trumpeter Jack Walrath. Responsible for the celebrated pair of Changes albums for Atlantic in 1974, the band here is augmented by baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan and, six years after sitting in with Les McCann and Eddie Harris at the same festival, trumpeter Benny Bailey.

The guest trumpeter actually gets two solos, the first un-muted and the second muted. Both seem to earn the admiration of the sometimes stern and even irascible Gerry Mulligan, whose expressions are a veritable picture. There's a nice restrained solo from pianist Don Pullen, who had a propensity for firing off wild atonal scurries across the keyboard in the manner of Cecil Taylor. And there's a splendid moment around the 10-minute mark when Adams and Walrath approach the microphone seemingly for the finale, only to step back again when the leader muscles in for a solo on the double bass. Back off fellas, it's my turn!

It's a strong contender. Nevertheless, there's something a little ragged about the proceedings, perhaps because of the presence of the two 'outsiders'. So I keep coming back to the 1964 performance of 'Peggy's Blue Skylight'. It's actually played by a quintet and not a sextet as labelled: trumpeter Johnny Coles, who accompanied the 'First Band in Jazz' on its extensive European tour that year, actually suffered a stomach rupture on stage just a couple of days previously as an after-effect of a recent operation. So he had to sit out the gig – at the American Hospital in Neuilly. A great shame for the trumpeter and rather a shame for us, the audience. As it is, it's almost perfect in every way: it's a tight, beautifully self-contained rendition that says all that it needs to say at just under six minutes. There's not a discernible bum note throughout and a pair of exceptional solos in Jaki Byard's on the piano and Eric Dolphy's on the alto sax.

There's a wonderful shot of Dolphy looking very thoughtful in his shades during Byard's solo. It's a poignant close-up, too, as Dolphy would die later that year while still in Europe at the age of just 36, as a result of uraemia and/or undiagnosed diabetes. His death would have a considerable impact on Mingus' ever-fragile state of mind. Personally, I much prefer Dolphy on flute or bass clarinet; I find his alto sax tone to be sharp and strident, harsher even than Jackie McLean's. While the warmth of Johnny Coles' trumpet is missed in the ensemble passages, his alto does however work nicely in tandem with Clifford Jordan's throaty tenor, and his solo is a thing of what Thelonious Monk might have called 'ugly beauty'. It's not smooth and elegant in the manner of Benny Carter or Johnny Hodges or Paul Desmond, perhaps, but – as one commentator puts it very astutely – it's 'like a message in mirror image from another world.'

The leader himself, the so-called 'Angry Man of Jazz', looks happy, relaxed and remarkably slender. Jaki Byard described Mingus as a 'foodaholic'. He was given to periodic dieting and he told an interviewer in 1964 (apparently while ordering a second steak) that he 'lost ninety pounds in weight through exercise and less eating.' His bass playing here is both nimble and suitably hefty.

This appears to be a live performance in some kind of recording studio. There are several albums that resulted from the European tour, and 'Peggy's Blue Skylight' appears on most of them. It was originally scheduled to be part of Atlantic's Oh Yeah, on which Mingus plays piano throughout, but that version was pulled from the album and had to wait for the expanded deluxe CD reissue. So although it was a staple of Mingus' live performances, the number's not as well known by the record-buying public as, say, 'Pork Pie Hat' or 'Moanin'' or 'Better Git It In Your Soul'.

There's an interesting if slightly shambolic version of the last named, by the way, recorded at the Antibes jazz festival in 1960, with Mingus on piano, Dannie Richmond in a natty light-coloured suit beating hell out of the drums, and a blank black screen for the first three minutes. From the same festival, there's a version of 'I'll Remember April' with some great footage of Bud Powell guesting on piano. He plays fluently if a little repetitively, but it's more about Powell than Mingus. There is, too, a fabulous performance of 'Flowers For A Lady' recorded at the Umbria Jazz Festival in 1974, with a blistering tenor solo by George Adams and Don Pullen doing his full-on Cecil Taylor bit, but sadly it looks as if the camera lens has a cataract.

Not quite five years later, not long after an abortive collaboration with Joni Mitchell on a musical version of T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets that would metamorphose into the singer's Mingus tribute album, and mere months after a standing ovation and a presidential embrace from Jimmy Carter at an all-star concert at the White House reduced him to tears, Mingus died in Mexico of Lou Gehrig's disease, an invalid in a wheelchair.

According to the writer Toby Litt, Mingus' controversial autobiography, Beneath The Underdog, was 'that of a profoundly troubled, often bitter man who never feels loved enough but constantly undermines those loves offered to him.' A creative genius, then, by any other description. Not something you could call our cat.

Jaga Jazzist - 'Day/Another Day'

If I were to reveal that 'I Could Have Killed Him in the Sauna' came a close second to my chosen one, you could take a pretty good stab as to the provenance of this approximately ten-piece group. They certainly were a dectet at the time of their first album to be issued outside their native Norway: 2002's A Livingroom Hush, which came out on Ninja Tune to some serious critical acclaim. The NME, for example, called it 'a brilliant record reminiscent of Tortoise in their evening wear.' The Independent on Sunday considered it 'a cohesive mixture of Herbie Hancock's 1970s keyboards excursions, Tortoise and Stereolab's post-rock guitar blues.' Most concisely and memorably, Sleaze Nation likened the group's music to 'Charles Mingus with Aphex Twin up his arse.' BBC listeners named it 'Jazz Albumof the Year'.

The group themselves cite John Coltrane, Robert Wyatt, Soft Machine and Talk Talk among other influences. All of which suggests how tricky – and probably pointless – it is to label their quirky, distinctive brand of music. Based on my own listening, since finding the follow-up to Livingroom, the brilliant The Stix, going for a solitary euro in a sale way back in the noughties, I would plump for 'prog-jazz'. Without taking up an entire side of an LP or engaging in the wearisome, self-indulgent longueurs of Yes, Van der Graaf Generator and others of that kidney, it's music that eschews conventional structures for something that stretches and evolves even within the framework of a single four-minute number, creating tension as it switches time signatures and builds up to premature climaxes before subsiding into passages of serene beauty: a kind of sonic sketch, perhaps, of the dramatic Norwegian coastline. There's more than a hint of Frank Zappa at his most symphonic on albums like The Grand Wazoo or numbers like 'Son of Mr. Green Genes'. The instrumentation is similarly idiosyncratic: vibes, marimba, alto flute, baritone sax, trombone, trumpet, tuba, for example, harmonise with guitars and electronic keyboards. It's music, in other words, that's bursting with ideas and creativity.

Most of Jaga Jazzist's repertoire seems to be composed by the brothers Horntveth: exuberant drummer and 'gentle giant' Martin, and especially multi-instrumentalist Lars, whose solo album Pooka is as good if not better than The Stix. 'Day' is Martin's piece, while 'Another Day' is Lars's, as is the wonderfully entitled 'I Could Have Killed Him in the Sauna' – and all three numbers appear on The Stix.

One of the most impressive and surprising thing about the live performances on YouTube is just how well they translate the intricacy of the studio sound to the context of a concert: a close but not literal translation, just different enough to allow for the unexpected. Like Zappa's live performances, there's room for a certain amount of improvisation, but only within a tight and well-rehearsed framework. There's a heart-stopping moment around the 1 minute 50 seconds mark, for example, where everything appears to have stopped abruptly, as if someone has played a bum note so startling that they want to abandon ship and begin again, only for the music to shift suddenly up a gear into one of their trademark soaring crescendos, which seems visibly to pump adrenaline into the whole crew, before subsiding once more. Then, a single trumpet blast splits the two numbers and a flute carries the melody of 'Another Day', before the trumpet again shifts direction with the nearest thing to a conventional jazz solo. After a couple of sublime key changes, we end not with a bang but with a trumpet's whimper. Et voilà! Seven exhilarating minutes of gorgeous melodic passages married to urgent, infectious rhythm.

I lost touch with the band after finding A Livingroom Hush for a similar knock-down price. I caught up with them again not long after Live With Britten Sinfonia came out in 2013, but found that a full orchestra rather swamped what I had found so unique and compelling about their music. Studio albums either side of it have apparently been more rock-oriented, emphasising the progressive elements at the expense of the jazz. In an interview, Martin Horntveth explained that the band toured a lot after releasing Livingroom and some of the original members quit the band around 2005 when they decided to take a break from the routine. Sister Line on tuba and a few of the other long-timers are still with them, playing music that Martin describes as 'complex, sometimes corny, sometimes beautiful, but most of all fun-to-play.' Fun to play and fun to watch.

 

Grant Green - 'I Wish You Love'

We have a few things in life to thank the French for, not least, perhaps, their appreciation of jazz and their willingness to welcome the refugees of racism from across the Atlantic. Grant Green no doubt suffered his share of abuse during his lifetime, but certainly not from Alfred Lion and Francis Wollf of Blue Note Records, where Green was the house guitarist throughout the Sixties. Given that he was arguably, along with Wes Montgomery, one of the two giants of jazz guitar during his era, it's puzzling and sad that there are no American TV clips of him at work. I had almost given up my search when I stumbled upon this video – recorded for French TV in 1969, but never broadcast (or so I believe). So let us now praise the French.

It's a very restrained affair, for all that two other great guitarists were sitting in on the session, Barney Kessel and Kenny Burrell. It's an almost forensic close-up on a technique that was less about chords and more about playing linear single notes with the clarity of glass and the acuity of razor wire. While Green picks out the melody on his Gibson (an ES-330 – although I would need to check this with my Amerikanische Freund and local guitar guru), Kessel gently strums a series of complementary chords alongside. Burrell sits out altogether. You can see all three on 'Rhythm Changes' (a catch-all title for 'How Could You Do a Thing Like That To Me'), which demonstrates Green's funkier, bluesier side and offers a rare glimpse of the maestro playing chords. Better still, watch all 32 minutes of their summit meeting, since 'Rhythm Changes' is a mere extract of the full 11-minute number.

Watching and listening to the way Grant Green played guitar, you can discern immediately the influence of Charlie Christian, the Texan guitarist who truly electrified his instrument and turned it into a bona fide solo voice in a jazz context. Christian, too, favoured the more linear approach that you can hear vividly on the sides he made with Benny Goodman's sextet. For all his seminal influence, he only made a quarter of a century before a combination of TB and pneumonia carried him off. The great talent scout, John Hammond, described him as 'a sweet loving man with few defences against the world.' Anyway...

 

Alas, there is no live footage of CC, so we must give thanks to this invaluable glimpse of GG (Great Guitarist). Green almost racked up a half century, but hard drugs undermined his health and well-being and ultimately proved the death of him. Nevertheless, thanks to Blue Note, Green's legacy – for one who is so consistently underrated and sometimes even overlooked altogether – is staggering: not only are there over 30 albums as leader, sometimes in the context of an organ trio, sometimes thematic (as in the gospel-soaked Feelin' The Spirit or the lovely swinging The Latin Bit), and sometimes just plain brilliant (as in Idle Moments with vibraphonist, Bobby Hutcherson), but always melodic, rhythmic and easy on the ear; but there are also countless albums made as sideman – for organists like Jimmy Smith, 'Brother' Jack McDuff and 'Big' John Patton; for saxophonists like Lou Donaldson, Ike Quebec and Stanley Turrentine; for trumpeters like Lee Morgan and Donald Byrd; and so on.

You can hardly go wrong with an album that bears the name 'Grant Green' somewhere on the cover. Latterly, however, he turned more to funk – in keeping with what was happening in the world of jazz during the Miles-obsessed Seventies. He has been called the 'Father of Acid Jazz' and the long groove sessions offered sampling fodder to the more jazz-oriented hip-hop outfits like Us3 and A Tribe Called Quest. I pick up the albums if they're going cheap, but really they're fairly lame, even tedious affairs. He goes in for a lot of comping and his solos seem to lack that cutting edge synonymous with the prime of Mr. Grant Green.

His life was a little like this video, in fact: not perfect, but precious.

 

Betty Carter - 'Droppin' Things'

Judging by the comments beneath the videos, I'm not alone in thinking that Lillie Mae Jones, aka Betty Carter, aka 'Betty Bebop', a name given to her by Lionel Hampton's indomitable wife Gladys, was perhaps the purest jazz singer of them all. If that sounds contentious in the light of Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan and other big-hitters, then the estimable chan-toose, Carmen McRae, considered that 'there's really only one jazz singer – only one: Betty Carter.' Whatever, I can at least say that I'm not alone in nominating Betty Carter as my favourite jazz singer.

Even though she was often underrated, overlooked and disregarded, there are innumerable good short videos available on YouTube, most of them recorded on American TV. Such abundance made choosing the best a very close run thing. So close that I still keep changing my mind. If 'best' equals quality of backing band, then the technically incredible version of Coltrane's 'Giant Steps' with an A-list band of pianist Geri Allen, bassist Dave Holland and drummer Jack DeJohnette would take the Golden Biscuit, but it doesn't really show what she can do with a proper song. 'The Good Life', too, with alto saxophonist David Sanborn would otherwise take some beating if you could only see as well as hear the dark side of this video.

By the time my chosen video was shot, in 1990, Betty Carter's career was on the ascendance once more after her time in the wilderness following a three-year stint touring with Ray Charles. Although mainly known for a repertoire of re-imagined standards, it's significant that both 'Droppin' Things' and its very close contender, 'Tight' – one of her hard-swinging abstract signature songs, filmed on a 1992 edition of The Tonight Show hosted by Jay Leno – are both self-penned numbers. To quote the title of the album that Leno refers to, It's Not About the Melody, both are much more about the serpentine twists and turns she takes around a conventional song (probably why some detractors call her mannered) using her marvellous husky voice like a reed instrument. As 'Themrpiggy6666' so acutely comments, Betty Carter was 'a dynamic swinger taking daring tonal and rhythmic liberties without losing the essential narrative flow.'

You can see it all here in this three-and-a-half minute theatrical performance. The picture quality is maybe not quite so crystal clear as it is on The Tonight Show clip, the outfit's not quite so funky and there's no illustrious saxophonist like Branford Marsalis with whom to trade licks, but this has a little bit of everything: the playfulness and sense of latent drama with which she approaches a song, her mesmerising scat-singing, her rarefied sense of timing, the ease and spontaneity of her improvisational instincts, and above all her ability to swing.

Perhaps my most prized trophy as a lifelong vinyl hunter is a double album, The Audience With Betty Carter, signed by the singer and on her own label before Verve signed her up and re-released her own Bet-Car label's back catalogue, in mint condition for a very competitive price, spotted at a record stall in a covered market in a scruffy suburb of Southampton. I shall bequeath it to the Jazz Nation when it's time to shuffle off to Buffalo – unless my daughter learns to appreciate this remarkable singer's talent in the meantime.

The fact that Betty Carter had to establish her own label, and thus finance the live recording herself back in 1979, in order to do things the way that she wanted to do them, not some commercially minded record company executive who probably knew doodly-squat about the art of jazz singing, is indicative of a fiercely independent personality and artistic spirit. Lionel Hampton, whose rather self-glorifying ghost-written autobiography I've just finished reading, was one of the first to hire the young singer from Detroit (who had already used a forged birth certificate in order to perform under the legal age in bars). During her three-year stay with Hamp, the leader fired her several times for not toeing his musical line.

As befitting the child of parents whose modus operandi was to encourage their children's independence, Betty Carter's immediate family often appeared to be the young musicians she nurtured and mentored. Her piano-based trios were a finishing school for drummers, bassists and keyboard artists like Benny Green, Stephen Scott, Cyrus Chestnut and Mulgrew Miller. The short film, New All The Time, offers an intimate glimpse into the way she worked with and tutored her bands. She comes over as a strong and singular individual, who knew her own mind. As she said elsewhere, 'If you want to hang in there for a long time, then you really have to be an individual, be something that someone will never forget.'

She delivers these words at one of the week-long intensive workshops for promising musicians that she sponsored. There's another revealing short film which shows Betty Carter the teacher at work, CBS Sunday Morning: Betty Carter – Jazz Ahead (1996). Among the pearls of wisdom that dispensed to her youthful hopefuls, she suggests that 'it's OK to make a mistake; it's what you do with that mistake.' If only teachers and theorists from the everyday world of children's education espoused such radical ideas.

Sadly, Michelle Parkerson's film, But then, She's Betty Carter, is not available. I saw it many, many moons ago on a Channel 4's Late Shift, hosted by writer, 'she-punk' and ex-Flying Lizard Vivien Goldman, and the late-lamented writer and DJ, Charlie Gillett. I knew nothing about Ms. Carter up to that point and probably hadn't consciously heard any of her music, but the film hooked me – line and sinker!

So why do I love her like I do? What makes her my favourite? Let me count the ways: she's daring and she takes risks (her version of 'My Favourite Things', for example, makes John Coltrane's sound positively family-friendly); her scat-singing is second only to Ella's; the way she fragments the lyrics and cuts up the rhythm makes me giggle with delight; she improvises like a saxophonist at play; her husky voice and 'smile to die for' make me feel un-nezzisary; she can both turn a ballad inside out and back again and swing like a baaad mother... (Shut your mouth!).

Betty Carter was an artist who remained totally true to herself throughout her career: an abstract artist, perhaps, but more in the mould of Kandinsky than Pollock in so far as she never wanders so far from the melody that you lose sight of the song. Listening to her and watching her perform with the grace of a lynx, it all seems so spontaneous – and by her estimation, 'that's the beauty of jazz.'