Charles Mingus - Right Now Live At The Jazz Workshop VINYL LP ACV2071
Much has been made of Mingus' 1960s Workshop sessions. Workshop concerts placed a premium on experimentation and featured a changing roster of musicians, compositions, arrangements and approaches in an informal, yet musically rigorous and highly adventurous atmosphere Right Now: Live at the Jazz Workshop songs. RIGHT NOW is a recording of one such concert (taped in San Francisco in 1964 at a club called, oddly enough, the Jazz Workshop) and gives a strong sense of what these events were like.
Including two lengthy pieces: "New Fables" and "Meditation (For A Pair Of Wire Cutters)," the disc captures Mingus exploring, almost in collage-style, improvised musical ideas, radically shifting tempos, passages of fragmented melody, cacophony and tight thematic interactivity. Joined by powerhouse drummer Dannie Richmond, tenor saxman Clifford Jordan (whose fiery solo on "Fables" is particularly noteworthy), pianist Jane Getz and John Handy on alto sax, Mingus covers the bottom (and middle and top) with his extraordinary bass playing.
An almost hour-long landscape of sophisticated, exploratory jazz compositions, Right Now is valuable as both a historical document and a musical adventure.
Tracklist
A New Fables
B Meditation (For A Pair Of Wire Cutters)
