November 19, 2021
Verve/UMe
1xLP
Charles Mingus was famously known as “The Angry Man of Jazz”. Stories of his temper are legendary and numerous enough for there to be an entire subsection in his Wikipedia article dedicated to the subject. While there is plenty of rage in his music that doesn’t overlook the overwhelming amount of joy and beauty in what he did as well. Case in point is The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, made-up of a single, evolving piece of music that was partially written as a ballet and touches on his most gentle and most avant-garde impulses to make for something that showcases his nearly-unparalleled skills as both a composer and an improviser. The relentless positivity that emanates from this album betrays Mingus’s reputation as a walking ball of rage and instead shows him to be something much more nuanced and closer to the musical equivalent of Albert Rosenfield from Twin Peaks. Mingus’s path was indeed a strange and difficult one.