More of the Music of Charles Mingus
Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Charles Mingus
One of our good customers, Robert Brook, writes a blog which he calls
A GUIDE FOR THE BUDDING ANALOG AUDIOPHILE
Below is a link to the review he wrote recently for one of our favorite Mingus records, Pre-Bird.
A few quick thoughts on the album which which we hope will be of interest to our readers:
We used to think the early Limelight pressing shown here was so amazing sounding that finding better sound for this recording would simply be impossible, but the original Mercury showed us just how wrong we were – the right Mercury pressing takes the recording to another level, one we never imagined it could reach. (In our experience records do that from time to time. We’ve written about some of the ones we’ve played here.)
Here is a small excerpt from our most recent commentary for the album:
The best copies recreate a live studio space the size of which you will not believe (assuming your room can do a good job of recreating their room). (Here are some of the other recordings we’ve auditioned with exceptional amounts of size and space.
The sound is tonally correct, Tubey Magical and above all natural. The timbre of each and every instrument is right and it doesn’t take a pair of golden ears to hear it — so high-resolution too.
If you love ’50s and ’60s large group jazz you cannot go wrong here. Mingus was a genius and the original music on this record is just one more album supporting the undeniability of that fact.
Background
Pre-Bird (later re-released as Mingus Revisited) is an album by jazz bassist and composer Charles Mingus consisting of music that was composed before Mingus first heard Charlie Parker, hence the Pre-Bird title. The music is scored for various sized large jazz ensembles and features many soloists prominent at the time of recording.
The album includes two tracks which are contrapuntal arrangement of two Swing Era pieces, whereby “Take the “A” Train” (left channel) is paired with a simultaneous “Exactly Like You” (right channel), and likewise “Do Nothin’ Till You Hear From Me” with “I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart”.
–Wikipedia