Mingus Takes Manhattan
Between October 1961 and October 1962, Charles Mingus took a working band into Birdland four separate times. The sets went out live on the radio, the way club dates did then, and somebody put a reel-to-reel machine on the feed. Then the tapes went into a box, and the box went into a basement in the Bronx, and that is where they stayed.
Bootleggers got at some of it over the years, in the usual condition bootlegs arrive in. The official version did not exist. New Land found the original reels, cleaned them, remastered them, and put them out with the Mingus Estate as Mingus Takes Manhattan: The Complete Birdland Dates, 1961–1962. Four LPs.
On Wednesday, September 30th, we are playing the box.
What is actually on the tape
The claim on a set like this is always the same, and it is usually oversold. This one is easy to check with your ears. These are radio broadcasts, not studio dates, so the room is in them, and so is the crowd, and so is Symphony Sid announcing the band. His introduction is on the record.
At the centre of the package is a forty-four page book. Christian McBride writes the foreword. Brian Priestley, who has been writing about Mingus for five decades, contributes a fifteen-thousand-word essay, and there is a new interview with Charles McPherson, who was in the band. The design is by Two To Tango, and there are photographs and ephemera through it that have not been printed before.
It is a limited edition, and it has been out since January 2024. Ours came from New Land, who sent it to us in April.
A different group almost every night
Mingus never kept a stable band for long, and across these four runs the personnel keeps turning over. Yusef Lateef is on some of it. Roland Kirk is on some of it. Jaki Byard is at the piano, Booker Ervin and Charles McPherson are on saxophones, Pepper Adams is on baritone, and Dannie Richmond is on drums, where he had been since 1956 and where he stayed.
The other thing that moves is Mingus himself. He alternates between bass and piano across these sets, which is worth listening for. He had just done the same thing on Oh Yeah, handing the bass to Doug Watkins so he could sit at the piano and sing. A bandleader who leaves his own instrument in the middle of a set is telling you something about what he wants from the group.
“Eat That Chicken” turns up five times
It is on all four discs. Twice on the last one. It is a two-minute Fats Waller pastiche off Oh Yeah, and it is not the piece anyone would name as important Mingus, and the band plays it night after night after night. That is the thing a box of broadcasts gives you that a studio album cannot. You get the set list, not the statement.
Much of the material here comes straight off Oh Yeah, which had been released weeks before the first of these dates. Then there is “Fables of Faubus,” and “Peggy’s Blue Skylight,” and “Tijuana Table Dance,” and a “Take the ‘A’ Train.” “O.P.” is for Oscar Pettiford.
How the night works
We start at 7:00 PM and play the box in order, all eight sides, with the breaks a record forces on you. Our sound system was built for exactly this, and a jazz kissa is a room where the record is the event rather than the background to it.
Broadcast tape is not audiophile tape, and it is not pretending to be. What you get instead is a band on a Saturday night in a club on 52nd Street, playing for people who paid to get in. Come for that.
Doors at 5:30 PM. No cover, no ticket.
Wednesday, September 30th
Doors at 5:30 PM, records at 7:00 PM. Free and open to the public. 667 Franklin Avenue, Crown Heights.
If this is your kind of evening, our upcoming listings have the rest of what is coming, and Verve Mondays runs every week.
Come listen
667 Franklin Avenue · Crown Heights, Brooklyn
No cover. No reservations required but always encouraged.
