In 1935, John Hammond had signed Billie Holiday to Brunswick Records, attaching her to the pianist Teddy Wilson in the hope that they would turn popular standards into swing hits. And in September 1939 he put to tape perhaps his most iconic composition, the self-titular ‘Lester Leaps In’. In July 1937, on the tenor sax alongside Herschel Evans, he recorded ‘One O’Clock Jump’, which became the theme song of the Count Basie Orchestra. Lester Young remained a regular fixture in Count Basie’s band for the best part of a decade, witnessing the rise of swing and Basie’s growing fame during the core years of the big band era. Hammond – who worked with so many major figures of twentieth century music, from Benny Goodman to Aretha Franklin to Bob Dylan – later described the session as ‘the only perfect, completely perfect recording session I’ve ever had anything to do with’. Young had previously played with Fletcher Henderson’s orchestra as the replacement for Coleman Hawkins, but these four sides in October 1936 with Count Basie were his earliest recordings. The producer John Hammond had heard Basie’s band over short-wave radio and after a visit to Kansas City to see them perform, he invited them to Chicago in October 1936 to record four sides which were soon released on Vocalion Records – one of the cuts, ‘Boogie Woogie’, appearing on the compilation of the same name five years later in 1941 after Vocalion had been swallowed up by Columbia. Playing the tenor saxophone and occasionally the clarinet, Young emerged as a crucial addition to Count Basie’s band shortly before its move from Kansas City to Chicago. Besides from the memorial for Lester Young on ‘Goodbye Pork Pie Hat’, it features ‘Open Letter to Duke’, ‘Bird Calls’, and ‘Jelly Roll’, songs which bring to mind Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, and Jelly Roll Morton – although in the case of ‘Bird Calls’, Mingus stated that he had tried to replicate the sounds of actual birds, rather than quote from his illustrious contemporary. Regarded as one of Charles Mingus’s best and most accessible albums, The Penguin Guide to Jazz has called Mingus Ah Um ‘an extended tribute to ancestors’. Richmond had first played with Mingus on The Clown, released in 1957, and would remain a constant in Mingus’s music for the next twenty-one years. As a result, ‘Goodbye Pork Pie Hat’ grew from 4 minutes and forty-six seconds to five minutes and forty-four seconds.īy the end of the 1950s, Mingus had well established his Jazz Workshop, a rotating group of musicians with whom he routinely composed and performed. Accompanying his double bass on Mingus Ah Um were the familiar faces of John Handy on the alto saxophone, Booker Ervin and Shafi Hadi on tenor sax, Willie Dennis and Jimmy Knepper sharing duties on the trombone, Horace Parlan on the piano, and Dannie Richmond on drums. These six songs were restored in 1979, with later reissues also incorporating three bonus tracks. This was Mingus’s first album on Columbia Records, and when it was issued later that year on 14 September, six of its nine songs – including ‘Goodbye Pork Pie Hat’ – were edited in order to fit on the LP. ‘Goodbye Pork Pie Hat’ comes from the second recording session. Mingus Ah Um was recorded across two sessions in 1959, the first on 5 May, the second on 12 May, both at Columbia 30th Street Studio in New York City. A darkly elegant ballad with a lone dissonant note full of pathos and pain, it contrasts sharply with the exuberant gospel of ‘Better Git It In Your Soul’, the track which opens the album. Charles Mingus wrote ‘Goodbye Pork Pie Hat’ as an elegy for the pioneering jazz saxophonist Lester Young, who died in March 1959, two months prior to the recording sessions for what would become Mingus Ah Um.
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