1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 38. Charles Mingus – The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady (1963)

What glorious insanity is this? Mingus describes it as “ethnic folk-dance music”, but it’s a jazz-fusion piece where the music is taken apart and glued back together in strange and unsettling ways, like the aural equivalent of a modernist painting.  

Bass woodwind provide a swirling, pulsing, driving backdrop like a dark oily river (heavily polluted and sluggish). Muted horns and sax wah-wah and groan and wheeze over the top, giving one of the most gorgeously dirty sounding albums yet. From somewhere a flamenco guitar suddenly appears, does its bit, and wanders away. 

It does jazz stuff – starting and returning to a motif but heading off into flights of wild fancy in between, but does it in new and excitingly difficult ways. Each of the four tracks is labelled as a dance, and I can see that, with strange Cirque Du Soleil figures writhing and contorting to the beat that never quite stays constant, to harmonies that like to wander to within semitones of each other to give harsh discordant sounds. 

I ought to hate it, it’s kind of a whole album of That Bit In The Middle Of A Prog Rock Song. But for some reason I really liked it. Having read what a prickly customer Mingus was, this album seems to suit his personality. Discordant, uncompromising, difficult, brilliant. 

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