A Duke Among the Avant-garde
Ellington, Mingus, and Roach Get Lost in the Money Jungle
Charles Mingus, Max Roach, and Duke Ellington are in a studio together. That sounds like the set-up for a particularly intense one-set drama a la Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom or One Night in Miami. From the accounts that have passed into the public, it seems it was indeed rather an intense session. Three musicians—two luminaries of the avant-garde and one elder statesman—came together, tore apart, and patched up long enough to record one wild, unrehearsed “you get what you get” album. When one thinks of a trio, one sort of assumes that it’s three musicians working in perfect harmony and vibing with one another. That was not the case with Money Jungle, the album that resulted from the session and which proves that three artists very much not vibing with one another can still make something amazing. It isn’t as much Ellington playing with Mingus and Roach, but rather is the three of them playing against each other, and somehow it works wonderfully.
It was September 17, 1962. Duke Ellington, a giant of the big band swing era, was not entirely relevant to the modern music scene, but neither was he a has-been. More than any of his contemporaries, Ellington was agile, interested in and inspired by the dramatic changes that took jazz from the Roaring ‘20s sound of Louis Armstrong to the big band sound of Ellington and Cab Calloway, and then onto the scaled-down sounds of bebop, post-bop, cool jazz, and by the 1960s, emerging avant-garde and free jazz experimentation. The latter half of this scale of styles is where both Mingus and Roach tended to operate, but Ellington was no slouch when it came to exploring new territory. After all, while swing may have been old-school by the 1960s, it was in its day innovative and controversial.
Ellington excelled at writing music not just for instruments but for specific players with a specific style. In 1959, he became the first Black person to write the score for an American film, Anatomy of a Murder (Miles Davis had scored a French film, Ascenseur pour l'échafaud/Elevator to the Gallows, the year before). Although the sound he had a major part in defining remained a core part of his work, he was branching out into symphonic compositions. Many of the musicians who evolved jazz away from the sound of the ‘20s-30s still cited Ellington as a major influence (nine days after the Money Jungle session, he recorded a session with John Coltrane). He’d even worked with Charles Mingus before, when the young bass player joined Ellington’s touring orchestra in 1953. Granted, he lasted less than a week before he started a fight with another band member, leaving Ellington little alternative but to fire Mingus.
Still, Mingus was always vocal about his appreciation for Ellington despite the difference in age, style, and temperament. As for Duke working again with a guy he once fired—well, if you weren’t willing to work with difficult personalities, you weren’t going to get very far in jazz at the time. Ellington had no recording contract in 1962, but he approached United Artists producer and friend Alan Douglas (who also worked with Miles Davis and, later, Jimi Hendrix) about recording something new, a small combo built around Duke’s piano. Oddly, although a piano player, Ellington had never recorded a piano-centric album. Douglas had asked Ellington about this when the two were living in Paris, and the idea stuck in Ellington’s brain.
Douglas suggested Charles Mingus on bass, and Mingus in turn requested Max Roach on drums. The day the trio convened in the studio was the first time they’d been together. There was no rehearsal. Although Ellington had said he didn’t want to record just his own compositions, that’s what they ended up doing. He had with him a mix of new material and Ellington classics with a twist. The players jumped straight in, with Ellington providing the two younger musicians the basic melody and harmony and a poetic description of the scene or feeling he wanted the music to evoke.
As to the origin of the tension that led to Mingus walking out of the session, no one can agree, not even the people who were in the room. Either Mingus was irritated that Ellington had promised they’d record compositions from everyone, to then only use his own; or Max Roach said something that set Mingus off, or maybe it was Mingus who insulted Max or was irritated that Max was playing over him. Or it was some wholly other reason. Whatever the case, at some point Mingus packed up and headed for the door, with Ellington having to lure him back in with that ol’ Duke smoothness.
The discordant nature of the recording session manifests within the first note of the first track. Mercurial bass player Charles Mingus is doing something not quite right with those strings, and when Duke’s piano leaps in, it’s similarly…not off-putting exactly. Confrontational—not so much with the listener as it is with the bass. Max Roach kicks his way into the fray with similarly aggressive drumming. The entire thing is like listening to an argument in Italian when you don’t speak Italian. It’s fiery, aggressive, and makes you a little nervous—but there’s also beauty in it. By the time the song ends, one is almost physically exhausted.
The second track on the current release of the album, part of Blue Note’s Tone Poet series (a long series of this company bought that company led the album, originally released by United Artists Jazz, to its current home with Blue Note), is "Fleurette Africaine," and it’s a much less aggressive number, though there’s still a sinister undercurrent to what should otherwise be a pretty straight-forward ballad. It’s a beautiful piece though, haunting and dark. Things settle down for the third track, “Very Special,” which is a more straightforward post-bop jam but still possesses a palpable conflict between the players.
“Warm Valley,” a soft, laid-back ballad is the closest thing the album has to harmonious playing. Money Jungle’s version of “Caravan,” a staple of jazz, easy listening, and exotica is recognizably the same tune but also very different, much more primal and in-your-face than the song usually is. The original version of the album closes with the seventh track, “Solitude,” which plays like the exhausted, winsome, smoke-filled epilogue to one wild night. The Tone Poet release, however, includes several tracks and alternate takes that were recorded during the session but not included on the original album. These bonus tracks are all pretty enjoyable in their own right, showcasing a grittier, bluesier style than the tracks that made the original cut and playing to Mingus’ strengths in particular.
The tension between the three personalities and playing styles creates something special, an album that has remained influential for decades since its release, even though it spent many years out of print, and which seems to embody the overall sense of unease and dissatisfaction permeating American society at the time. Its reputation is deserved, and some fifty years after its original release, it still commands the attention of the listener. Few expected Ellington, despite (or because of) his pedigree, to be able to hang with the youngbloods, but he steps outside of what people expected of him and thought Duke could do. He was a man always in control, but on Money Jungle he was trying to direct a tempest, and sometimes that required a brute force that was unlike anything he had done before.