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Review of concert from 2001-11-07: with Charles Mingus Orchestra; NYC, Beacon Hall
NY Times, 2001-11-13
- Jon Pareles

 

November 13, 2001
JAZZ REVIEW | ELVIS COSTELLO & MINGUS ORCHESTRA

Joining the Mingus Legacy, Just Like the Other Fans

By JON PARELES

Romance, rage, art, ancestry, risk, camaraderie and an endless scuffling quest are encompassed in the music of Charles Mingus. Elvis Costello is neither the first to cherish those qualities nor the first to put them in lyrics, but he stretched himself to try both when he collaborated with the Charles Mingus Orchestra in a concert on Wednesday night at the Beacon Theater.

If Mr. Costello had not been a songwriter, he would be the epitome of the passionate, knowledgeable music fan. He has made it his business not only to voice appreciation for musicians from the country singer George Jones to the pop songwriter Burt Bacharach, but to collaborate with them. He couldn't work with Mingus, who died in 1979, but he has been dropping by the Thursday- night shows at Fez of the Mingus Big Band and the Mingus Orchestra, and sometimes singing with them.

The orchestra is distinguished from the big band by instruments like bassoon and French horn; both are repertory groups overseen by the composer's widow, Sue Mingus. They uphold the boisterous luxuriance of the Mingus legacy while delving ever deeper into his repertory. For concerts in Los Angeles and New York and an appearance on the Mingus Orchestra's next album Mr. Costello wrote lyrics for Mingus compositions and adapted his own songs for the group.

In orchestral arrangements by Sy Johnson, Earl McIntyre and others, Mingus compositions became the constantly shifting coalitions of a city in motion. Horn brawls turned into chorales; woodwind dissonances resolved as close-harmony embraces; rhythm parts splintered off but stayed connected. The music refracted past jazz eras through modernist complexity, with shifting meters and harmonic transformations, yet stayed grounded in the blues.

Mr. Costello based his lyrics on Mingus's titles, which he called "a gift" to a songwriter. The nervy "Hora Decubitus" became an insomniac affirmation of life, while "Jellyroll" meditated angrily on the way great jazz musicians clowned around to survive: "a joke with a curse in the middle." In Mingus's knotty ballad lines Mr. Costello heard love affairs filled with complications and regrets. "Self-Portrait in Three Colors" became a jazz nocturne as he wondered, "Did I stay away too long?"

He didn't make things easy on himself. Mr. Costello chose compositions with leaping, chromatically warped melody lines that were made for instruments not voices. It was difficult for him to reach all the notes, much less add subtleties. He was better off with the self-tailored melodies of his own songs, as the arrangements carried him into realms suggesting film noir and imaginary bygone ballrooms. "Clubland" — as applicable to jazz musicians as to rockers — dissolved vertiginously from mambo to waltz to jazz.

Rough-hewn but wholehearted, the music sounded like a work in progress or maybe just one of those urban encounters that holds out tantalizing possibilities.

Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company

 
         
 

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