Charles Mingus: The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady

(This is an edited transcript of Episode 22 of the Sounds Out of Time podcast. Here’s a link to the album.)

I had originally planned to do this episode right after Concierto de Aranjuez as a two-part series on the intersection of jazz and Spanish music in the early ’60s. Then streets around the world erupted in protest after the murder of George Floyd, and Charles Mingus’s “Original Faubus Fables” struck me as the right song for the moment.

So I’m doing back-to-back Mingus episodes, because his album The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady was what I’d planned to pair with Sketches of Spain.

Like Sketches of Spain, The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady is a concept album. But The Black Saint has no sketches. It’s a fully realized artistic expression from the first note to the last. And it’s not easy listening. If you’re looking for something to put on in the background while you’re writing or cooking, this is not it. It demands your attention.

Mingus wrote this in the original liner notes:

“I wrote the music for dancing and listening. It is true music with much and many of my meanings. It is my living epitaph from birth til the day I first heard of Bird and Diz. Now it is me again. This music is only one little wave of styles and waves of little ideas my mind…