Charles Mingus: Right Now: Live At The Jazz Workshop

"New Fables" features a ten-minute solo from Jordan, some fine ensemble work, and a solo encounter from Handy. Mingus changes the mood as he sees fit, and one would describe these different styles as avant-garde (in 1964), blues, flamenco, and straight-ahead jazz. Handy's work is stirring, deeply imaginative, technically thrilling, and a harbinger of what was to come the following year at Monterey.

"Meditations" offers something quite different: Mingus bowing the bass in the cello range with that certain sad quality, teenager Jane Getz playing loose, free, and exciting, much as she does today, and a moment where Mingus joins Getz for a four-handed piano romp. The piece is a flowing ballad, but there are constant changes throughout. The music is, as Rachel Sales states in the liner notes, "what we have come to expect from Mingus the bassist-composer: the sound of exuberance, of angry involvement, or joy and rage, of going-for-broke, and most of all, the `sound of surprise'."