The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady

The subtractive test bites more than it does on a record of tunes, because this one is sectional by design. Inside “Solo Dancer” the parts are required: the slow, heaving ensemble figure over Dannie Richmond’s tread, the brass growling against it, the alto rising out of the mass. Each dance of side one sets up the next, and the titles hold them to a plan of one, two, many. The give is on side two. Its eighteen and a half minutes return to themes of side one and pass through episodes, a flamenco interlude for guitar, a passage of piano near to solo, a reprise of the alto’s lament, whose order could change without loss, and parts sound like a ballet’s linking music. The return is partly the design, a dance coming back to its figures, so it is charged lightly.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Disclosure through sound is credited as fully as disclosure through words, and what the record shows can be stated: love, rage, grief and political revolt are one passion in one person, and the person cannot be told apart from the group that sounds him. Charlie Mariano’s alto cries over an ensemble that is itself crying; the solo dancer is never alone, and the group never drowns the one. The titles, in the year of the March on Washington, name freedom and revolution beside love and farewell, so that the political struggle is heard as an interior one and the interior as political. That is a meaning, not only a mood. Held at the line: much of the articulation rests on titles and sleeve, the sound alone carries the condition of feeling more than the claim, and the sinner lady is never disclosed as anyone.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Height comes often and in more than one kind. “Solo Dancer” opens at height: a low, swaying chorale, the brass rearing up over it, then the alto bending and wailing at the top of its range, the record’s signature and one of the high moments of recorded jazz. The ballad passages of “Duet Solo Dancers” reach a tender beauty in Jaki Byard’s piano and the soft brass. Side two climbs again and again: the shouting ensemble over Richmond’s accelerations, the sudden quiet of the guitar, the last gathering of the lament. The height is terror and grief as much as beauty, a wider range than most records of its kind hold. Held from the top by the episodes of side two that link rather than rise, and by passages where the ensemble’s density blurs rather than lifts.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Part of the archetypal is built. The dance of the one and the many is not an allusion: it is the plan of the record, declared by every title and carried by the music, in which the solo voice steps out of the group and is taken back. The saint and the sinner in one figure is an old pattern, the divided soul, and the record gives it a sound, the same theme played as a hymn and as a howl. The lament inherited from the blues and the church runs under all of it. Held below the gate: the ballet’s figures, the black saint, the sinner lady, the dancers, are named and never particularised; the passion and the battle front are summoned by titles more than built by the music; and on side two the archetype stays nearer to atmosphere.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The departure is from the jazz record of 1963 as a set of tunes with solos, to a single ballet of six dances for eleven players, written and improvised in one weave and assembled on tape. Three turns at once: the extended composition carried by a working jazz band rather than an orchestra; collective improvisation orchestrated, so that the band’s cries are scored and its scoring cries; and the studio as an instrument, years before the layered records of the late 1960s made that ordinary. The stake was real: a new label’s prestige release placed on a forty-minute suite with no standard and no single, by a leader whose records sold modestly. Held from the top by precedent: Ellington’s extended works, Mingus’s own Pithecanthropus Erectus (1956) and his workshop method, the Third Stream around him; and the breaks of Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor in the same years cost more.

Score: 8.8 / 10

The sequence is counted here, once. Change the form and the record stops knowing its one thing, that the one and the many are a single passion. The titles are the form: solo, duet, group, trio and group, single solo and group, group and solo. The order turns the soloist’s relation to the band into the drama, and ends on the group with one, so that the farewell is spoken by a voice inside the mass. Side two, run without a break, makes the second half one movement of passion rather than three tunes. The overdub is form too: the alto sounds over the ensemble rather than inside a solo chorus, so the one is literally laid over the many. Recast as tunes with solos, the record would lose its argument. Held below the top because the seams of side two are where the form comes nearest to a container.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Evidence rather than promise, and sixty-three years of it. Listeners, musicians and critics have returned to the record without exhausting it, and its formal questions are still open: how much is written and how much improvised; what was laid on afterwards and where the joins fall; whether it is a suite or a ballet, and what the programme of the titles means against the music. Its themes recur in Mingus’s later bands, so the material is studied across his work. The semantic depth, the divided self and the freedom of 1963, keeps yielding. Held below Kind of Blue, at 9.0 on this axis, because its afterlife in performance is narrower: no standards came from it, and the record is reheard far more than it is replayed.

Score: 8.7 / 10

The intrinsic force is high: the record is a real reorganisation of what a jazz album could be, a composed and edited whole in which the improvisation is part of the composition and the studio part of the band. The reach is real and harder to trace. No school descends from it as modal playing descends from Kind of Blue, it gave the repertoire no standards, and the turn to the studio as instrument came into general practice by other routes. Delayed and diffuse influence is credited and discounted, and the force is weighed above the reach. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record stands among the models for extended composition in jazz and for later writing for the large ensemble; it is studied by jazz composers; and the repertory bands that carry Mingus’s music carry its material.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric. The form survives whole as issued, with no lost part and no disputed text; later editions band side two as a single track, the same music. Presence is continuous but not the widest: the record has stayed in print and in circulation since 1963, it is a fixed point of jazz listening and of the large-ensemble repertoire, and it reaches listeners outside jazz, without the mass presence of Kind of Blue. The fabric is sound: an acoustic band closely recorded, whose dense, hot mix and audible joins mark its date a little, and the surface carries its period less than most records of 1963. Sixty-three years sit where survival of this span usually sits, two tenths below Kind of Blue, which has lasted a little longer with the widest presence.

Score: 8.8 / 10

The making bears weight throughout. Eleven players are voiced to sound like an orchestra: the tuba and the baritone saxophone give the bottom a weight a big band of sixteen seldom has, and the brass is voiced in close, growling clusters in the Ellington manner. Richmond controls the accelerations and slowings that drive side two; Byard ranges from stride to the impressionist; Jay Berliner’s classical guitar is placed for contrast. Mariano’s alto, and the placing of it over the ensemble, is command of the recorded medium. The costs are stated: the ensemble is at times rough in attack and intonation, some passages are congested, the joins of the tape can be heard, and the record never reaches the clarity of the best large-ensemble recording of its decade. Some of the roughness is chosen; not all of it.

Score: 9.0 / 10

One law governs the record: a vocal, crying ensemble sound, a time anchored in the bass that bends and surges, and the solo voice rising out of the group and returning to it. Take the two most distant elements, the opening’s slow, heaving chorale and the Spanish guitar of side two. They obey the same law, because the guitar too is one voice set against the group, and its scale returns into the ensemble’s lament. The range is wide: chorale, blues shout, ballad, Spanish interlude, near-free collective passages, a swing that leans toward the waltz. The strain is on side two, where some joins sound like changes of scene in a ballet rather than consequences of one law, and where the reprise of side one can sound like recall rather than growth.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Judged on what the record achieves. Consciousness is held, as a divided interior made audible and named in the title. Eros is held, in the duet and the farewell. The social and the political are held, in the freedom and revolution of the titles and in the band as a society of shouting equals, and they are integrated with the interior rather than listed beside it, which is the record’s achievement. The sacred is named in the saint and carried in the church inflections of the ensemble. The history of Black music, from the blues and the church through Ellington, is carried in the sound. What holds the axis lowest is absence: labour, the family, the state as an institution and the natural order do not appear. A wordless record of thirty-nine minutes holds what it holds, and the figure describes the form.

Score: 7.5 / 10