A Salute to Duke and 'Money Jungle'

In commemoration of the maestro's 126th, a look back at a very curious session

As salutes come pouring in on this 126th anniversary of Duke Ellington’s birth on April 29, 1899, I’ll add to the deluge with this piece that originally appeared in the June 2013 issue of Downbeat. It’s my interview with producer Alan Douglas, who reminisced about the incredibly unlikely trio session he put together on Sept. 17, 1962 with Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus and Max Roach, resulting in the hugely impactful Blue Note album, Money Jungle (released in February of 1963). The piece was entitled “50 Years After the Summit":

Fifty years later, the reverberations are still being felt. This year marks the golden anniversary of the release of Money Jungle, the utterly audacious cross-generational summit meeting of Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus and Max Roach. How the revered and courtly maestro Ellington—who was 63 at the time of this recording—got together with two such mercurial jazz rebels as Mingus (40 at the time) and Roach (38) has remained something of a mystery all these years. Who instigated this session? How did these formidable figures happen to gather in the studio on Sept. 17, 1962?

Credit goes to producer Alan Douglas, who was heading up the jazz division at the United Artists label at the time and was all of 30 when the historic session went down. Having already produced such potent UA sessions as Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers’ 3 Blind Mice and the first Bill Evans-Jim Hall collaboration, Undercurrent, Douglas had a bit of a track record when he approached Ellington about doing a piano trio recording for the label. “I had met Duke and Billy Strayhorn in Paris when they were writing a score for the movie Paris Blues,” recalled Douglas in a phone interview from his home in Paris. “I was working at [the French record label] Barclay Records atthe time. Billy and Duke were staying at the Hotel Trémoille, and Nicole Barclay asked me to do whatever I could to help them during their stay there. So I was with them for about a month, doing all kinds of errands and things, and became friendly with them. They had two pianos in their hotel room, back to back, and sometimes they’d play duets together. One day when I was hanging out with them I said to Duke, ‘How come you never made a piano record? You’re always making records with the big band.’ And he said, ‘Nobody asked me.’ I kind of just smiled and just let it go.

“About a month later, I got a call to come to the Barclay office and meet Art Talmadge of United Artists. Nicole, who was very prominent in the record business at that time, recommended me for the job of running the new jazz department that Mr. Talmadge was setting up at United Artists. So I left Paris, came to New York and did a couple of records for United Artists. One day my secretary calls me and says, ‘Duke Ellington is here to see you.’ Naturally, I’m caught off guard. He came into my office, sat down in front of me and said, ‘You know, you put something in my head back in Paris. I’d like to do a piano record.’ I was working with Mingus at the time, or trying to work with him, so I said, ‘Let’s do it with Charlie Mingus,’ because I felt Mingus was the contemporary extension of the Ellington school. And Duke said, ‘Yeah! That would be interesting.’ So I called Charlie and he disagreeably agreed, as usual, and he insisted that the only drummer for the session could be Max. I then went back to Duke, told him about Max and Mingus, and he was comfortable with the idea.”

Money Jungle was recorded to. three-track at Sound Makers Studio in midtown Manhattan in a single day. “I tried to get them to rehearse, and all three of them said no, they didn’t want to rehearse,” Douglas said. “Their attitude was, ‘Let’s just go to studio and see what happens.’” And while Douglas maintains that Mingus was “a perfect gentleman with Duke at all times,” he confirms that there was indeed a clash in the studio between the hot-tempered bassist and the strong-willed drummer:“Mingus started to complain about what Max was playing. Mingus was getting louder and louder as the session went on. I forget what song they were doing, but in the middle of it Max kind of looked up at Mingus and smiled and said something. Andat that point, Mingus picked the bass up, put the cover on it and just stomped out of the studio.”

Douglas described the scene that unfolded on the street below after Mingus left in mid-session: “That’s one of the visuals I will never forget. We were in the studio on 57th Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, and I remember leaning out the window, looking up towards Seventh Avenue and seeing Duke Ellington chasing Charlie Mingus up the street. He finally caught up with him and convinced him to return to the studio. After they came back together, Mingus was very cooperative and took care of business for the rest of the session.

“Of course, Mingus idolized Duke,” he continued. “And Mingus and Max knew each other so well that Charlie could yell at Max and it didn’t bother Max at all. He just kept on playing. So there was a healthy respect for each other and eventually they got into a groove together, which you hear on the record.”

Writing in the March 28, 1963, issue of DownBeat, Don DeMicheal critiqued threerecords in a combined review: Duke Ellington Meets Coleman Hawkins (4 stars), Duke Ellington & John Coltrane (4 stars) and Money Jungle (5 stars), which he referred to as “astonishing,” describing the bassist and drummer as “some of the fastest company around.” DeMicheal’s prose repeatedly praised Mingus for pushing Ellington into new territory: “I’ve never heard Ellington play as he does on this album; Mingus and Roach, especially Mingus, push him so strongly that one can almost hear Ellington show them who’s boss—and he dominates both of them, which is no mean accomplishment.”

Over the past five decades, hundreds of jazz musicians have drawn inspiration from this classic album, including many of today’s stars, such as drummer Terri Lyne Carrington and pianist Frank Kimbrough. “[Money Jungle] was one of those ad hoc things—they weren’t a working band—so there’s a lot of experimenting going on in the studio,” Kimbrough said. “And of course, some of it’s abrasive. But sometimes abrasive is good. Everything doesn’t have to be pretty all the time because you’re conveying the range of human emotions in the music. And look at what was happening in 1962. Things were coming to a boil. So that goes into the mix as well.”

Indeed, the Cuban Missile Crisis was just a month away. A year later, Dr. Martin Luther King would deliver his “I Have A Dream” speech in Washington, D.C., and President Kennedy would be assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963. “The seams were getting tight at that point,” Kimbrough continued. “It’s like a balloon filling up with water, and Money Jungle happened at a point just before the balloon bursts. But for Mingus, it’s gotta be the happiest day of his life, right? I mean, playing a trio date with Duke, his idol?”

Nine days after recording Money Jungle, Ellington would go into the studio to record the Impulse album Duke Ellington & John Coltrane. A few weeks later, on Oct. 12, Mingus would preside over his Town Hall concert (a musical train wreck, documented on a 1963 United Artists album). But on that historic day in September in the studio with Ellington, Mingus, Roach, producer Douglas and engineer Bill Schwartau, a certain kind of magic prevailed. “The gods were looking down on us that day,” Douglas said. “It could’ve gone another way, but it didn’t. It was a very successful collaboration. It’s a great record, a tough record, and it came from no rehearsal with no previous plan to do anything in particular. Just three great spirits together in the room feeling each other out.”

“Obviously, it’s an important release,” said pianist Fred Hersch. “I can remember buying the LP in Cincinnati around ’73 or ’74 and just putting it on and going ‘Wow!’ It’s such a ‘wow’ from the first note, like they’re shot out of a cannon. Sometimes you get three or four all-stars together and they go with the common denominator and make it simple, but this was a lot of ‘push me-pull you’ on all parts.”

Depending on one’s point of view, Mingus is either the star or the saboteur of Money Jungle. “That’s one of the first records in history that has the bass-in-your-face kind of sonority to it,” said Mingus Big Band bassist Boris Kozlov, who performs with the group weekly at New York’s Jazz Standard (using Mingus’ famous “Lion’s Head” bass). “And I keep thinking that maybe that was somehow crafted by Duke—that he wanted that.”

From the opening salvo of tortured bass notes issuing forth on the first track, it is clear that this is no ordinary piano trio session. “The title track has this declamatory intensity and power and almost shock to it,” observed pianist Vijay Iyer. “Mingus is playing very much ‘up in your grill.’ He’s very interactive, kind of contrapuntal with what Duke is playing, and the drums fill up a lot of the space. So it had real equanimity, much more of an even dialogue among the three, which is a little different from the kind of blowing sessions that are more representative of that time.”

Ellington enters the fray on that opening track, “Money Jungle,” not with his usual pianistic elegance but rather with spiky chords and a dissonant streak, as if he’s dueling rather than dialoguing with Mingus as Roach cooks underneath with some hip interaction between snare, bass drum and ride cymbal.

“It’s like Duke’s going in this Monk-Cecil direction sometimes,” said pianist Uri Caine. “It’s like an experiment for him, using dissonance and other devices that he normally doesn’t use. His playing can be very angular, very sparse. Then he gets these riffs that he keeps repeating over and over, almost like the horn section of a big band. And I love that part in ‘Caravan’ where he’s playing the melody way down in octaves and you hear these little Webern-like notes on the top where he’s just sort of hitting the keys. You can tell that he’s thinking orchestrally there; he’s thinking like a big band. Not everybody plays the piano that way.”

Hersch admires Ellington’s authoritative playing throughout Money Jungle: “I think it’s some of his best playing on record. The other Ellington trio albums [1953’s The Duke Plays Ellington and 1961’s Piano In The Foreground] are pretty manicured, in a way. The tracks are short and they’re a little more polished. But Money Jungle is great because Duke stretches in a way that he doesn’t on the other trio albums. Because Duke wasn’t totally in control, it brings out something in his playing that’s very special. He had to come up with it on the spot, and it reveals Duke as more of a fearless improviser than any of his other trio projects.”

Pianist Matthew Shipp is also impressed by Ellington’s playing on the disc. “There’s a very dark grittiness and beauty to the harmonic language that Duke employs that’s a full flowering of a piano language,” Shipp said. “There’s something so integral about the space-time that he generates. Every little architectural detail is carved to the Nth degree. It’s one of the greatest examples of piano playing I’ve ever heard.

“Interestingly enough, there are aspects about that album that are almost completely free,” Shipp continued. “That version of ‘Solitude’…Duke’s playing free on that! And his orchestration on ‘Caravan’ is otherworldly. I mean, it’s 100 percent the tune—the materials engender everything that’s going on—but there’s nothing rote about his playing on either of those familiar tunes. Actually there’s nothing rote about any aspect of this album. It has none of that feel of when you’re throwing people together in the studio and you’re just going through the motions, because the tension was palpable. I find it an album of utter vitalism, unlike a lot of straightahead albums of that time.”

Kozlov compares the conversational playing on Money Jungle to the Bill Evans Trio with Scott LaFaro and Paul Motian. “Just conceptually and functionally, there’s this heavy counterpoint, this polyphony going on,” he said. “Earlier trio records that Mingus played on with Hampton Hawes and Dannie Richmond and another one from much earlier with Bud Powell and Roy Haynes are pretty straightahead. You still know it’s Mingus, but it takes maybe 20 seconds to figure out that it’s him. On Money Jungle, it takes five seconds.”

The bassist plays with uncanny force on that edgy opener, practically mugging his instrument by thumping a single note repeatedly, then literally pulling the string off the fingerboard at one point. Ellington holds his ground in the face of Mingus’ volatile statements, responding in kind with some rather ‘out’ proclamations of his own. In Caine’s view, “Duke is being very fatherly to Mingus in the sense of saying, ‘I’m going to let you be obstreperous there; you can do your thing and I’m going to hold it down for you. Next time you do it, I’m going to go out, too.’ There’s a lot of psychology going on in this session.”

The final minute of the title track has Mingus muscling his bass once again, bending strings with such force that he makes the instrument sound like a cross between a berimbau and a Delta blues guitar. “If they did nothing else but record that opening track, it would [still] be notable,” said Hersch. “It’s just so extraordinary.”

But of course, there’s much more to Money Jungle. The hushed, stark beauty of “Fleurette Africaine” is equally extraordinary but with a wholly different dynamic than the rambunctious title track. With Mingus gently trilling like a hummingbird on his bass and Roach underscoring the proceedings with sparse use of mallets, Ellington paints a portrait of an exotic flower deep in the jungle that has never been touchedby human hands. It’s as delicate and mysterious as “Money Jungle” is brash.

“Certainly Mingus is the wild-card of the session,” Hersch said. “On the first tune he’s playing this insistent high note through the whole track and it’s kind of not functional either harmonically or rhythmically. Yet, he’s sort of stubbornly up there and Duke is filling in the blanks. On ‘Very Special,’ Mingus decides to play more functionally, and it totally changes the vibe. There are certain tunes where Mingus played more compositionally and others where he plays more functionally. So it’s a pretty schizophrenic session. It’s almost like two different trios going on. And really, the person who decides whether it’s going to be one or the other is Mingus.”

Bassist John Hébert, a member of Fred Hersch’s trio and a leader in his own right, noted, “There’s not a lot of sections where Mingus is just playing walking time. There’s a lot of broken playing and really melodic playing behind what Duke’s doing. It’s like they’re always blowing together. That was fascinating to me back when I first heard Money Jungle and that’s how I want to play now—be in the pocket but at the same time be really elastic with the time and the feel.”

“Everybody’s kind of doing their thing, but they’re together,” added drummer Jeff “Tain” Watts. “And that predates Keith Jarrett’s way of doing things and in a way even Wayne Shorter’s way of doing things with his current quartet. They have a much freer way of doing it, but everybody’s kind of in their own zone and yet they’re definitely playing the composition in tune with each other, just like Duke and Max and Mingus were doing on Money Jungle.”

The original United Artists recording had seven tracks, including the loosely swinging blues “Very Special,” a gorgeous reading of “Warm Valley” (which Ellington had famously recorded in 1940 as a feature for Johnny Hodges), a hard-driving “Wig Wise,” a unique interpretation of Juan Tizol’s “Caravan” and Ellington’s exquisite solo piano reading of “Solitude,” which Mingus and Roach only enter in during the final minute of the tune.

The 2002 Blue Note CD reissue (programmed by Michael Cuscuna) contains a string of blues-drenched numbers wherein Mingus is turned loose to testify on his bass. Along with two potent takes of “Switch Blade,” the bear-like bassist reaches deep into a gutbucket vibe on two takes of “Backward Country Boy Blues.” There are also two takes of “REM Blues,” which sounds like an answer to Mercer Ellington’s “Things Ain’t What They Used To Be,” and two takes of the Roach showcase “A Little Max (Parfait),” a buoyant, Latin-flavored piece that features some slick fills on the drum breaks.

Part of the enduring legend of Money Jungle lies not just in the quantity of musicians who embrace it, but also their diversity. The members of Medeski, Martin & Wood acknowledge the album as a touchstone for their own cutting-edge explorations. “It is one of my favorite records of all time,” said drummer Billy Martin. “The personality is just so fucking strong. To me, it’s almost like punk rock. They’re virtuosos but they’re approaching it in such a raw way. It’s just so rich and intense and raw compared to the more refined, classic piano trio recordings of the time. That blend of personalities, where everybody brings their own dimension to it, was something we related to deeply. You listen to those cats and they each have such a strong footing that it’s just undeniable. So it gave us more juice to keep going.”

MMW bassist Chris Wood recalled that the album title became an adjective for the group: “We’d be rehearsing and someone would say, ‘Do that Money Jungle thing,’ which meant don’t groove perfectly, don’t be too tight, keep looseness, create that tension.’ Marc Ribot has this phrase for stuff like that. He calls it ‘wrong and strong.’ If you’re gonna do it wrong, do it strong! And Mingus’ playing on the title track, which is awesome, is a perfect example of that. He’s not slick. Even though he’s technically incredible, he’s not afraid to be raw. He sounds more like a Delta blues guy on that track, like the Son House of bass.”

MMW keyboardist John Medeski said, “Money Jungle, to me, was sort of the pinnacle of grooving jazz trio interplay. No one needed to be supportive because they’re all playing beyond the forms, beyond the style, beyond everything. It’s contrapuntally interactive like the Ahmad Jamal Trio or the Bill Evans Trio, but in a much more aggressive, more powerful way. There’s a certain intensity and intention to this recording that is just incredible. There’s a lot of space for the energy of the communication to be the focal point, not necessarily the notes or the melodies. And that, to me, is the real spirit of jazz. It’s improvised communication, a conversational way of playing. That’s what this album is all about. Hopefully that’s coming back in recording, especially for those who call themselves jazz musicians.” DB