or better or worse, we here at Stylus, in all of our autocratic consumer-crit greed, are slaves to timeliness. A record over six months old is often discarded, deemed too old for publication, a relic in the internet age. That's why each week at Stylus, one writer takes a look at an album with the benefit of time. Whether it has been unjustly ignored, unfairly lauded, or misunderstood in some fundamental way, we aim with On Second Thought to provide a fresh look at albums that need it.

Charles Mingus shouted a lot, both on his recordings and, I am told, in his daily life. At what I am not entirely sure—nor do I think there is an easy answer—but maybe some of it, at least on this record, can be traced to what we call jazz. Not jazz itself, which could quite easily be the first thing to resist an easy categorization, the sort of naming-for-posterity name we give something that signifies its death, but its simulacra. Or jazz as simulacra, maybe an easy-living narcotic for yuppies meant to go down easy: smoothed-out cocktail-party music, office music, that which is supposed to take the contours out of life. Take away the noise and the passion, the mathematics and the fury, and you end up with go-nowhere easy listening. And so it is doubly unfortunate that jazz today has met a peculiar fate or, if you will, fates: if its present-day incarnations have become the sort of thing that evoke some curious mixture of rage and haughty indifference from those who claim to care about music—hippie jam-rock bands and so-tasteful-as-to-be-entirely-tasteless background burble and hum—it has, in its historical form (which may not exactly be pure, but then again what is?) it has neared the precipice of excinction, become (sorry Ken Burns) history for people who don’t really care about history that much. History, too, that’s rewritten: what do we hear of old jazz aside from dwindling late-night university radio broadcasts (I recommend Temple’s, if you’re curious)? Coffee-shop music. It’s become, well... cute.

John Cassavetes, another raging iconoclast, despised “cuteness” from his performing actors. Though he pretended to know a lot more about jazz than he actually did, he had the good sense to approach Charles Mingus to score his first feature, Shadows. Mingus said he’d do the score on one condition: that Cassavetes and his cohorts came to his apartment and cleaned up all the cat shit that was littering his piled-up scores. He did so, then was notified by Mingus that it was too clean in there now, that he was unable to think, that he had to wait for some cat shit to accumulate again before any progress could be made. (The score ended up arriving about two years late.) From this anecdote we can derive one thing about Mingus’ psyche: it is perennially untidy. And on Oh Yeah, one of the artist’s strangest and strongest albums, it is allowed to run amok. Denying himself the bass and confining himself to the piano is one thing; Mingus is incredibly adept at the instrument, anything but dilettantish one-dimensional: his violent blues pounding on this album seems the product of someone very different from the Mingus who performs the mercurial, cerebral piano interludes on The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady. His untutored vocals, though, are another story.

Mingus has to know that we don’t think he’s a very good singer. Mingus has to know that we understand he doesn’t give a shit about that. “Hog Callin’ Blues,” beginning with a salvo of percussive voice poetry, announces its intent right off the bat, then comes out swinging and proceeds to whoop your ass. Like much of the album, it is rooted in the stomp and swagger of the blues, but it takes things into very raw territory seldom explored by the jazz composers of the era. Harsh and cartoonish blasts of loping brass at war with one another (check out the oft-bizarre tumult of bird calls courtesy of Roland Kirk), a staggering, brazen beat, and some drunkenly self-assured piano combine to throw a raucous party you’ll not soon forget. It’s this color—that of fuck-all-the-bullshit amused rage—that occupies much of the record’s palatte, albeit in a variety of tones.

> “Devil Woman,” for example, slows the pace, but hardly lets up in intensity. Mingus’ voice, raw and strained—often, all he needs to do is let out an expressive moan, somehow sounding as melodic as it does wracked—opens and closes this song, managing to evoke everything from pathos and degradation (this is a man who’s had his share of wrestling-with-God crises, a man who’s had his share of dark nights of the soul. His life is in a state of permanent upheaval. If the voice doesn’t tell you this, listen to the all-but-ruined sprawl of the brass chorus, which finds its glossolalic counterpart in “Ecclesiastics”) to blessed-out hope (what does he do? He sings, he plays). Is Mingus’ soul to be saved, and, if so, does he have to do it himself? Is he a holy man reduced to sin, or some inversion of this classic paradigm? The song doesn’t give us any easy answers. All that Mingus can tell us is that it’s complicated, that he’s being as honest as he knows how.

“Wham Bam Thank You Ma’am” and “Eat That Chicken” are the joyous, romping numbers here, whose spontaneity I think is awfully hard to top, the latter—and probably the former—a particularly wonderful paean to unbridled lust (or any number of other appetites). But for every delicious run of off-kilter sax we come across, for which we can thank Booker Ervin, there’s more existential grimness to stare down. (It goes with the territory.) Thankfully, it’s presented with a healthy dose of humor: “Oh Lord Don’t Let Them Drop That Atomic Bomb On Me” boasts Mingus’ most expressive, bizarre vocal performance, a cajoling plea that the powers (or power) that be spare his life; the “me” in this case is italicized. Delivered over liquid lines of trumpet and sax that occasionally surge forth into swollen blasts, and his own supple piano work, Mingus’ lament is not nearly as beautiful as its instrumental accompaniment. It certainly comes across as the farthest thing from prayer, which in music so often presents itself as a safe, smug call to arms. Frankly, Mingus doesn’t sound much like he cares about the rest of the world, not as long as he’s got his voice and his piano. Shockingly selfish, and proud of it? Maybe. But if only the rest of the jazz world possessed such dogged instincts of self-preservation. So what if we keep on playing this record—everybody, now—with something of the same manner in which we lay hands on the meekly ailing?