Month: January 2022

Record #817: Charles Mingus – Mingus Ah Um (1959)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Some years bear a strange significance in music history. Single calendars that compress massive explosions of musical ingenuity within their pages.

In 1967, it was psychedelic and progressive rock. In 1977, it was punk. 1991 brought multiple waves of noisy guitar bands, from grunge to shoegaze to post-hardcore to the massive umbrella of alternative rock.

For jazz, that year was 1959, which saw several seminal releases: Coltrane’s Giant Steps, Brubeck’s Time Out, Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come, and Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, which is arguably the greatest jazz record of all time by every metric.

But even among such legendary peers, Charles Mingus’ masterpiece, Mingus Ah Um, stands unwavering on its own two feet and swings mightily at all challengers.

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Record #816: Bad Brains – Bad Brains (1982)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

The conversations around the greatest punk band of all time are often focused in the rivalry between USA and the UK. Punks wax philosophical about The Ramones or The Clash, Black Flag or the Buzzcocks…(note: I’m intentionally omitting the band Virgin Records put together to reappropriate punk aesthetics).

One factor that’s not often brought up is that of race. True, there might not be too much to talk about there—for all its rebellion against the status quo, punk has always skewed heavily white. But for Bad Brains, whose legend demands that they’re mentioned in any conversation about important punk bands, their punk cred is tied intrinsically to their blackness, both in lyrical content and the way they were perceived in their early days.

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Record #815: Eugenius – Midlife (2020)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

I am by no means a connoisseur of hip hop. The hip hop section of my collection is very meager, and I feel ill-equipped to talk about hip hop in any sort of meaningful way.

That said, my metric for good hip hop is much the same as Justice Potter Stewart’s metric for pornography: I know it when I see it. And Midlife, the sprawling, mercurial debut from Cincinnati’s Eugenius, passes that test with ease.

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