Goodbye Pork Pie Hat

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Goodbye Pork Pie Hat is a jazz composition by Charles Mingus .

Bassline by Charlie Mingus from the track Pork Pie

Goodbye Pork Pie Hat - with the subtitle Theme for Lester Young - is one of the most famous compositions by the American band leader, bassist and composer Mingus. It is a slow blues with a length of twelve bars. Mingus created the piece immediately following the news of the death of the tenor saxophonist Lester Young (1909-1959), whom he admired, while he was playing with his band in the Half Note Cafe . The title refers to his preferred headgear, which he wore on every occasion - a circular saw-like hat model with the exotic name Porkpie Hut .

Impact history

The title was first recorded by Charles Mingus on his Columbia LP Mingus Ah Um from 1959. When he recorded the piece with his septet only two months after Young's death, he must have made a conscious effort to exercise restraint. "<Whisper The two tenor saxophones> the topic only." In extensive and developed form was made of composition in 1964 with Eric Dolphy the piece So Eric long with a different theme, which was performed regularly on the European tour in April this year. In 1977 Mingus created a version of Good Bye Porkpie Hat with guitarists Larry Coryell and Philip Catherine , which had "a strangely melancholy, almost gypsy mood", but which took up the feeling of fusion jazz.

Rahsaan Roland Kirk wrote the first text for the instrumental title in 1961, in which it was said about Young that he had put his whole soul into the tenor saxophone and had a way of speaking that was a language of its own. Guitarists like John McLaughlin , Ralph Towner (with Gary Burton ) and Jeff Beck discovered the qualities of the piece early on. Goodbye Pork Pie Hat gained additional popularity through recordings by pianist and bandleader Gil Evans , who recorded the composition several times with his Monday Night Orchestra in the 1980s .

Although it was a jazz composition, the song also influenced pop music around 1970: The first cover version of the piece outside the jazz genre was presented by British folk guitarists Bert Jansch and John Renbourn as early as 1966. Beyond jazz, he was therefore taken up by groups such as Pentangle or East of Eden . Goodbye Pork Pie Hat was later recorded by Joni Mitchell (with Jaco Pastorius and Wayne Shorter ), which however referred to the solo by John Handy on the first recording in 1959 and contributed a new text. Mitchell's version influenced the interpretations of the song by Mark Murphy (1981) and Jay Clayton (1986).

Other recordings from the jazz genre exist by Carla Bley , Anthony Braxton , Oliver Lake , Horace Parlan , Stanley Clarke , Lenny White , Bill Mays & Ray Drummond , George Mraz , Tony Reedus Aki Takase , Andy Summers , Cassandra Wilson and the German musicians Peter Herbolzheimer , Klaus Doldinger or Tobias Hoffmann . Karl Denson (1993) recorded a delightful interpretation in its minimalism (only bass and saxophone) . A total of 260 recordings of the title exist in the jazz sector.

Richard Cook and Brian Morton comment critically that only one in ten who can whistle goodbye pork pie hat can say something about Lester Young's music. It is now almost only associated with Mingus and hardly with Lester Young.

Selection discography

  • Charles Mingus: Mingus Ah Um (Columbia, 1959)
  • Charles Mingus: Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus ( Impulse ! , 1963; as Theme for Lester Young )
  • Charles Mingus: Three or Four Shades of Blues (Atlantic, 1977)
  • Joni Michell: Mingus (Asylum Records, 1979)
  • Gil Evans: Live at Sweet Basil, Part 1 (King, 1984)
  • Mingus Big Band : Blues & Politics (Dreyfus), 1999

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See Brian Priestley , Mingus: A Critical Biography London 1985, p. 113
  2. ↑ Pork Pie are usually round pork patties in puff pastry.
  3. ↑ a b Hans-Jürgen Schaal (Ed.) Jazz Standards. The lexicon ; Bärenreiter, Kassel, 2004 (3rd edition), p. 172f.
  4. ^ "He put all of his soul into a tenor saxophone. Had a way of talkin ',' twas a language all his own. "Kirk only recorded the title on his album Return Of The 5000 Lb. Man (1977).
  5. ↑ The chord progression was partially ignored. See B. Priestley, Mingus: A Critical Biography , p. 113
  6. ↑ See Bielefeld Catalog Jazz, editions 1988 and 2002, Tom Lord The Jazz Disography .
  7. ^ Richard Cook , Brian Morton : The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD . 6th edition. Penguin, London 2002, ISBN 0-14-051521-6 .