The Black Saint And The Sinner Lady
by Charles Mingus

From AfterHours 02/11/2007 15:35 | #333 | TOP COMMENT Vote up your preferred comments and the comments with the most votes will be flagged.

The Black Saint & The Sinner Lady is a tense, passionate, fierce album that deals directly with the personal chaos Mingus found in his love life. It is a meticulously composed, multi-layered triumph that continually announces its motifs through a hefty series of deft variations, continually building in repeating, masterfully executed climaxes while scaling the walls of ecstacy, the depths of despair, the longing, passion, and weakened knees of love, and the "soap operas" of indulging in sin. It does this with a cathartic vigor that magnifies each stream of explosive emotions into a focused, intensely provocative event, giving emphasis to the gradual, rising phrases as if a feast of sensuality and desire were caught in the charging hormones and emotions that spring up in the most irrepressable of love affairs. It exploits the characters as if twisting them around eachother until each is a relentlessly pursued object of affection, left dizzy and exhausted by whetted appetites rung dry, offering bodies succumbed and their minds bent within an enigmatic, inescapable and confounding drama. (Edited)

From ForegroundNoise 09/13/2018 16:45 | #221007 | TOP COMMENT Vote up your preferred comments and the comments with the most votes will be flagged.

By all contemporary accounts an obsessive band leader, (think J.K. Simmons in Whiplash) Mingus suffered nothing less than perfection when he began work on his great composition for an imagined ballet. The moments of free improvisation on this thing have a funny knack of seeming somehow deliberate; every flourishing bassline, every wailing trumpet, every rolling snare – the songs cascade past your ears (/eyes?) like renaissance painting arranged to painstaking detail. With this record Mingus cut through the cool jazz of his predecessors to provide something simultaneously beautiful and horrifying.

It may not be my personal favourite jazz record of all time, but if you listen to one jazz album your life, make it this one.

Most of this is copied from the description of the album in my overall chart, do check it out if you have the time!!

I am not a Jazz listener but this album is so so so good. I wish I could understand other Jazz records like I get this record. It is majestical the performance in the record. So powerful and so communicative. (Edited)

From ffudnebbuh TOP 100 COMMENTER 10/04/2009 05:00 | #6586 | TOP COMMENT Vote up your preferred comments and the comments with the most votes will be flagged.

I first heard this in 1974 when I was a music student, and it really blew me away, the first ten minutes along put it in the realm of the very great jazz albums. I love Mingus' compositions and the talent that he was able to assemble. This could be my favorite jazz album of all time....It moves me so much.

From Hayden TOP 100 COMMENTER 05/13/2012 19:16 | #42219 | TOP COMMENT Vote up your preferred comments and the comments with the most votes will be flagged.

This should get the recognition Kind Of Blue gets, and greater. Best jazz album I've ever listened to. (Edited)