Some cool jazz for a Saturday morning. As usual, thanks and gratitude to Open Culture for finding all of the most interesting stuff for the rest of us to enjoy.

John Coltrane Performs A Love Supreme and Other Classics in Antibes (July 1965)

April 17th, 2014


John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme came out in 1964, an “album-long hymn of praise,” writes Rolling Stone, “transcendent music perfect for the high point of the civil rights movement” as well as Coltrane’s growing spiritual awakening after kicking his heroin habit. The record amazed critics and jazz fans alike and by 1970, it had sold over half-a-million copies. But lovers of Coltrane would have only one chance to see him perform the full four-part suite live, and not in any stateside clubs but in Antibes, France on July 26, 1965, where he played two nights with his quartet.

You can see twelve of those miraculous minutes above, consisting of the first two movements of the suite, “Acknowledgement” and “Resolution.” This is a gorgeous performance, capturing what saxophonist David Liebman describes as “an end and a new musical beginning” for Coltrane. The second evening’s performance, below, begins with “Naima,” on which, Liebman says, “Trane solos combining a striking lyrical approach offset by multi-noted, densely packed runs.” If you’ve ever wondered what Ira Gitler meant in describing Coltrane’s style as “sheets of sound,” these performances will clear up the mystery.


The mid-sixties was a pivotal time for jazz—before the electronic fusion experiments to come, as hard bop and free jazz combined with the dissonance of early 20th century contemporary classical music, which had “permeated jazz for at least a handful of artists.” Coltrane still spoke the “common language”—the “standard repertoire stemming from the American song book and/or original compositions with similar and predictable harmonic movement,” yet in his case, he “added modality to the mix,” a trick picked up from Miles Davis.

Coltrane sadly died from liver cancer in 1967 at age 40 and did not live to see the strange, surprising turns jazz would take in the decade to come. How his brash, yet enchanting playing would have translated in the 70s is anyone’s guess. Yet, like so many artists who die young and in their prime, he left us with a body of work almost mystical in its intensity and beauty—so much so that his more religious followers made him a saint after his death. Watching these too-brief recordings above, it’s not hard to see why.

The second night’s performances from the Antibes Jazz Festival were issued as a live album in 1988. The first night’s live showcase of A Love Supreme has seen several releases, and if you’re one of those who professes devotion to this amazing piece of work, you’d do well to pick up a copy, if you don’t own one already. “The intensity if the Antibes live performance,” writes Liebman in his 2011 liner notes to the Jazz Icons/Mosaic release of the Coltrane Live at Antibes 1965 DVD, “far exceeds the studio recording” of the album. And that’s saying something.

Related Content:

• John Coltrane’s Handwritten Outline for His Masterpiece A Love Supreme
• Watch John Coltrane and His Great Quintet Play ‘My Favorite Things’ (1961)
• The World According to John Coltrane: His Life & Music Revealed in Heartfelt 1990 Documentary

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

Nine Inch Nails on Austin City Limits (April 5, 2014)

Courtesy of Rolling Stone, we get to see the video performance of Nine Inch Nails that aired on Austin City Limits Saturday night. They recorded 19 songs in their live show, 10 of which made it onto the show. There is also a 15-minute interview with Trent Reznor - a real bonus for fans.

Enjoy!

Watch Nine Inch Nails' 'Austin City Limits' Show

The show also posted a 15-minute interview with Trent Reznor, in which he explains why he has shied away from television concerts

By Kory Grow
April 7, 2014

It may have taken Nine Inch Nails a quarter of a century, but the industrial rock pioneers played the first television-specific concert of their career last week on Austin City Limits. The full, hour-long concert is now streaming here. The band's set list drew tracks from its 1989 debut, Pretty Hate Machine, as well as Year Zero, The Fragile and The Downward Spiral, but it weighed most heavily on the group's most recent album, 2013's Hesitation Marks. In fact, the group played 19 songs at Austin, Texas' 2,750-person-capacity Moody Theater for the taping, 11 of which were from Hesitation Marks, but only 10 songs made it to air. The show also put one outtake, Hesitation Marks' "Satellite," online.

Prior to the taping, Austin City Limits released an impossibly short comment from frontman Trent Reznor about the taping: "We've waited a long time to do anything like this." But now the show has also posted a 15-minute interview with Reznor, viewable below. "I've shied away from really any television, live or otherwise, because I think a lot about the context in where you hear the performance and the experience that the audience goes through," he said. "And we spent a lot of time thinking about that before tour, how we're going to present it, and a lot of emphasis goes into production and the right setting. So you're coming into our place and we're framing the music in an experience that's special. It's an event, it's a thing."

Here is the set list that aired from Nine Inch Nails' Austin City Limits performance:

"All Time Low"
"Sanctified"
"Came Back Haunted"
"Copy of A"
"The Frail"/"The Wretched"
"The Big Come Down"
"In This Twilight"
"While I'm Still Here"
"Hurt"

Related

• Watch Nine Inch Nails Perform 'Sanctified' Live From ACL - Premiere
• 'This Is a Trent Reznor Song' Singer Makes Perfect NIN Spoof Video
• Nine Inch Nails, Soundgarden Embarking on Joint Tour 
• Where Did Nine Inch Nails' 'The Downward Spiral' Rank Among the 100 Best Albums of the Nineties?

The Doors: Live in Denmark & Los Angeles (1968) - Jim Morrison Near His Charismatic Peak

Via Open Culture, the curators of cool on the interwebs.

The Doors Play Live in Denmark & LA in 1968: See Jim Morrison Near His Charismatic Peak

Open Culture | February 21st, 2014


Do they look a bit scruffy, the Doors on live Danish TV in 1968? My image of the Doors is forever colored by Oliver Stone’s The Doors. But the real Jim Morrison had even better hair than his doppelgänger Val Kilmer (“not a case of casting,” quoth Ebert, “but of possession”), even if the above performance is less Lizard King than lounge lizard. John Densmore lays back on the beat, gets out the way of Morrison’s free associative poetry. Guitarist Robbie Krieger riffs intently, looks subdued. Always the one to watch, the recently departed Ray Manzarek plays hypnotic baselines with his left hand while his right dances around melodic blue note phrases. It’s a very cool show, but the lack of an audience is palpable.



Morrison was at his best, and probably also worst, before crowds of admirers. He has no lack of them in another ’68 performance, this time at the Hollywood Bowl. Where the Danish gig is cabaret, this is a shamanistic happening: Morrison wears something like a sleeveless toreador’s jacket and the band plays loud, especially Densmore, who bashes his drums like John Bonham. Jim Morrison seems entranced, and really stoned. Densmore later said he’d just dropped acid: “I could tell once we hit the stage because his movements, his performance, was a little deliberate; a little like he was holding it together. But he was fantastic.”

The Hollywood Bowl is the show to see. It was a magical night. It was a big deal to play the Hollywood Bowl. We were all so excited. We’d had dinner with Mick Jagger just before the show and he was right in the front. For any fan of The Doors — young or old — this is really the way it was; this is the way to see what it was all about.

In neither of these concerts is Morrison quite the unhinged maniac of legend, but things, as they say, had already begun to unravel. Two years later the band would play its last show with Morrison at The Warehouse in December of 1970. Some believe the Doors peaked in 1967 and never topped their debut (a “stoned, immaculate classic” and the dark underbelly of Sgt. Pepper’s sunny psychedelia). I don’t buy that at all. But even if these shows catch them on the start of a decline, it was a long slow burn, and beautiful to watch.

Related Content:

• Doors Keyboardist Ray Manzarek (1939-2013) Tells the Story of the Classic Song, ‘Riders on the Storm’
• “The Lost Paris Tapes” Preserves Jim Morrison’s Final Poetry Recordings from 1971
• A Young, Clean Cut Jim Morrison Appears in a 1962 Florida State University Promo Film

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

Awesome - happy Sunday! This comes courtesy of Open Culture.

Watch Big Time, the Concert Film Capturing Tom Waits on His Best Tour Ever (1988)

 August 30th, 2013

Here at Open Culture, we’ve often featured the many sides of Tom Waits: actor, poetry reader, favored David Letterman guest. More rarely, we’ve posted material dedicated to showcasing him practicing his primary craft, writing songs and singing them. But when a full-fledged Tom Waits concert does surface here, prepare to settle in for an unrelentingly (and entertainingly) askew musical experience. In March, we posted Burma Shave, an hour-long performance from the late seventies in which Waits took on “the persona of a down-and-out barfly with the soul of a Beat poet.” Today, we fast-forward a decade to Big Time, by which point Waits could express the essences of “avant-garde composer Harry Partch, Howlin’ Wolf, Frank Sinatra, Astor Piazzolla, Irish tenor John McCormack, Kurt Weill, Louis Prima, Mexican norteño bands and Vegas lounge singers.” That evocative quote comes from Big Time‘s own press notes, as excerpted by Dangerous Minds, which calls the viewing experience “like entering a sideshow tent in Tom Waits’s brain.”

Watch the 90-minute concert film in its entirety, though, and you may not find it evocative enough. In 1987, Waits had just put out the album Franks Wild Years, which explores the experience of his alter-ego Frank O’Brien, whom Waits called “a combination of Will Rogers and Mark Twain, playing accordion — but without the wisdom they possessed.” The year before, the singer actually wrote and produced a stage play built around the character, and the Franks Wild Years tour through North America and Europe made thorough use of Waits’ theatrical bent in that era. Its final two shows, at San Francisco’s Warfield Theatre and Los Angeles’ Wiltern Theatre, along with footage from gigs in Dublin, Stockholm and Berlin, make up the bulk of Big Time‘s material. As for its sensibility, well, even Waits fans may feel insecure, and happily so, about quite what to expect. (Fans of The Wire, I should note, will find something familiar indeed in this show’s rendition of “Way Down in the Hole.”)

Related Content:

• Tom Waits, Playing the Down-and-Out Barfly, Appears in Classic 1978 TV Performance
• Tom Waits Reads Charles Bukowski
• Tom Waits and David Letterman: An American Television Tradition
• Tom Waits Shows Us How Not to Get a Date on Valentine’s Day

~ Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.

Elliott Smith Jams with Jon Brion in Lost VH1 Pilot (Rolling Stone)

Smith in 1997

Elliott Smith was an icon in the Pacific Northwest when I lived up there. He regularly played local clubs in Seattle and Portland, and places in between. His shows were almost acoustic, just his voice and his guitar. His songs are pretty and melodic, but the lyrics reveal a darker, harsher life, riddled with drugs and depression.

After playing in the rock band Heatmiser for several years, Smith began his solo career in 1994, with releases on the independent record labels, Cavity Search and Kill Rock Stars (KRS). In 1997, he signed a contract with DreamWorks Records, the label for which he recorded two albums. Smith rose to mainstream prominence when his song, "Miss Misery"—included in the soundtrack for the film Good Will Hunting—was nominated for an Oscar in the Best Original Song category in 1998. 

Smith suffered from depression, alcoholism, and drug dependence, and these topics often appear in his lyrics. At age 34, he died in Los Angeles, California, from two stab wounds to the chest. The autopsy evidence was inconclusive as to whether the wounds were self-inflicted. At the time of his death, Smith was working on his sixth studio album, From a Basement on the Hill, which was posthumously released.

This video is great for fans, and maybe even for non-fans. In my opinion, his best work was his earliest solo work, Roman Candle (1994), Elliott Smith (1995), and Either/Or (1997).

Elliott Smith Jams with Jon Brion in Lost VH1 Pilot

Late singer was featured in show directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

JANUARY 18, 2013 10:55 AM

A lost TV pilot featuring Elliott Smith has surfaced online thanks to director Paul Thomas Anderson. In 2000, Anderson helped out on a pilot for The Jon Brion Show, a variety show with guest musicians. Brion unsuccessfully pitched the pilot to VH1, but the clip has surfaced on Anderson's Al Rose Promotions YouTube page.

In the episode, Smith jams with Brion and pianist Brad Mehldau, playing "Everything Means Nothing To Me," "Son of Sam" and another tracks while also including covers like the Kinks' "Waterloo Sunset" and John Lennon's "Jealous Guy." The VHS-era footage crackles and warbles, but Smith's presence shines through the bare-bones setup. Smith died on October 21st, 2003.

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10 Great Performances From 10 Legendary Jazz Artists: Django, Miles, Monk, Coltrane & More

If you are a jazz fan, these videos are a wonderful holiday gift. From Open Culture, of course. The Billie Holiday song, "Strange Fruit," likely the first popular anti-racism song ever, is one of the great performances of all time, and one of the bravest.

10 Great Performances From 10 Legendary Jazz Artists: Django, Miles, Monk, Coltrane & More

December 18th, 2012

1. Billie Holiday Sings ‘Strange Fruit,’ 1959:


Last week we brought you a post titled “Miles Davis and His ‘Second Great Quintet,’ Filmed Live in Europe, 1967,” featuring Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter. The response was enthusiastic, and it reminded us that a great many of you share our love of jazz. It got us thinking: Why not gather the material from our favorite jazz posts and organize it in one place? So today we’re happy to bring you ten great performances from ten legendary artists.

We begin with Billie Holiday (above) singing her painful signature song of racism and murder, “Strange Fruit.” The song was written by teacher and unionist Abel Meeropol, who was horrified when he saw a 1930 photograph of two black men hanging from a tree in Indiana, victims of a lynch mob. Holiday first recorded “Strange Fruit” in 1939 and continued to sing it, despite some resistance, for the rest of her life. The performance above was taped in London for the Granada TV program Chelsea at Nine in February of 1959, just five months before Holiday’s untimely death at the age of 44.

2. Dave Brubeck Performs ‘Take Five,’ 1961:


The legendary pianist Dave Brubeck died earlier this month, just one day short of his 92nd birthday. To remember him on that day we posted the clip above from a 1961 episode of the American public television programJazz Casual, with Brubeck and his quartet performing the classic song “Take Five” from their influential 1959 album, Time Out. The musicians are: Brubeck on piano, Eugene Wright on bass, Moe Morello on drums, and Paul Desmond (who wrote “Take Five”) on alto saxophone. For more on Brubeck, including a delightful clip of the elderly master improvising with a young Russian violinist at the Moscow Conservatory, see our Dec. 5 post,“Remembering Jazz Legend Dave Brubeck with a Very Touching Musical Moment.”

3. Chet Baker Performs ‘Time After Time,’ 1964:


Last December we featured the clip above of Chet Baker playing the Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne standard, “Time After Time,” on Belgian television in 1964. Baker is joined by the Belgian flautist Jacques Pelzer, French pianist Rene Urtreger and an Italian rhythm section of Luigi Trussardi on bass and Franco Manzecchi on drums. Baker sings and plays the flugelhorn. For more of Baker’s music and a poignant look at his troubled life, be sure to see our 2011 post, Let’s Get Lost: Bruce Weber’s Sad Film of Jazz Legend Chet Baker.

4. Duke Ellington on the Côte d’Azur, 1966:


On a beautiful summer day in 1966, two of the 20th century’s great artists–Duke Ellington and Joan Miró–met at a museum in the medieval French village of St. Paul de Vence, high in the hills overlooking the Côte d’Azur. Neither one understood a word the other said, but Miró showed Ellington his sculpture and Ellington played music for Miró. In the scene above, narrated by the noted jazz impressario Norman Granz, Ellington and his trio play a new song that would eventually be named “The Shepherd (Who Watches Over His Flock).” The trio is made up of Ellington on Piano, John Lamb on Bass and Sam Woodyard on drums. To learn more about that day, including recollections from the only surviving member of Ellington’s trio, see our May 10 post, “Duke Ellington Plays for Joan Miró in the South of France, 1966: Bassist John Lamb Looks Back on the Day.”

5. Django Reinhardt Performs ‘J’attendrai Swing,’ 1939:


Django Reinhardt by hexholden
With only two good fretting fingers on his left hand, gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt created one of the most distinctive instrumental styles in 20th century music. The clip above is from the 1939 short film Jazz “Hot”, which features Reinhardt, along with violinist Stéphan Grappelli and the Quintette du Hot Club de France, perfoming “J’attendrai Swing.” (“J’attendrai” means “I will wait.”) To learn about Reinhardt and the fire that cost him the use of most of his left hand, be sure to see our Aug. 10 post, “Django Reinhardt and the Inspiring Story Behind His Guitar Technique.”

6. John Coltrane Plays Material From A Love Supreme, 1965:


In December of 1964 the John Coltrane Quartet recorded its masterpiece,A Love Supreme, in one session. A highly original blending of hard bop and free jazz with spiritual overtones, the album is recognized as a landmark in jazz history. The Smithsonian Institution declared it a national treasure. But Coltrane reportedly played the material only once in public, at a 1965 concert in Antibes, France. You can see a portion of that performance above, as Coltrane and his quartet play ”Part 1: Acknowledgement” from the four-part composition. The quartet is composed of Coltrane on tenor saxophone, McCoy Tyner on Piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass and Elvin Jones on drums. To watch and listen as the band plays “Part 2: Resolution,” see our 2011 post, John Coltrane Plays Only Live Performance of A Love Supreme.

7. Miles Davis on The Robert Herridge Theater, 1959:


Most of the great performances on this page were preserved by government-funded broadcasting companies, particularly in Europe. Left to its own devices, the “invisible hand” of the television marketplace was fairly content to ignore jazz and allow its great artists to pass unnoticed and unrecorded. A notable exception to this trend was made by the CBS producer Robert Herridge, who had the vision and foresight to organize an episode of The Robert Herridge Theater–a program normally devoted to the storytelling arts–around the music of Miles Davis. In an extraordinary 26-minute broadcast, shown above in its entirety, Davis performs with members of his “first great quintet” (John Coltrane on tenor and alto saxophone, Wynton Kelly on piano, Paul Chambers on bass and Jimmy Cobb on drums) and with the Gil Evans Orchestra. (The sixth member of the smaller combo, alto saxophonist Julian “Cannonball” Adderly, can be seen briefly but doesn’t play due to a splitting migraine headache.) The broadcast took place between recording sessions for Davis’s landmark album, Kind of Blue. The set list is: “So What,” “The Duke,” “Blues for Pablo,” “New Rhumba” and a reprise of “So What.” For more on Davis, see our Oct. 25 post, “The Miles Davis Story: the Definitive Film Biography of a Jazz Legend.”

8. Thelonious Monk in Copenhagen, 1966:


Here’s a great half-hour set by Thelonious Monk and his quartet, recorded by Danish television on April 17, 1966. The lineup includes Monk on piano, Charlie Rouse on tenor saxophone, Larry Gales on Bass and Ben Riley on Drums. They play three songs–”Lulu’s Back in Town,” “Don’t Blame Me” and “Epistrophy”–with Monk giving the others plenty of room to solo as he gets up from the piano to do his stiff, idiosyncratic dance. For more on Monk, see our 2011 post on the extraordinary documentary film,Thelonious Monk: Straight No Chaser.

9. Bill Evans on the Jazz 625 show, 1965:


In March of 1965 the Bill Evans Trio visited the BBC studios in London to play a pair of sets on Jazz 625, hosted by British trumpeter Humphrey Lyttelton. The two 35-minute programs are shown above, back-to-back. The trio features Evans on piano, Chuck Israels on bass and Larry Bunker on drums. To read the set list for both shows, see our May 31 post, “The Bill Evans Trio in London, 1965: Two Sets by the Legendary Combo.” And for a fascinating introduction to the great jazz pianist’s philosophy of music, don’t miss our April 5 post, “The Universal Mind of Bill Evans: Advice on Learning to Play Jazz and the Creative Process.”

10. Charles Mingus in Belgium, 1964:


In April of 1964 the great bassist and composer Charles Mingus and his experimental combo, The Jazz Workshop, embarked on a three-week tour of Europe that is remembered as one of the high-water marks in Mingus’s career. The performance above was recorded by Belgian television on Sunday, April 19, 1964 at the Palais des Congrés in Liège, Belgium. Mingus and the band play three songs: “So Long Eric,” “Peggy’s Blue Skylight” and “Meditations on Integration.” The group features Mingus on bass, Dannie Richmond on drums, Jaki Byard on piano, Clifford Jordan on tenor saxophone and Eric Dolphy on alto saxophone, flute and bass clarinet. A sixth member, trumpeter Johnny Coles, was forced to drop out of the band after he collapsed onstage two nights earlier. For more of Mingus’s music and a look at his troubled life, see our Aug. 2 post, “Charles Mingus and His Eviction From his New York City Loft, Captured in Moving 1968 Film.”

Miles Davis and His ‘Second Great Quintet,’ Filmed Live in Europe, 1967

For lovers of jazz, these two live clips of Miles Davis and his quintet, featuring Davis on trumpet, Wayne Shorter on saxophone, Herbie Hancock on piano, Ron Carter on bass and Tony Williams on drums.


Miles Davis and His ‘Second Great Quintet,’ Filmed Live in Europe, 1967
December 12th, 2012

In the mid 1960s Miles Davis responded to the form-breaking influence of free jazz by surrounding himself with a group of brilliant young musicians and encouraging them to push him in new directions.

The group was Davis’s last with all acoustic instruments, and came to be known as his “second great quintet.” It featured Davis on trumpet, Wayne Shorter on saxophone, Herbie Hancock on piano, Ron Carter on bass and Tony Williams on drums. Between 1964 and 1968 the quintet recorded a string of innovative albums, including E.S.P., Sorcerer and the transitional Miles in the Sky, in which Hancock introduces the electric Fender Rhodes piano.

For Guardian jazz critic John Fordham, the second great quintet was Davis’s best group ever. “Their solos were fresh and original, and their individual styles fused with a spontaneous fluency that was simply astonishing,” writes Fordham in a 2010 article. “The quintet’s method came to be dubbed ‘time, no changes’ because of their emphasis on strong rhythmic grooves without the dictatorial patterns of song-form chords. At times they veered close to free-improvisation, but the pieces were as thrilling and hypnotically sensuous as anything the band’s open-minded leader had recorded before.”

You can hear for yourself in these two concerts, shown back-to-back, recorded for television during the quintet’s 1967 tour of Europe. The first concert was recorded on October 31, 1967 at the Konserthuset in Stockholm, Sweden. Here’s the set list:

Agitation (Miles Davis)
Footprints (Wayne Shorter)
‘Round Midnight (Thelonius Monk)
Gingerbread Boy (Jimmy Heath)
Theme (Miles Davis)

The next concert was recorded one week later, on November 7, 1967, at the Stadhalle in Karlsruhe, Germany:

Agitation (Miles Davis)
Footprints (Wayne Shorter)
I Fall in Love Too Easily (Sammy Cahn/Jule Styne)
Walkin’ (Richard Carpenter)
Gingerbread Boy (Jimmy Heath)
Theme (Miles Davis)

Related content:

• The Miles Davis Story, the Definitive Film Biography of a Jazz Legend
• ‘The Sound of Miles Davis’: Classic 1959 Performance with John Coltrane
• Mashup Duet: Miles Davis Improvising on LCD Soundsystem

Here is a little classic jazz from Charles Mingus for a cool, rainy, autumn morning (at least here in Tucson). Mingus was one of the legends, and this is a cool 30+ minutes of his brilliance.

Classic Charles Mingus Performance on Belgian Television, 1964

November 6th, 2012

In early 1964 Charles Mingus put together one of the great combos in jazz history. The sextet was composed of Mingus on bass, Dannie Richmond on drums, Jaki Byard on piano, Johnny Coles on trumpet, Clifford Jordan on tenor saxophone and the extraordinary multi-instrumentalist Eric Dolphy on alto saxophone, flute and bass clarinet. Mingus called his experimental group The Jazz Workshop.

In April of that year Mingus and his band embarked on a three-week tour of Europe, much of which is recorded on film and audiotape. The tour is remembered as one of the high-water marks in Mingus’s career. As Rob Bowman writes in the liner notes to the Jazz Icons DVD Charles Mingus Live in ’64:

The tour effectively introduced two new compositions, “Meditations On Integration” and “So Long Eric”, while the band walked a fine line between Mingus’s usual amalgam of bop, swing and New Orleans jazz and the free-jazz leanings of the cataclysmic Dolphy. The result, of course, was something that could only be called Mingus Music–a galvanizing, high-energy sonic stew that, while the product of the kinetic interplay of six musicians, could only have been conjured up with Mingus as the master of ceremonies.

The performance above is from Charles Mingus Live in ’64. It was recorded by Belgian television on Sunday, April 19, 1964 at the Palais des Congrés in Liège, Belgium. The band had unexpectedly been reduced to a quintet two nights earlier, when Coles collapsed onstage in Paris and was rushed to the hospital with what was later diagnosed as an ulcer. In the Belgian TV broadcast, pianist Byard makes up for the missing trumpet parts as the band plays three Mingus compositions:

1. So Long Eric
2. Peggy’s Blue Skylight
3. Meditations on Integration

“So Long Eric” was originally called “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat,” but Mingus renamed the tune in honor of Dolphy, who had announced before the band left America that he would remain in Europe when the tour was over. Sadly, Dolphy fell into a diabetic coma in Germany and died just two months after finishing the tour. Mingus would later call the song “Praying With Eric.”

Related content:

• Charles Mingus and His Eviction From His New York City Loft, Captured in Moving 1968 Film
• How to Potty Train Your Cat: A Handy Manual by Charles Mingus