Guilbeault, Normand - Hommage A Mingus - Live At Upstairs 2008
SKU
AM185
“Tears came to my eyes when I started reading Normand Guilbeault’s transcriptions of tunes like What Love and The Black Saint & The Sinner Lady. I guess a pilgrim reaching Mecca for the first time must be experiencing similar feelings, or an art lover who finally gets to see a long-time favorite painting “in the flesh.” Mingus’s music is controversial, politically engaged, generous, warm, and passionate. It is not for the lukewarm and the undecisive. There is something simultaneously provocative, sexual, and mystical about it. It draws a wide landscape of America, an epic fresca that runs deep into the roots of jazz music. Very few American composers have successfully depicted their continent this perfectly, except maybe Duke Ellington and Charles Ives. You cannot enter Mingus country like a traveller on an organized trip, or a visitor on a museum tour — you have to throw yourself into it, body and soul. It’s a huge territory with several hundred compositions. I have always listened to Mingus’s music, but I had never given serious thought to the idea of really exploring it as a performer. It seemed to me that the music was too viscerally tied to Mingus himself, leaving little room for interpretation. In other winds, for a long time I though you couldn’t actually “play” Mingus. The Normand Guilbeault Ensemble has been proving me wrong for 14 years now.” —Jean Derome, January 2009
- LabelAmbiances Magnetique