Duke Ellington’s ‘Money Jungle’ at 60: Aging Like Fine Wine

Sixty years ago, Duke Ellington released one of his most controversial albums, “Money Jungle,” a once-in-a-lifetime collaboration with two much younger masters of modern jazz, bassist Charles Mingus and drummer Max Roach. A lifetime later, it’s impossible to get a consensus on the music, but nonetheless it has become one of the most widely heard and well-regarded projects of the Maestro’s long career.There was a moment in September 1962 when Ellington was called upon to put his feelings about young and allegedly more “modern” musicians to the test. It was when, within less than 10 days, he recorded back to back two of the most unusual but ultimately most highly regarded albums of his career, “Money Jungle” and “Duke Ellington and John Coltrane.” “Money Jungle” has grown over the years, both in the general esteem of listeners and in the size of the work itself — the original album issued in 1963 was a mere seven tracks. There have been three subsequent reissues on LP and CD, each at least slightly longer, adding additional material; the most recent issue, from 2002, includes 15 tracks and almost 70 minutes’ worth of music.There are conflicting ideas about the backstory of “Money Jungle”: Some say it was Ellington’s idea, some say it was brought to him by the producer Alan Douglas, who would go on to become both famous and infamous for his work with Jimi Hendrix. As a young man, Douglas had been kind of a “go-ger” for Duke during certain gigs in Douglas’s native Boston, and in 1962 he was producing jazz for the United Artists label. Douglas does seem to be the one who thought to use Charles Mingus, who had also just signed with UA Records for the purpose of taping the bassist-composer-bandleader’s epic Town Hall concert that was to come about a month later, and Mingus apparently suggested that they bring in Max Roach.A Mingus biographer, Krin Gabbard, in his excellent “Better Git It in Your Soul,” tells the story of how Ellington initially presented himself to his two young collaborators with great humility. First, he tells them, “Think of me as the poor man’s Bud Powell.” Then, he informs them, apparently sincerely, that he doesn’t intend to dominate the project, and that he is open to playing compositions other than his own. In the end, that’s not the way it worked out: It’s an Ellington project through and through, and all the tunes are his.Although both Mingus and Roach, who were by then well-established bandleaders in their own right, deferred to Ellington’s leadership, there was still a degree of contentiousness between the two younger men. Famously, Mingus at one point got furious — possibly at Roach, possibly at how the session was going — and stormed out of the studio. Duke had to be the bandleader again, after telling him how wonderfully he’d been playing and generally calming him down. Scholar Tom Cunniffe is among those who have suggested that when you listen to the recording in sequence, you can hear the tension building.By that standard, the first tune recorded, “Very Special,” is one of the mildest, and despite its title, a fairly standard Ellington blues of the sort that he might have played in a more customary trio project with the band’s regular rhythm section, Aaron Bell and Sam Woodyard.Indeed, the album is full of blues. Recorded later in the session, “Switch Blade” is a more angular blues with a prominent part for Mingus — and no, Ellington wasn’t merely pacifying the bassist; he really is playing spectacularly well here. “A Little Max (Parfait)” gives equal time to Roach, and features the drummer in a series of stop-time breaks similar to what Ellington wrote for himself in “Dancers in Love.” Two more such blues tunes, “Backward Country Boy Blues” and “REM Blues,” were only added in the later editions — Ellington and Douglas probably felt that they had enough such numbers in the original release.The original album opened with “Money Jungle,” which must have knocked listeners for a collective loop in 1963. It’s not necessarily that it sounds like Cecil Taylor or some other state-of-the-avant-garde pianist of the early ’60s; Duke never sounds anything like other than himself, but it is a rougher, more aggressive, dangerous Duke than we’ve ever heard anywhere else. Mingus and Roach support him indirectly: They’re not playing in the customary supporting roles or comping, odd as it sounds; they’re supporting him by antagonizing him and even irritating him. At first it sounds like a chaotic free-for-all, but it gradually makes more and more sonic sense as it progresses.Ellington obviously didn’t want to offer longtime fans a program of all-new music, and so there are three of his songbook standards, “Solitude,” “Warm Valley,” and “Caravan.” Still, the album’s acknowledged masterpiece is “Fleurette Africaine [Little African Flower],” the second track on the album and the third to be recorded. Even the title is arresting; Duke, a self-described “race” man, including many allusions to Africa in his music titles, but he was also enough of a self-parodying sophisticate to employ a lot of parlor French. Here, he does both. Douglas had vaguely hoped to reunite this trio for a second session, and Mingus himself wanted to do a date of piano-bass duets with Ellington in honor of Duke’s pioneering duos with bass innovator Jimmy Blanton. Neither happened. In fact, no one made much of a fuss about “Money Jungle” in 1963; Miles Davis himself pooh-poohed it: “Mingus is a hell of a bass player, and Max is a hell of a drummer. But Duke can’t play with them, and they can’t play with Duke.” While Mingus and Ellington later became two of the most conspicuous autobiographers in jazz, neither mentioned it in their memoirs. Yet the album grew in everyone’s estimation over the decades; when I conducted a critics’ poll for the Village Voice in 1985, more named “Money Jungle” and the Coltrane album than any “standard” Ellington project. Ten years ago, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary, drummer Terri Lynn Carrington released a tribute project, “Money Jungle: Provocative In Blue,” which has its moments; the flutes are groovy on “Fleurette” but Clark Terry’s mumbles-ing seems unnecessary. In general, the 2013 album can’t lay a glove on the original – in fact, its purpose may have been merely to make you love the 1963 album all the more. “Money Jungle” is that rare work of art, imperfect yes, but the kind of art that you love not just in spite of its flaws but, to a large part, because of them.

Duke Ellington’s ‘Money Jungle’ at 60: Aging Like Fine Wine

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