Mingus At Antibes

Antibes Jazz Festival, July 1960. Mingus’s working sextet: Eric Dolphy on alto and bass clarinet, Booker Ervin on tenor, Ted Curson on trumpet, Dannie Richmond on drums. Bud Powell sits in for one number — “I’ll Remember April” — playing with the band as a guest on the Côte d’Azur. Powell was living in self-exile in Paris by then, mentally fragile, three years from death. Mingus reportedly cried after the set.

The connection between this record and Out to Lunch! is direct: Dolphy in Mingus’s band here, Dolphy leading his own date two years later with largely the same generational cohort of Blue Note musicians. Bill Evans’s bassist Scott LaFaro also played with Mingus on other occasions, which pulls Sunday at the Village Vanguard into the same web. The jazz records here resolve, on close inspection, into a single interconnected moment captured from multiple angles.