You wonder why this Mingus album was so frequently overlooked among his fertile 1957 output – The Clown, Tijuana Moods and East Coasting are all more lauded. Was it the lengthy title, or its even longer subtitle? Or maybe because the nearly 12-minute opener ‘Scenes In The City’, the only piece with narrator Stewart (and other “off-stage” voices including Richmond’s), is more advanced than most other jazz-and-poetry of the period.

It’s certainly amazing for the episodic nature of its music and especially the tempo changes dictated from the bass (and it’s worth noting that a slightly less successful version was part of the Tijuana Moods sessions but only emerged in 2002). The other long ‘dramatic’ item, ‘New York Sketchbook’, has similar qualities but without the words, while two shorter tracks from the original album (‘Duke’s Choice’ and ‘Nouroog’, the latter with Hardman replacing the remarkable Shaw) contain the material that was compressed into ‘Open Letter To Duke’ on Mingus Ah Um.

Clearly, the album is overdue for reassessment, but this expanded edition also includes lengthy bonus versions of Gillespie’s ‘Woody’n You’ and Parker’s ‘Billie’s Bounce’ which, like the original album track ‘Slippers’ (here with an additional take), are just by a quintet. But what a quintet, with Parlan’s comping and Knepper’s amazing fluency – Hadi was perhaps not as individual as Booker Ervin (see p47) but what a player he was, exclusively on tenor here rather than alto. These bonuses have appeared on CD (Fresh Sound) but the remaining item is a 3’20” edit of ‘Scenes In The City’, originally coupled with a ‘single edit’ of East Coasting’s title-track, and which contains the narrative build-up of the story and the closing let-down. The fact that the total playing-time of the 2-LP set is only 60 minutes should be no deterrent, and even a non-hifi-buff such as this writer can hear the remastered sound (by Kevin Gray) is superior to any previous issues of this material.