Compared to the stifling effect of Sony's blanket coverage of Dave Brubeck, their holdings of Mingus are quite modest. Now also owning the 1957 RCA album Tijuana Moods, they include Mingus Ah Um and Mingus Dynasty (both 1959), Let My Children Hear Music and Mingus And Friends In Concert (1971-72) and the posthumous Gunther Schuller realisation of Epitaph. Given the latter two were double albums, and that the 1957 and 1959 albums threw up a lot of alternate takes, this amounts to 10 well-filled CDs. Partial as the picture may be, omitting masterpieces from Impulse and Atlantic, this adds up to an amazing programme of Mingus music, with the 1950s albums by small or medium-sized groups and the rest all big-band based. For readers of Jazzwise, it may be unnecessary to rehearse once more the virtues of Ah Um and Dynasty, which showed the composer-bandleader capitalising on his early gains in advancing the use of simultaneous improvisation and modal approaches. But Tijuana Moods is perhaps insufficiently recognised as a one-off masterpiece, given that it single-handedly pointed the way towards the idea of ‘world-jazz’, and the alternate takes underline how Mingus and his musicians pulled it together – despite Sue Mingus's booklet essay criticising the idea of releasing such rejected material at all. Let My Children still sounds marvellous and, whereas In Concert is a bit of a mess overall, its ‘Little Royal Suite’ probably deserves some re-evaluation. As indeed does the career résumé that is Epitaph.

The versions used correspond to the most recent separate CD reissues but, instead of the new notes that accompanied them, some previously unpublished archive photos suffice. The one innovation is that the 1959 Alternate Takes CD is now expanded with two isolated Mingus tracks that don't belong elsewhere, the major one being the 12-minute ‘Revelations’ (last available on Birth Of The Third Stream). And then there's Mingus's duet with Brubeck, improvised for and partially seen in the movie All Night Long.