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Transcription: Charles Mingus "Bird Calls"

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Last year, I staged a house concert of Charles Mingus’ “Mingus Ah Um” along with fellow Houston jazz artists Andrew Lienhard, Thomas Helton, Joe Slezak, Doug Wright and Ernesto Vega. As the title implies, we played the entirety of Mingus’ classic 1959 album in order, track by track. This was made all the more easier with the essential resource Charles Mingus - More Than a Fake Book. It had all the essential information I needed in order to transcribe and arrange from the album, except for “Bird Calls”, which is a difficult tune to play and transcribe!

Even though I’ve been very, very familiar with this entire album for years, I began transcribing “Bird Calls” by listening to the album take several times, slowing it down to listen for the closest intricacies I could get, and comparing with other more recent versions (like the Mingus Big Band). It’s very hard to adapt Mingus’ intended writing by ear! Mingus was such a master at blending his composed music with improvisations (like Ellington before him), that it was hard to delineate what was pre-determined by Mingus, what was pre-determined by his musicians, and what was improvised on the spot. I think I landed fairly close to the proper notation and “bones” of the composition here.

** While many have attributed the song’s title to Charlie Parker (“Bird”), it’s actually a reference to the flighty and “bird call”-esque triplet rhythms played in the introduction.

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