"Goodbye Pork Pie Hat", as I mentioned yesterday, was Charles Mingus' musical elegy to the great Lester Young. Its brilliance comes from its combination of the familiar and the unexpected (Ezra Pound's formula for art), because it is a twelve-bar blues that contains extremely unusual chord changes. This prevents improvisers from playing stock phrases (i.e. their vocabulary) in a rote manner - in other words, it forces them to play like Lester Young (i.e. right). Suggested listening: Mingus Ah Um (1959), Joni Mitchell's Mingus (1979), anything that features Lester Young.

Here are some of the subjects that I'll be writing about in the days ahead: one of Stevie Wonder's masterpieces from the seventies, one of Little Feat's brilliant albums, The Band, Mark Murphy and more.