condition (records/cover): NM / EX

Gatefold sleeve.

1950 and 1951, and one of the most quietly radical small groups of its era. Red Norvo put together a trio with no drums at all: vibraphone, Tal Farlow's guitar and a very young Charles Mingus on bass, playing at breakneck tempos with a transparency and precision that nothing else in jazz sounded like. The absence of a drummer forces all three to carry the time, and the result is a chamber-music clarity applied to bop material. Mingus was in his twenties and already had the enormous sound and the harmonic imagination; Farlow was rewriting what a guitar could do at speed.

Savoy double LP. Essential listening, and the best possible argument that Mingus could have had an entirely different career.