Charles Mingus: All the Things You Could Be By Now If Sigmund Freud's Wife Was Your Mother

"All of us who stay sane," reflected Charles Mingus after seeking treatment at Bellevue and being locked up for his naïveté, "stay inside our own cages all the time." Mingus spent years in analysis and even had his psychotherapist write liner notes for The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady discussing client C.M.'s "recurrent themes of loneliness, separateness and tearful depression." Here, Mingus's 1960 quartet with the brilliant Ted Curson and ever-astonishing Eric Dolphy deconstructs a series of Chinese boxes devised by the leader to challenge musicians and listeners alike. Mingus could no more be caged than King Kong.