Flip over the sleeve of a 1963 jazz record and instead of personnel lists and critical praise you find a clinical psychological analysis co-written by the composer's own psychotherapist, Edmund Pollock. That is how Charles Mingus packaged The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, and this episode uses the making of that album as a window into his genius, his psychological complexity, and his refusal to separate his mind from his art. On Sunday, January 20, 1963, Mingus walked into a New York studio with an 11-piece band and producer Bob Thiele for the Impulse label to record not a set of tunes but a single continuous composition conceived partly as a ballet, which he described as ethnic folk dance music.

The episode digs into the six-week Village Vanguard residency where Mingus absorbed arranger Bob Hammer's rehearsal band and workshopped the pi ...