New York City, September 17, 1962. Three titans walk into Sound Makers Studios on 57th Street without rehearsing a single note, and before the day is over one of them packs up his bass in a rage and heads for the elevator. The music they captured anyway became Money Jungle, the 1963 post bop album that put a 63-year-old Duke Ellington in a trio with two 40-something firebrands, bassist Charles Mingus and drummer Max Roach. This episode asks how three enormous egos produced brilliance when they could barely stand to be in the same room.

We trace the origins with producer Alan Douglas at United Artists, the generational and stylistic gap between the three men, the fact that Ellington had no recording contract while Mingus was the one signed to the label, and the baggage from 1953 when Mingus lasted four days in Ellington's orchestra before a  ...