Charles Mingus - Mingus Ah Um

Mastered from the Original Master Tapes with Mobile Fidelity's One-Step Process

Lavish Packaging Includes Opulent Box, Foil-Stamped Jackets, and SuperVinyl LPs: Deluxe Audiophile Pressing Strictly Limited to 6,000 Numbered Copies (Limit Two Per Customer)

Pressed at RTI on MoFi SuperVinyl

Deluxe Collector’s Set Includes Opulent Box and Foil-Stamped Jackets 

Blues- and Gospel-Rooted Jazz Brilliance Sparks with Diversity, Personality, and Freedom 

“Better Git It in Your Soul” not only serves as the name of the inviting opening track of Mingus Ah Um. It epitomizes the spirit, urgency, freedom, and feel-it-in-your-bones passion of an album that is cited on practically every “greatest” list assembled and enjoys the rare distinction of wearing a prestigious crown in the Penguin Guide to Jazz and membership in the Grammy Hall of Fame. The vaunted 1959 record stands as an exuberant tribute to the idea (and blueprint-caliber execution) of fully realized musical frameworks serving as launching pads for expressive interactions, responses, exchanges, and improvisations. At the core, personality, character, invention, and color remain paramount.

Strictly limited to 6,000 numbered copies and pressed on MoFi SuperVinyl, Mobile Fidelity’s ultra-hi-fi UltraDisc One-Step collector’s edition box set makes Mingus Ah Um pop with unprecedented vibrancy, command, energy, and scale. The bassist’s church-music roots spring to life in the form of blues themes, moaned vocals, spiritual motifs, and preacher-inspired riffs that register with hyperrealistic dimensionality and natural intimacy. Experienced as a seamless whole, the band enters your listening room, its intertwined assembly of notes, phrases, pauses, shapes, and solos yielding something more than music. What you hear is the formation of aura and atmosphere traditionally only associated with live concerts. As such, the collective’s technical acumen lingers not only in the mind, but invigorates the senses.

More About Mobile Fidelity UltraDisc One-Step and Why It Is Superior
Instead of utilizing the industry-standard three-step lacquer process, Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab's new UltraDisc One-Step (UD1S) uses only one step, bypassing two processes of generational loss. While three-step processing is designed for optimum yield and efficiency, UD1S is created for the ultimate in sound quality. Just as Mobile Fidelity pioneered the UHQR (Ultra High-Quality Record) with JVC in the 1980s, UD1S again represents another state-of-the-art advance in the record-manufacturing process. MFSL engineers begin with the original master tapes and meticulously cut a set of lacquers. These lacquers are used to create a very fragile, pristine UD1S stamper called a "convert." Delicate "converts" are then formed into the actual record stampers, producing a final product that literally and figuratively brings you closer to the music. By skipping the additional steps of pulling another positive and an additional negative, as done in the three-step process used in standard pressings, UD1S produces a final LP with the lowest noise floor possible today. The removal of the additional two steps of generational loss in the plating process reveals tremendous amounts of extra musical detail and dynamics, which are otherwise lost due to the standard copying process. The exclusive nature of these very limited pressings guarantees that every UD1S pressing serves as an immaculate replica of the lacquer sourced directly from the original master tape. Every conceivable aspect of vinyl production is optimized to produce the most perfect record album available today.

Mobile Fidelity SuperVinyl: The World’s Quietest Surfaces and Cleanest Grooves
Mobile Fidelity SuperVinyl is a new proprietary compound developed by NEOTECH and RTI to address two specific areas of improvement: noise floor reduction and enhanced groove definition. The vinyl composition features a new carbonless dye (hold the disc up to the light and see) and produces the world’s quietest surfaces. This high-definition formula also allows for the creation of cleaner grooves that are indistinguishable from the original lacquer. Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab feels SuperVinyl provides the closest approximation of what we hear in the mastering lab.

TRACK LISTING:

Side One:
1. Better Git It in Your Soul
2. Goodbye Pork Pie Hat
Side Two:
1. Boogie Stop Shuffle
2. Self-Portrait in Three Colors
3. Open Letter to Duke
Side Three:
1. Bird Calls
2. Fables of Faubus
Side Four:
1. Pussy Cat Dues
2. Jelly Roll