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 piece in front of paying audiences, the 39-minute, 25-second final product divided into six movements with titles like Solo Dancer and Stop, Look, and Sing Songs of Revolutions, and the deliberate casting of Don Butterfield’s contrabass trombone, Jay Berliner’s classical guitar, Dannie Richmond’s drums, and pianist Jaki Byard, the musical time traveler Mingus trusted through the 1964 concerts at Town Hall, Monterey, and across Europe. It closes with the album’s standing today, from Richard Cook and Brian Morton’s rare crown rating to its place among the 1001 albums to hear before you die.

• Why listening to the album is like binge-watching a mini-series rather than reading a collection of short stories
• Solitary genius or master collaborator: what Bob Hammer’s orchestration says about how Mingus worked
• How the civil rights turbulence of 1963 was baked into the subtitles and structure of the ballet
• The floor-shaking role of the contrabass trombone in the final Songs of Revolutions medley
• The misprinted track times on the original sleeve and other details for vinyl collectors