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 fight with trombonist Juan Tizol. We look at Ellington’s bait-and-switch, promising an egalitarian session and then arriving early with all the music written, directing the band with imagery about serpents representing greedy music industry agents rather than notation. We compare the conflicting accounts of why Mingus walked out, from Ellington’s version involving a Billboard Christmas ad to Roach’s claim that Mingus could not stand Ellington’s stride left hand. Then we listen to the results: the dissonant title track, the meditative Fleurette Africaine, the trio’s version of Caravan, the flawed 1963 stereo mix and the 2002 Ron McMaster remaster, the five-star Downbeat review, and Miles Davis’s harsh verdict in a 1964 blind listening test.

• How the three-track tape format raised the stakes of a one-take session with unseen music
• Why Mingus and Roach were close partners who had founded Debut Records together
• The four competing explanations for Mingus walking out mid-session
• Why the original stereo mix sounded wooly and how the remaster fixed it
• How Money Jungle became a blueprint for combative small-group freedom cited by Jeff Tain Watts, Lafayette Gilchrist and the Bad Plus