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What’s up Sorry State readers? I hope everyone has had a nice week. As I’m sure most of you are aware, this past Saturday was Record Store Day. Definitely our busiest day of the year, but luckily everything went very smoothly and most everyone seemed to get what they were looking for. I’m glad we’re not one of these record stores that makes a huge deal of RSD and opens up at like 6 AM or something, but to each their own. I hope if you participated this year, you got all the titles you were looking for cause there were definitely some good ones. Of course I had to get in on the fun too. I picked up a copy of Mingus At Monterey, a live album of Charles Mingus’ 1964 performance at the Monterey Jazz Festival. I’m always a sucker for live albums, and RSD always seems to deliver the goods on that front. What really hooked me on this was reading the notes on the back of the cover written by Mr. Mingus himself on the performance. It’s really awesome to read about it from his perspective and what was going through his head during the whole performance. My favorite part is when he talks about what was happening during the song “A Train.” He felt heart palpitations and thought his own death was imminent and looked up to the sky and said “Well, here I come, baby. Lord, I guess this is it” and that energy translated into his playing. Obviously, he didn’t drop dead during this performance, but I can only imagine how wild that must’ve felt. This record also sounds amazing. You can really hear that bass thumping throughout the whole thing. It’s hard for me to say what my favorite song is on here cause it seems silly to reduce the performance to individual songs rather than just view the performance as a whole. That probably sounds dumb and snobby and fake sophisticated lol, but if I wanna listen to this, I wanna listen to the whole thing, not just a certain song or part. I guess you could say that really about any album, but I guess I especially feel that way about live jazz records. Maybe what I’m really trying to say is I love all of it. If you come across this one and you didn’t already snag one this past weekend, I’d definitely recommend you snag it. Throw it on and just pop a squat in front of your record player, close your eyes and imagine yourself in that crowd in Monterey in 1964.