Girl of My Dreams

John Handy and Shafi Hadi (alto sax), Booker Ervin (tenor sax), Willie Dennis (trombone), Horace Parlan (piano), Charles Mingus (bass) and Dannie Richmond (drums). From the album Mingus Ah Um (1959).

Jimmy Knepper was an American jazz trombonist. From the late 1940s to the early 1950s he worked successively with the big bands of Freddie Slak, Roy Porter, Charlie Spivak, Charlie Barnet, Woody Herman and Claude Thornhill. Knepper gained a reputation for his versatile and creative playing with several Charles Mingus’s bands between 1957 and 1962.

He also worked with Stan Kenton, Herbie Mann, Gil Evans, Benny Goodman (with whom he toured the Soviet Union in 1962) and the big band of Thad Jones and Mel Lewis. In the 1970s he played with Lee Konitz’s nonet and the Mingus Dynasty, an ensemble he led after the death of the previous leader, drummer Dannie Richmond, and with whom he toured Europe and the Middle East in the 1980s and 1990s. He died in 2003 of complications related to Parkinson’s disease at 76 years of age.

The main melody is one that lifts the mood, but on the bridge the group reduces the tempo by half in AABA structure. Returning the composition to its medium-fast speed, Ervin begins by showing off fast and intricate phrases, but then slows down. Parlan follows him more calmly with a very well-proportioned melodic line. Then the band plays the bridge again and re-exposes the main melody ending abruptly.