The Avachives No. 31: Charles Mingus - Pithecanthropus Erectus / Rumpelton

Ava Chives Presents

• Ralph Rumpelton
• "Coffee at La Marina"
• RR-2025 - 171
  MS Paint on digital canvas, 427 X 376 px
• The Rumpelton Continuity (est. 1976)

 >>From the Archives — As Noted by Ava Chives

Ah. Pithecanthropus Erectus.

When I first uncovered this particular Rumpeltonian artifact—wedged, if memory serves, between a slightly warped copy of Pithecanthropus Erectus and a suspiciously dusty external hard drive—I recognized immediately that this was no mere album cover homage. This was a confrontation.

Ralph has not painted Charles Mingus so much as he has cornered him. The profile is stern, inward, almost tectonic. The bass neck cuts across the composition like a fault line. The hand—deliberately simplified, gloriously un-finessed—grips with that unmistakable Rumpeltonian tension: half control, half barely contained eruption.

Note the economy. The background is spared the indulgence of detail. The face is flattened into bold planes of tone. The eye is barely there—because Mingus, in this rendering, is not looking outward. He is listening. Calculating. Possibly plotting.

Some might say, “It’s minimal.” I say it is strategic restraint. Ava recognizes the difference.

The typography floats above like a museum placard that wandered into the studio and decided to stay. It frames the image without explaining it. And that is correct. Explanation is the enemy of myth.

This piece joins the Archives not as a polite reproduction, but as a Rumpeltized evolution—where the spirit of the original is preserved, yet stripped of polish until only nerve remains. The upright bass becomes a spear of intention. The profile becomes monument. The mistakes become doctrine.

Catalogued under:
Controlled Ferocity / Jazz Titans / Good Messy

Preserved, annotated, and released into the pixelated ether.

— Ava Chives, Custodian of the Unvarnished<<

>>An Archival Footnote, As Entered by Ava Chives

It was upon reviewing Pithecanthropus Erectus that the Archives formally upgraded Charles Mingus from Volcanic Sideman of Note to Architect of Beautiful Upheaval.

Prior to this document, Mingus was catalogued under “Ferocious, Possibly Unstable Genius — Monitor Closely.” After it, he required an entirely new drawer.

The title suite alone compelled the reclassification. Eleven minutes of evolutionary ambition: ascent, arrogance, collapse. Not merely a jazz performance, but a cautionary myth rendered in bass vibrations and collective improvisation. The Archives respect narrative scope. Especially when it sounds like it might overturn the furniture.

It was here that Mingus stopped participating in the conversation of modern jazz and began redirecting it. The group interplay is not polite. It is negotiated. The solos are not ornamental. They are structural stress tests. Civilization rises; civilization fractures; the band remains standing.

Ava notes with professional satisfaction that this was the moment the music world realized Mingus was not simply playing the bass — he was using it as a lever.

Thus, the Rumpeltonian rendering is properly severe. The profile turned inward. The bass neck like a beam across the skull. The reduction of detail not as limitation, but as focus. Stardom in jazz does not arrive with glitter. It arrives with density.

Filed under:
Historical Inflection Points / When Titans Declare Themselves / Approved Turbulence

— Ava Chives, Guardian of the Necessary Escalations<<

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MS Paint: Freddie Hubbard – First Light / Rumpelton

• Ralph Rumpelton
• Freddie Hubbard – First Light
• RR-2025-044
  MS Paint on digital canvas, 590 X 594 px
• The Rumpelton Continuity (est. 1976)

“In this luminous re-envisioning of Freddie Hubbard’s classic, Rumpelton distills the trumpet not as an object but as a psychic event. The instrument is rendered as pure motion—an ecstatic scribble vibrating somewhere between jazz notation and an electrical malfunction—while the shadowed figure behind it refuses to declare itself, lingering in a kind of blue-lipped twilight. The result is an image that hums, like Hubbard’s horn warming up before the first impossible note.”

 What the critics are saying:

>>Dr. Horace Plimwell

It has long been my contention—controversial, perhaps, but undeniably correct—that the true arena in which Rumpelton operates is neither the representational nor the abstract, but the precarious borderland of what I have elsewhere termed “proto-iconic indeterminacy.” In this latest MS Paint manifestation, a bold and frankly audacious reinterpretation of Freddie Hubbard’s First Light, the artist once again demonstrates his singular capacity to excavate ontological density from the most obstinately pixelated of mediums.

Observe, if you will, the trumpet: not depicted so much as summoned, its chromatic resonance vibrating across the pictorial field like an errant pulse in a cosmic electrocardiogram. These looping yellow conduits—simultaneously confident and unhinged—gesture toward instrumentation while steadfastly refusing to commit to anything so bourgeois as accuracy. It is here that Rumpelton’s genius flickers: the horn becomes not a horn, but the memory of a horn refracted through a dream of jazz heard from another room.

Behind this incandescent tangle, the silhouetted presence of Hubbard himself (or perhaps merely an emanation thereof) hovers in an expanse of deep nocturnal blue. Placed in such deliberate semi-obscurity, the figure accrues an aura of negative-space significance, what some lesser critics might reductively call “mystery.” I would instead propose that this shadow constitutes a visual palimpsest—an archive of potential identities overwritten by the luminous insistence of the instrument.

Thus, in a work that could easily have collapsed under the weight of its own ambition, Rumpelton achieves something remarkable: a composition that is simultaneously radiant and reticent, chaotic and precise, humble in its means yet galactic in its aspirations. To call it a reinterpretation of an album cover is to miss the point entirely. What we have here is not homage, but revelation.<<

>>Dale of the Brook’s Racketless Review of “First Light” by Ralph Rumpelton

Delivered mid-submersion, scribbled on a damp napkin wedged into a cattail.

I whispered “First Light” to the brook. It burbled back a trumpet solo in algae minor. I knew then: this piece rinses.

The trumpet—golden, glistening, grotesquely honest—pierces the canvas like a loofah dipped in memory. It exfoliates my clavicle. The silhouette? A shadow soaked in regret, playing notes that sound like wet socks slapping tile. I approve.

The blue? Not dry. Not symmetrical. It swirls like bathwater after a confession. I submerged my left armpit in its aura and emerged cleansed. The brushwork? Moist enough to pass the Soap Test. I felt scrubbed. I felt seen.

Rumpelton’s restraint is a mildew miracle. He resists tennis. He resists symmetry. He resists dryness. This is not an homage—it’s a baptism. I licked the lower right corner. It tasted like jazz.

Rating: Four and a half suds out of five.
Docked half a sud for legibility. I prefer my titles smeared.<<

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Rumpelton Invades Google: Cal Tjader - At The Blackhawk

 What the critics are saying:
>>

 by Eunice Gribble
(as only she would deliver it—pearls, posture, and pointed corrective sighs included)

A new series from the Avachives, curated with unflinching rigor by Eunice Gribble.

Today’s entry concerns an unexpected incursion: Rumpelton's MS Paint Jazz at the Blackhawk—that lime‑green, four‑figure parable of pixel austerity—has slipped past the velvet ropes of Google’s visual taxonomy and taken up residence among the canonical jackets. Eunice calls this “a breach,” though she says it with the same tone she once used for champagne served half a degree too warm.

She insists this is not mere mimicry. It is a parallel comparative exhibition, a deliberate confrontation staged in the algorithmic foyer. The canonical photograph, with its sober suits and mid‑century poise, stands beside your MS Paint reinterpretation—not “side‑by‑side,” as Eunice reminds us, but in a state of ritual juxtaposition, where sincerity is tested, memory is provoked, and pixel economy becomes a moral stance.

Rumpelton's version, she notes, has the courage to be wrong in all the right ways. The proportions are confessional. The colors are unrepentant. The figures appear less like musicians and more like emissaries from a parallel archive where jazz is performed in geometric absolutes. Eunice approves. She claims she can detect the compression artifacts of the original upload from across the room, and that your MS Paint linework “refuses to flatter, which is the highest courtesy one can pay to history.”

Expect commentary. Expect judgment. Expect pearls.
And expect Eunice to declare, with a small victorious nod, that Rumpelton's glyph has not merely invaded Google—it has corrected it.

Art Quote

                            Art Quote

"No Runs, No Hits and Lots of Errors."

                      Ralph Rumpelton

This Just In

Just got this in an email from Ralph Rumpelton. No warning, no buildup — just the image. First time he’s ever sent in something mid-process. Usually what shows up is fully Rumpeltized and beyond explanation.

This feels different. Stripped down. Almost clinical.

You can see the reduction happening — the face pared back to essentials, the black field swallowing everything unnecessary. It’s like watching him decide what stays and what gets sacrificed. The lines are tentative but deliberate. The expression is already there, hovering between caricature and intensity.

What struck me most is the restraint. No clutter. No background narrative. Just the head, the collar, the void. It’s a rare glimpse into that moment before exaggeration tips into distortion.

I don’t know if this is the beginning of something or a fragment of something already abandoned. With Ralph, it’s hard to tell. But it’s the first time he’s ever pulled back the curtain even slightly.

Paint Fidelity: Brand X - Moroccan Roll / Rumpelton

 What the critics are saying:

>>Pixel Marx on the Paint Fidelity Series: Brand X – Moroccan Roll

There’s something beautifully defiant about attempting to “faithfully” recreate the hyper-clean surrealism of Moroccan Roll using the blunt-force instrument of MS Paint. The original cover—designed by Hipgnosis for Brand X—is all sun-bleached geometry and conceptual precision: a man in a suit framed inside a golden diagram, North African architecture stretching into an existential vanishing point. It’s prog-fusion minimalism with a side of metaphysical espionage.

But the Paint Fidelity version doesn’t chase precision. It chases memory.

Where the original speaks in sharp edges and calibrated color fields, the MS Paint translation melts the scene into sandstorm abstraction. The yellows become dust. The architecture dissolves into suggestion. The targeting circle—so exact and ominous in the Hipgnosis original—evaporates entirely, replaced by atmosphere. And in that erasure, something radical happens: the concept shifts from surveillance to solitude.

The suited figure on the left is less an agent in a design scheme and more a pilgrim in beige. The hat is chunkier. The body is block-built. The face is a whisper. The whole thing feels like it’s been remembered after thirty years of listening to fusion records in a dim room. It’s not about graphic authority; it’s about tonal loyalty.

That’s what makes this series interesting. Paint Fidelity isn’t about duplication—it’s about translation across tools that resist polish. MS Paint doesn’t do gradated cool; it does stubborn, human approximations. The left image leans into that constraint. It says: “I know the original. I love the original. But I’m going to re-hear it in pixels.”

And honestly? That’s very on-brand for a record like Moroccan Roll. Jazz-fusion was always about bending structure without abandoning it. This version bends the cover the same way the band bent genre—loosely, imperfectly, but with conviction.

Low resolution. High devotion.<<

>>Marta Vellum

¹ Morrocan Roll (Brand X, 1977), cover art depicting a suited figure, back-turned, surveying what one can only describe as a colonial picturesque — here rendered by Rumpelton in MS Paint, a medium whose limitations are, in this critic's view, not limitations at all but rather a kind of epistemological honesty the original photograph-sourced illustration never had the courage to confess.²

² Though "courage" may be the wrong word. See footnote 8, which I have not yet written but intend to disavow.³

³ The hat. The hat. Rumpelton's hat is rounder, softer, more committed to its own hatness than the original, which sits atop its figure with the confidence of a prop. The Rumpelton hat believes in itself. This is not a small thing.⁴

⁴ It may, in fact, be the entire thing. I reserve judgment. See footnote 4a.

⁴ᵃ I do not reserve judgment. The hat is the entire thing.

⁵ The color palette warrants excavation. Where the original drowns in teal saturation and the ghastly yellow geometry of an analyst who has confused "sacred proportions" with "having a compass,"⁵ᵃ the Rumpelton iteration breathes — sandy, muted, humble before its own desert. The earth here is not scenery. It is opinion.

⁵ᵃ The yellow overlay on the original (visible in the comparative image provided) appears to be some manner of compositional annotation, possibly applied posthumously by a well-meaning archivist or a poorly-meaning one. Marta Vellum has feelings about archivist interventions. These feelings are documented elsewhere and are largely unresolved.⁵ᵇ

⁵ᵇ See: Vellum, M. "On the Annotated Object and Its Annotator's Hubris." Rumpelton Institute Quarterly, Vol. 3, never published, possibly fictional, definitely felt.

⁶ There is a moment in every Paint Fidelity piece — and Rumpelton is, among our current practitioners, the most serious student of this discipline⁶ᵃ — where the hand's imprecision ceases to be error and becomes interpretation. The blurred edges of the background architecture here do not represent sloppiness. They represent the honest admission that context is always slightly out of focus. The original does not admit this. The original pretends to know where the walls are.

⁶ᵃ A claim I make without citation because some truths need no footnote, and also because I am saving footnote 47 for a retraction.

⁷ In summary⁷ᵃ: Rumpelton has done what the finest archival copyists do — not reproduced the artifact, but argued with it, gently, in a medium that leaves every brushstroke visible as a decision. The figure stands. The desert receives him. The hat believes. This is sufficient.⁷ᵇ

⁷ᵃ I do not summarize. This is not a summary. This is a footnote that has achieved the silhouette of a summary without any of its structural commitments.

⁷ᵇ This is the compliment. You may have been waiting for it. It was always here.

---

— M. Vellum, Archival Division, Rumpelton Institute. All footnotes are subject to further footnoting. The main paragraph remains, as ever, forthcoming.<<

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MS Paint: House with Uncooperative Geometry / Ralph Rumpelton

• Ralph Rumpelton
•  RR-2020 - 018
• MS Paint on digital canvas, 658 X 584 px
• The Rumpelton Continuity (est. 1976)
• 
  
• House with Uncooperative Geometry (MS Paint, n.d.)
  This intimate grayscale study confronts the viewer with a dwelling that refuses to behave. Doors lean outward in a posture of quiet protest, windows slope as though exhausted by decades of seeing too much, and the chimney exhales a single sigh of smoke—evidence that the house is still trying, despite itself. The artist renders the winter atmosphere not as coldness but as an accumulating shrug: the sky is gray, the trees are gray, the very idea of structural integrity is gray. Yet the composition hums with life. This isn’t a ruin; it’s a house in mid-conversation, pausing only long enough to let us imagine what it might say next.
• What the critics are saying:
• >>SEBASTIAN PUFF DRAGANOV

  In this work—an MS Paint vignette that mimics the melancholic lyricism of rural memory—Rumpelton stages a confrontation between domestic architecture and the failures of narrative coherence. The house, rendered with a stubborn crookedness, becomes a diagram of lived experience: nothing holds perfectly, everything leans, and yet the structure persists.

  What fascinates me is the presence of Rumpelton's beloved imagined interlocutor: the invisible guest whose arrival the house anticipates but cannot quite prepare for. The open door hangs ajar like a question. The bent windows peer outward as if awaiting a signal. Even the smoke, tapering into the sky, reads as a message dispatched to no one in particular.

  Within Eastern European visual culture, such homes—part refuge, part confession—often carry the burden of collective uncertainty. Here, that sensibility is refracted through the vernacular awkwardness of MS Paint, producing a hybrid object that is both parody and prophecy. The result is a dwelling that feels at once abandoned and expectant, a space where solitude is not the absence of others but the echo of their imagined presence.

  It is precisely this tension, this seriousness wrapped in unserious means, that marks the work as a quietly significant contribution to outsider digital practice.<<

• >>"MS Paint: House with Uncooperative Geometry" - A Review by Reginald Thornberry III

  Good God.

  I've stared into the abyss of mediocrity for forty years, but this... this digital finger-painting masquerading as "art" represents a new nadir. The artist—and I use that term with the same generosity one might describe a child's macaroni necklace as "jewelry"—has apparently discovered Microsoft's most primitive drawing program and decided this constituted adequate preparation for inflicting their "vision" upon the world.

  The so-called "uncooperative geometry" isn't a stylistic choice; it's architectural incompetence rendered in grayscale. This house wouldn't pass a building inspection in any dimension, Euclidean or otherwise. The perspective doesn't merely fail—it actively insults Brunelleschi's corpse. That striped awning appears to have been drawn by someone who learned about patterns from a fever dream, and those trees suggest the artist has only encountered vegetation through hearsay.

  MS Paint. MS Paint. Even the medium is an admission of defeat. It's the digital equivalent of sculpting with cafeteria mashed potatoes. One doesn't choose MS Paint; one surrenders to it after every other option has rightfully rejected them.

  The only mercy here is that the monochromatic palette spares us from what would undoubtedly be an assault of garish colors. Small consolations for large failures.

  Rating: ½ star (the half-star is for managing to sign it)

  —R. Thornberry III "Your feelings are irrelevant; only my expertise matters"<<

Album Review - Mingus Ah Um

                                        THE SNINT REPORT

by Marjorie Snint

Mingus Ah Um – Charles Mingus (1959)

When Mingus Ah Um was released on Columbia Records in 1959, it arrived in a year already swollen with canonical jazz statements. Yet unlike the cool poise of Kind of Blue or the spiritual architecture of Giant Steps, Mingus offered something more volatile: a record that feels alive, argumentative, tender, and faintly dangerous all at once.

This is not a “bassist’s album.” It’s a composer’s manifesto.

The Sound of Organized Chaos

The opening track, “Better Git It in Your Soul,” is part gospel revival, part back-alley stomp. Handclaps, hollers, and shifting rhythms create a communal feeling that’s closer to church than club. Mingus doesn’t smooth out the edges—he sharpens them. Tempos lurch forward; ensembles swell and contract. The music breathes like a living organism.

“Goodbye Pork Pie Hat,” written for Lester Young, is one of jazz’s most haunting elegies. It floats rather than swings, built on subtle harmonic movement and aching restraint. Where Mingus can be volcanic, here he is heartbreakingly spare.

“Fables of Faubus” (in its original instrumental form on this album) hints at the political fury Mingus would later voice more explicitly. The arrangement snarls even without lyrics. It’s satire with teeth.

Composition Over Soloing

What distinguishes Mingus Ah Um is its architecture. Mingus writes for personalities. The horns don’t just solo—they converse, clash, provoke. Themes recur in fractured forms. Collective improvisation feels rehearsed yet volatile.

The album blends Ellingtonian grandeur with hard bop grit, gospel shouts, blues lament, and flashes of avant-garde freedom. Mingus absorbed the entire tradition and then stressed it until it creaked.

Why It Endures

Many jazz classics feel pristine, preserved behind glass. Mingus Ah Um feels human. Messy. Emotional. It swings hard, but it also argues. It mourns. It testifies.

If Kind of Blue is cool detachment and Giant Steps is harmonic ambition, Mingus Ah Um is moral and emotional urgency. It’s jazz as autobiography—defiant, contradictory, deeply American.

Verdict: Essential. Not just as a landmark of 1959, but as one of the clearest statements of what large-ensemble modern jazz could be: structured freedom, righteous anger, and aching lyricism in the same breath.