Mingus Ah Um was the first album Charles Mingus made for Columbia and originally appeared in 1959. Across a handful of sessions he laid down Better Git It in Your Soul, with handclaps and a gospel pulse, plus Goodbye Pork Pie Hat, the elegy for Lester Young who had died shortly before, and Fables of Faubus, aimed at the governor of Arkansas who had Black students blocked from entering a school. Columbia refused the lyrics to that last piece, so it appears here as an instrumental. Other tracks are tributes to Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker and Jelly Roll Morton, played by a line-up around John Handy, Booker Ervin, Shafi Hadi, Horace Parlan and Dannie Richmond. The album was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2013.

This edition is an LP on blue vinyl.