Dionysius was the last studio album recorded under his own name by Dannie Richmond, who would die five years later from this recording, due to a heart attack.
Dionysius, a song signed by Richmond himself, in its reference to the original god of ancient Greece, actually evokes the spirit of Mingus whose presence pervades the whole album and whose compositions (Three or Four Shades Of Blues and Peggy Blue Skylight) close the album. Dionysus was the archaic Greek god of prosperity and vegetation, the creator of the cyclical renewal of nature, as well as the god of ecstasy, the one who gave wine to man. His divine personality, complex and changeable, his ability to act as an intermediary between the human and the supernatural, his polymorphous nature, appearing among men from time to time as bull, snake, lion, kid, barbarian, Greek, young, old, recall the different facets of Mingus’s personality as well as the ecstasy, or conversely, the organised chaos, towards which the double bassist’s music was directed.