Last week at the Allen Room, at a reception to raise money and awareness for the ongoing disaster in New Orleans, one particular speaker brought us back to a Crescent City crisis that occurred 47 years ago. This was Ruby Bridges Hall, who had been the first black child to integrate the Louisiana public school system in 1960. That Mrs. Hall is still only 52 was in itself kind of shocking; it forced us to remember that the American shame of institutionalized racism was very much a reality within most of our lifetimes.

Perhaps not coincidentally, for the next two weeks, a mini-festival will be held to commemorate the 85th birthday of Charles Mingus (1922–79), the jazz icon who perhaps devoted more energy than anyone to combating the evils of segregation. All will occur just outside the doors of the Allen Room, in various nooks and crannies of Lincoln Center.

Under the stewardship of Mingus’s resourceful widow, Sue Mingus, no less than three posthumous ensembles currently operate in Mingus’s name and play his compositions: Mingus Dynasty, which replicates the sextet format that the bassist used for most of his performing career, and two larger groups, the Mingus Big Band and the more classically oriented Mingus Orchestra. Usually these three groups alternate on Tuesdays at the Iridium, but this week all three will appear on different nights at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola. On April 23, the Juilliard Jazz Ensemble will offer its own program of Mingus music at Dizzy’s. And the climax of the series will arrive on April 25, when the celebrated conductor and scholar Gunther Schuller leads a massed 30-piece orchestra in Mingus’s sprawling epic, “Epitath.”

Also on the horizon are two CD releases containing rare performances by Mingus — a 1970 concert in Paris previously issued only in France (Sunnyside Records), and a completely unknown appearance from March, 1964, at Cornell University, to be issued as a double-CD package by Blue Note. The latter is of special historical importance: The spring of 1964 was a championship season for the bassist and bandleader, who performed a famous concert at Town Hall on April 4 before launching a tour of Europe. It would become the most famous tour of the most celebrated edition of virtually any Mingus ensemble, featuring Eric Dolphy (reeds), Jaki Byard (piano), Clifford Jordan (tenor sax), Johnny Coles (trumpet), and Dannie Richmond (drums).

Until now, it was generally believed that Mingus introduced this particular edition of the sextet, as well as three of his most famous compositions, at Town Hall. But the discovery of the Cornell concert reveals that he had this group together and was playing this music at least two weeks earlier. The Cornell show includes classic performances of Mingus’s two most famous anti-discrimination statements, “Fables of Faubus” and “Meditations” (aka “Meditations on Integration”).

Mingus originally introduced “Fables of Faubus” in 1959, in response to the damage done by Orville Faubus, the governor of Arkansas, who had closed down the high school system in Little Rock rather than let black children share a classroom with white children (in direct defiance of an order to integrate from President Eisenhower). The original “Fables of Faubus” ran a mere eight minutes, but Mingus revived it in 1964, partly in response to the Faubusian rancor of Alabama governor George Wallace.

“Fables of Faubus” was the central work of the April 1964 tour, and Mingus introduced the new, expanded version at Cornell. The written part of “Fables” is less than two minutes, which is comparatively short considering that all the April performances of it are roughly 30 minutes long. The melody, written in 4/4 and A-flat, is phrased as a tango in the tradition of Kurt Weill.

In evoking Weimar-era Germany, Mingus was obviously comparing Faubus and Wallace to the Nazis, an irony that would not have been missed by jazz audiences of the 1960s. In calling the work “Fables,” Mingus had at least two meanings — a fable in the sense of a myth or an old story that is just not true, and a fable like a folly in the sense of Florenz Ziegfeld, an extravagant story staged for our amusement. “Fables” is not only a piece of music, but of theatre, and in the way the six soloists make their individual statements, it can almost be seen as a Ziegfeld-style revue.

Certainly, the Cornell concert of 1964 did take on theatrical dimensions, both in terms of the performance and the subject matter. Each of the players’ turns is hardly a “solo” in the sense of your usual jazz ensemble, but something more like an vaudeville act, an extended statement of taste, culture, and history.

First up is trumpeter Coles, who begins by imitating Mingus’s sometime collaborator, Miles Davis. He deliberately mimics the trumpeter’s tone and several stock burnished phrases circa 1959. When Byard takes over, he references familiar music in an altogether different way, taking several key American patriotic anthems, “Yankee Doodle” and “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,” and turning them on their ear. Just in it case it isn’t clear what Byard thinks of the segregationists, he plays a few bars of Chopin’s funeral march.

As Byard’s section ends, the theme is reprised with Coles doing Ellingtonian wah-wahs, Dolphy blowing bass clarinet, and the group detouring through Latin and boogie-shuffle interludes. Out of nowhere Clifford Jordan is upon us, in a mostly upper-register solo that sums up 20 years of jazz history from bebop to freebop — the latter represented in a largely unaccompanied section in which he wails a free-form blues. The other horns gradually fall in behind him, with much sobbing and gnashing of teeth; when Byard and the rhythm section return, we are ready for it, and at one point he enters into a pistolsat-10-paces duel with drummer Richmond.

Mingus then reminds us that he was, in fact, one of the very first bassists to claim the privilege of soloing alongside the frontline horns. He takes a cue from Byard and dwells on “My Country Tis of Thee,” working other tunes like “When Johnny Comes Marching Home,” “Blues in the Night,” and “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” in and out of it. When Dolphy enters on bass clarinet, he plays the instrument as if he’s just discovered it, starting with avant-garde screeches in the upper register, then an unaccompanied ad-lib passage in the lower that sounds more classical, and a trip to exotic lands and sounds with Eastern harmonies that sound neither major nor minor. He climaxes the piece and very nearly the whole evening — even though it’s only the third number of the first half.

There are many other highlights in this amazing two-hour concert, not least of which is the other piece on the subject, “Mediations on Integration.” For his political stance, Mingus and his five musicians end sweetly but swingingly on two fast, soulful waltzes — Fats Waller’s “Jitterbug Waltz,” featuring Dolphy on flute, and “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.”

The latter is played in a catchy 6/4 with modal overtones, perhaps somewhat irreverently, but Mingus had too much respect for other cultures to play it caustically or sarcastically. In that sense, he makes “Irish Eyes” one of the most eloquent pleas for racial and ethnic unity that I’ve ever heard. It’s a bold statement from a time when even the daily routine of going to school amounted an act of unbelievable bravery.

wfriedwald@nysun.com