At Mingus’s Centennial, ‘Lost’ 50-Year-Old Sets Surface and Draw Fresh Applause

One of my favorite episodes of “The Simpsons” climaxes in an all-star jazz concert that is promoted in the show as an eight-hour marathon during which, get this, “two songs will be played.” It’s a fair cop. To those accustomed to three-minute pop singles, many jazz musicians seem ridiculously long-winded, to put it charitably. Certainly Charles Mingus, who could extract an entire hour-long set out of just one of his signature tunes, like “Fables of Faubus,” was among the guilty.Yet Mingus, whose centennial is being celebrated with a spectacular new release of a previously unheard live performance — as well as a week of tribute performances at Jazz at Lincoln Center — was hardly self-indulgent. “The Lost Album from Ronnie Scott’s” consists largely of cuts that are a half hour or longer, and yet there’s nary a dull moment in it.Brian Priestley’s expert annotation details how this music was originally taped by Columbia Records at the iconic London jazz club in August 1972. Before it could be released, alas, the musical naif then running that corporation, the notorious Clive Davis, decided to prune nearly all jazz from the roster — including not only Mingus but Ornette Coleman, Keith Jarrett, and even Bill Evans. The tapes languished for fully 50 years until jazz’s indefatigable detective, Zev Feldman, came to the rescue. The results are now being issued on Resonance Records in cooperation with the bassist-bandleader’s widow, Sue Mingus, the custodian of his legacy. The group at Ronnie’s in August 1972 is one of Mingus’s least known, featuring only one of his longtime collaborators, the eloquent alto saxophonist Charles McPherson, who is joined by tenor saxophonist Bobby Jones. There’s also John Foster, a talented pianist new to me who died while still a very young man in 1976; drummer Roy Brooks; and the major surprise, the 19-year-old trumpet sharpshooter Jon Faddis. Between Messrs. Faddis and McPherson, the sextet has a frontline that could handily evoke Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, the original beboppers who had influenced Mingus so profoundly at the start of his career.The three hours and nine tracks contained on these three discs (CDs or LPs) illustrate the breadth and scope of Mingus’s music. The opener, “Orange Was the Color of Her Dress, then Silk Blues,” contains moments that seem like the very earliest and yet also the most contemporary of jazz, often within just a heartbeat of each other — this blues theme sounds incredibly old and completely modern at the same time and puts me in mind of much jazz from the 1980s and ’90s that seemed inspired by Mingus’s groups, starting with David Murray’s octet. It’s a style that the New York Times’s Jon Parales coined as “avant-gutbucket.”The opening ensemble is together but loose, almost erotically dissonant. It somehow seems appropriate for a piece inspired, as the composer said, by a pretty albeit mischievous woman in a particular piece of clothing. If the 31-minute “Orange” is an avant-garde kind of a blues, the next track, “Noddin’ Your Head Blues,” is the most fundamental, basic blues imaginable. Even so, it allows two of Mingus’s sidemen to display hitherto hidden talents: Foster sings a blues lyric that he credits to Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson, and then follows with a quote from “Sentimental Journey” in his piano solo. For his part, Mingus plays a quote from “Blues in the Night” that sets up a powerful blues solo by Brooks on, of all the things, a musical saw.Recorded over two nights, the music features Mingus continually playing with our expectations: “Mind-Readers Convention in Milano” is about as free as jazz gets, but there’s also an homage to Louis Armstrong titled “Pops” set in a vigorous dixieland two-beat. The second night ends with a brief but dazzling “Air Mail Special,” which sets the tone for the later performances of early jazz by Sun Ra. Then there’s “Fables of Faubus,” famously named after the former Governor of Arkansas who foolishly — and fiendishly — opposed Civil Rights and integration in 1957. Some modern jazz compositions are essentially a series of monologues, but this Mingus classic is more like a performance by a tap dance troupe in which every member of the group gets a solo turn. The central melody is reminiscent of one of Kurt Weill’s off-kilter Weimar era tangoes, and in general depicts the foolishness of getting in the way of that major social change that was about to come and being stuck on the wrong side of history. It was part of Mingus’s public image that he always seemed to be angry — at the oppressors for holding his people down, at the musical establishment for not giving him the support he needed — yet in his final words here, he’s quite the opposite. Rather, he thanks the London crowd for receiving his music so warmly, and allowing their “claps” to be heard on the live recording.Fifty years later, on the occasion of his centennial and the release of this remarkable music, the world is clapping still.

At Mingus’s Centennial, ‘Lost’ 50-Year-Old Sets Surface and Draw Fresh Applause

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