Fables of Faubus

John Handy (alto sax), Shafi Hadi and Booker Ervin (tenor sax), Jimmy Knepper (trombone), Horace Parlan (piano), Charles Mingus (bass) and Dannie Richmond (drums). From the album Mingus Ah Um (1959).

Charles Mingus’s compositions preserved the hot and soulful feel of hard bop, inspired by gospel and blues, while sometimes including elements of free jazz, the Third Stream and classical music. Duke Ellington and the church were his main influences. Mingus expressed great admiration for Ellington, but took his sound mixtures and harmonies much further, introducing dissonances and sudden changes in meter and tempo, as well as stimulating accelerations that generated an impulse of their own. In 1963 he collaborated with him on the album Money Jungle with drummer Max Roach.

Mingus adopted the collective improvisation of the old New Orleans jazz parades, paying special attention to the way each member of the band interacted with the rest of the group. In creating his bands, he focused not only at the skill of his musicians, but also at their personality. Many of them later had brilliant careers. He always recruited talented and sometimes unfamiliar artists, whom he used to create unconventional instrument configurations.

This theme is a denunciation against Orval E. Faubus, governor of Arkansas who in 1957 sent the National Guard to prevent the integration of nine African American teenagers into Little Rock Central High School, and has a certain ironic air, as if the group was mocking him. Handy makes a brave but flexible solo with the rest of the wind section making comments below, and after that, the group plays the original theme again. Next Ervin enters exchanging moderate passages with frantic phrases. Then Parlan comes in with a fluid, ambitious and creative speech, closely followed by Mingus. After that, Hadi arrives with a calm solo that sometimes becomes stronger and more intense. Then Mingus enters with a powerful tone and a pulsating sense of rhythm before the re-exposure of the theme.