Fables of Faubus – Charles Mingus
from the album Mingus Ah Um on Columbia (1959).

Original Faubus Fables – Charles Mingus
from the album Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus on Candid (1960).

Many thanks to Junior, floodwatch, b, and the gang for holding down the site so well while I’ve been swamped over the last month. Lots of posts have formulated in my mind and soon they’ll be beaming out toward you via fiber optic.

April 22nd of this year marked the 85th anniversary of the birth of my favorite composer of all time: the late Charles Mingus. 2007 also marks the 50th anniversary of the civil rights milestone of the integration of Little Rock Central High School by the “Little Rock 9.” That cat being interviewed in the image above is Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus, who became rightfully infamous by using the Arkansas National Guard to prevent the integration of LRCHS after the Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education Supreme Court decision that segregated schooling was unconstitutional. In response President Eisenhower sent the US Army to enforce integration and quell a crowd that can without hesitation be said to have been building towards lynching the black students. Imagine tanks and a riotous mob on your high school’s lawn in any circumstance and you see the surreal aspect of this moment. And the topic of all the calamity was the forced subjugation/separation of some members of society. It is an incredibly ugly incident in US history. This seems largely unreal to me, but this happened only 50 years ago. My father was 10 and most of our family lived in Arkansas at the time. Lots more can be read here and summarized at wikipedia

And now I’ll come back to Mingus. Never at a loss for opinion especially on racial issues, the “Angry Man of Jazz” recorded a song remembering the Little Rock 9 and denouncing Governor Faubus. The song “Fables of Faubus” appears on perhaps Mingus’s most acclaimed album Mingus Ah Um, one of his 3 big-ticket Columbia releases. However, the Columbia executives demanded the vocals stripped from release. The tune itself is has a largely jaunty, swinging air that belies the serious nature of the material. Or perhaps Mingus felt the situation so absurd as to transcend “serious” or “sober” comment. Regardless the brass heavy octet moves in and out of free expression with great skill always returning in lock step to the theme. As always, Mingus and his right hand man drummer Dannie Richmond are in impeccable unison as the many horns get their turn (I particularly like Shafi Hadi’s sax and Jimmy Knepper’s trombone) and Horace Parlan plays some excellent atonal piano shifts.

For comparison, a year later on Candid’s Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus, the vocal version did come out. In Mingus’s quartet of choice at the time (Curson on trumpet, Eric Dolphy on sax/clarinet, with Richmond and Mingus) Richmond and Mingus speak-sing the vocals originally meant to go with the song. Despite the smaller group, the sound is still very full and Richmond shines even more. The jaunty tone of the music makes much more sense with the mocking and sardonic words. I vastly prefer the vocal version (hardly ever true for me), but this is beautiful and inventive stuff either way.

Happy Birthday, Mingus. Everyone be kind.