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THE MINGUS BIG BAND
KEEPING THE LEGACY ALIVE


If the performance by the Mingus Big Band in their first of two sets at the Regattabar last Saturday is any indication, Charles Mingus is still showing the way. At this point, he can probably be counted as one of jazz’s Big Four composers along with Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington, and Thelonious Monk. Like his peers, Mingus was one of the few jazz writers to instruct his players with detailed compositions. The first number at the R-Bar, "Jump Monk," began with trumpet soloing over a fast walking 4/4 bass; it was quickly joined by drums and a tenor-sax counterline, then by trombone and generally fast-talking free lines from the whole band before they all came together to state the fast, Monk-like corkscrewing theme and then a big exultant, gospel-tinged fanfare.

"Children’s Hour of Dreams" was even more complex, opening with a gorgeous Ellingtonian theme of rich reed harmonies, shifting up the rhythm and the sonority with a five-note figure from mid-range brass, then introducing a trombone theme — earthy and deep-voiced and bluesy — that was echt Mingus. Pianist Dave Kikoski ran knotty lines up and down the keyboard, a muted trumpet section entered over the swirling ensemble, a solo trombone voice piped up against them with another counterline, and then a keening, Eastern-flavored alto sax took over.

In other big bands, you tend to admire the syncro-mesh interplay of sections, brass against reeds and so on — a gleaming, barreling train of sound that’s the chief legacy of the big-band era. But Mingus’s music isn’t — or never was — that tidy, in large ensemble or small. And even his most subdued ballads are likely to approximate the spontaneous collective and individual outbursts of the sanctified prayer meetings that he attended as a child and that inspired some of his greatest music (Saturday night the band spurred themselves on with, among other things, shouts of his signature "Oh yeah!"). The music bristles with a Stravinsky-like complexity of rhythm and harmony, with new details unfolding by the measure, but it’s also suffused with the stop-time, shuffles, and polyphony of early New Orleans jazz, and a hooky tunefulness that eludes most jazz composers.

Mingus, who died in 1979, would have been 80 on April 22. His widow, Sue, runs the band (Saturday night she was hawking both their new CD and her new memoir about her life with Mingus), and with the help of former Mingus friends and associates like Gunther Schuller (who sat at her table at the Regattabar) and Sy Johnson, she keeps turning up new pieces and new arrangements. She’s keeping the legacy alive. More power to her.

BY JON GARELICK

Issue Date: April 4 - 11, 2002
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