parlando

charles mingus, "fables of faubus" (1959) and "original faubus fables" (1960)

Posted on January 19th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Songs.

Song Project #6 and 7

I didn't grow up with jazz -- not even Brubeck. My parents were not huge music fans, though I was raised on a few staples: Simon & Garfunkel, the Tijuana Brass, Roger Miller, the Beatles. We didn't stray far from mainstream pop. I didn't knowingly hear jazz till I was looking for music on my own as a teenager, and what I heard I didn't much like. I can't honestly say that I tried to like it.

In the early 1980s I worked in a chain record store (Peaches) for a few years, and I thoroughly burnt out on popular music. That's the only time since I was twelve that I've deliberately avoided hearing new music. Consequently I missed a lot of the late 1980s, and have had to approach the music of that time -- particularly the rise of popular hiphop -- almost as historically as I approach the music made before I was born.

But I still wanted to hear music -- I just wanted something else. Country was anathema (that one took a long time to get over), classical was interesting but hard; jazz was still largely a great unknown. I asked a friend, Ted White, who was passionate about jazz and had interested me with stories of the 1950s Greenwich Village jazz scene, to point me toward a good entry point. He recommended Mingus Ah Um.

I don't know whether Ted guessed well based on what he knew of my taste, or based on what had worked for others before, or whether he simply chose his favorite. I don't know whether I would have been knocked out by it any time I heard it, or if I had to wait till I was ready. Mingus Ah Um didn't open the door to jazz for me; it blew the door down. It was intricate and melodic and shifted from mood to mood; it was adventurous and unexpected and it never noodled; the songs were like human personalities, the intruments like voices.

For the next few years I listened to almost nothing but jazz, a crash course. It was exciting, sometimes thrilling, and I'm still learning and exploring jazz and doubtless will be for the rest of my life. But I had started at the peak. I don't know whether it's because it was the first great jazz album I had heard, but I don't think so: Mingus Ah Um remains my favorite jazz album of all time, and my favorite album, period. I know every note, but I haven't wearied of one second of it. From the start, I had two favorites: the melancholy "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat" (also known as "Theme for Lester Young"), which is certainly his best known composition, covered by dozens of folks, including pop and folk musicians like Joni Mitchell and Bert Jansch & John Renbourn. My other favorite was "Fables of Faubus", which was a composition Mingus returned to often in live performance.

This is the Mingus Ah Um version of "Fables of Faubus".

It's the first version of "Fables" I heard, and it's the first version most people heard; it was the first version recorded. I think it's beautiful, with a complex tone: quizzical, questioning, and (as with so many of Mingus's songs) often like a conversation, particularly after the first time the song's main themes have been stated (for example, the passages beginning at 1:30 and 2:37). But it's a thoughtful conversation, calm; the song is more contemplative than rousing; its pleasures don't shake the listener, they insinuate, put down roots and grow inside.

"Original Faubus Fables" is something else again.

It's called "Original" because this is the way Mingus meant the song to be heard (and the way it was subsequently played live -- it's not live in this version, despite the introductory patter, which was meant to re-create the atmosphere of a live Mingus set). What I didn't know when I was memorizing Mingus Ah Um was that it is (along with its Columbia Records companion, Mingus Dynasty) something of an anomaly. It is an undisputed great Mingus recording -- everything he was doing around 1959 is amazing, for at least four different labels -- but it doesn't sound like other Mingus records. It's polished, clean, beautiful, perfect. Mingus generally preferred to leave the rough edges on.

Not only that, but Columbia made Mingus leave out the vocal parts. No wonder: they are racially political, an attack on segregationists, and Columbia doubtless feared the effect on sales to the genteel white jazz audience. I'll speculate that this was responsible for Columbia's smooth recording approach, too; they were Brubeck's label, and it wouldn't surprise me if that's how they conceived their jazz audience.

"Original Faubus Fables" was recorded for the album Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus on Nat Hentoff's great Candid label, which existed to record jazz records the way the musicians wanted. About "Fables", Hentoff writes, "I was disappointed when I heard an earlier recorded version . . . In the club, the mood of the caricature was much more bitingly sardonic and there was a great deal more tension." This version is a quartet -- the Mingus Ah Um version was an octet -- with Eric Dolphy on saxophone, Ted Curson on trumpet, and Dannie Richmond on drums (as he was on Mingus Ah Um and virtually everything that Mingus recorded from the late 1950s on).

Even without the lyrics, you'd know this was an angry, sarcastic, frustrated song. It isn't faster; it isn't louder. It's harsher. Everything is blown and plucked stridently; it all sounds like feelings held barely in check, with control sometimes lost; like people who've been putting up with shit for a long time and have had enough. Listen to the squawling and growling of Curson and Dolphy at 1:46 and 1:51, for example, the way even the trill at 2:15 sounds like someone trembling; the mocking tone of even the non-verbal vocals that first appear at 3:26 (and Danny Richmond's non-verbal outbursts at 2:32); the saxophone losing its temper at 5:48.

"Fables of Faubus" and Mingus Ah Um remain perfect to me. But the harsh emotional power of "Original Faubus Fables" is undeniable, and no doubt it is more what "Fables" is supposed to be. Together they are a marvel -- like a photograph and its negative -- the most compact example I know of the ingenuity and the great emotional range of Mingus and his musicians.

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