Fables of Faubus

The premiere version featured lyrics that the record label forced Mingus to obscure with scat syllables on the 1959 release — the actual words named Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus, who deployed the National Guard to prevent Black students from entering Little Rock Central High School in 1957. The music doesn't need the lyrical specificity to communicate outrage: Mingus built a piece that sounds like mockery elevated to art form, a deliberate, musical pointing-and-laughing at cruelty and stupidity. The ensemble plays with a kind of grinning menace, the horns tumbling over each other in passages that feel satirical — music that ridicules through exaggeration, that takes the self-seriousness of authority and punctures it rhythmically. There is genuine humor in the piece alongside genuine anger, and Mingus understood that satire which makes you laugh is more devastating than satire that only makes you furious. The later Charles Mingus Presents Mingus version from 1960 restored the original lyrics, which adds another dimension — but even instrumentally the meaning is legible. This belongs to a tradition of African-American artistic resistance that found in comedy and music a power that direct confrontation couldn't always access. It sounds unlike most jazz of its era precisely because it was trying to do something that most jazz wasn't trying to do.