Composer Charles Mingus was a prominent jazz musician with strong ties to California and New York, but his earliest days were spent in Southern Arizona.
Mingus was born in Nogales in 1922. His father, Charles Mingus Sr., was a sergeant stationed at Camp Stephen D. Little, a segregated Army post and military encampment that served as home to the 25th Infantry Regiment.
His stay in the border town was short. Several months after Mingus was born, Charles Sr. moved the family to Southern California, where Mingus developed his early love for music into a prolific career.
Mingus’ brief time in Arizona hasn’t stopped an avid group of local fans, promoters and educators from claiming Mingus — known as “The Angry Man of Jazz” — as their own.
Next week, members of the Santa Cruz Advocates for the Arts, working under the name, The Mingus Project, will put on its annual Charles Mingus Hometown Music Festival, a two-day celebration of Mingus’ life and his work.
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The fest begins with a daylong Mingus Invitational Jazz Festival competition at the James K. Clark Performing Arts Center at Nogales High School, featuring school ensembles from all over Southern Arizona. Renowned bassist and session musician Ray Drummond will be a judge.
On April 26, Drummond will perform, alongside a long list of local professional and amateur music acts, including the Redhouse Brothers Band, Mariachi Apache from Nogales High School, Grupo Manteca and ensembles from the Tucson Jazz Institute.
Most of the acts, even Mariachi Apache, will include Mingus songs in their sets.
“He was second only to Duke Ellington as far as American jazz composers,” said Ken Tittelbaugh, board chairman of the Mingus Project. “He died in 1979, but his music still sounds so current. He was way ahead of his time and he was born right here in Arizona.”
The Mingus music festival has been taking place in its current form since 2008, but the idea to honor the musician’s birthplace took shape more than 15 years prior.
Yvonne Ervin coordinated the first Mingus music fest, dubbed “Jazz On the Border: The Mingus Project” in Nogales in 1993.
Ervin, who is the treasurer for Santa Cruz Advocates for the Arts, has a long history of jazz promotion in Arizona.
She moved to Tucson from Illinois in 1981 to attend the University of Arizona where she received her degree in journalism.
Throughout the 1980s, she ran an all-woman jazz ensemble called Bitches Brew, named after the Miles Davis album. She also served as executive director of the Tucson Jazz Society for a decade, building it up to be one of the largest jazz- appreciation organizations in the country, before she moved to New York City.
The idea to honor Mingus’ legacy in Nogales arose from discussions between Ervin and Jeff Haskell, a local jazz educator and pianist.
“It was Jeff who was talking to me about Mingus being born in Nogales,” Ervin said. “We agreed that we should do something to honor that.”
Concepts for some sort of festival were bandied about for years until a grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts made it possible.
The first Mingus music fest — a joint effort between the Tucson Jazz Society and the Nogales-Santa Cruz Chamber of Commerce — was held in 1993.
It was a grand affair.
Mingus’ childhood friend, Buddy Collette, was brought in to work with students in schools around Nogales and Tucson.
Writer and Mingus historian Gene Santoro, who would go on to pen the definitive Mingus biography, “Myself When I Am Real: The Life and Music of Charles Mingus,” lectured in the libraries.
Concerts were held on both sides of the border.
In Nogales, Ariz. members of the Tucson Jazz Orchestra and the Tucson Symphony Orchestra performed the world premiere of a long-lost Mingus piece dubbed “Inquisition,” part of Mingus’ legendary “Epitaph” composition.
In Nogales, Sonora, thousands showed up for a free jazz concert with the Tucson Jazz and Latin Jazz orchestras at Plaza Hidalgo.
The weeklong event received national attention.
“We made all of the big jazz publications at the time,” Ervin said. “It was a huge undertaking.”
It was also a one-time happening.
“I aged so much planning that thing,” Ervin said. “I was done after that.”
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Aside from a few smaller music festivals put on in Nogales in the early 2000s, The Mingus Project concept wasn’t picked up again until 2008, when Tittelbaugh and the Santa Cruz Advocates for the Arts took the reins.
The group has attempted to expand their efforts to incorporate year-round events and educational components.
In addition to this month’s festival, a second festival and competition, geared entirely toward high school and middle school bands, takes place in the fall.
Tittelbaugh, who spent more than two decades as the school band director at Nogales High School, also has worked to make sure Mingus pieces are available to students and music programs throughout Santa Cruz County.
“We want students to know more about Mingus, to help them as jazz artists,” Tittelbaugh said.
It’s why the Santa Cruz Advocates invited the bands of the prestigious Tucson Jazz Institute down to perform for the last three years.
The Institute, whose student base is comprised of high school-aged kids, will have two groups at next week’s festival, the Ellington Big Band and its nine-piece Concord Combo.
The Concord Combo just came back from the Next Generation Jazz Festival in Monterey, Calif. where it won the opportunity to play at the Monterey Jazz Festival in September.
In May, the Ellington Band will once again perform at the Essentially Ellington competition, held annually at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City. It took first place in the competition in 2013.
The Ellington band will perform the works of Mingus and Ellington on Saturday. Ellington was Mingus’ favorite composer.
“It is nice to do something local,” said Scott Black, who runs the Institute with fellow jazz instructors, Doug Tidaback and Brice Winston. “Along with drummer Lewis Nash from Phoenix, Mingus is one of the more famous jazz musicians to come from Arizona. We enjoy supporting and bringing recognition to events like these.”
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The Mingus Project has more plans in store as things roll along, particularly in raising awareness that Mingus was born in Nogales.
In 2011, at the behest of Santa Cruz Advocates, the Nogales City Council gave its approval for the Mingus Memorial Park to be built where the entrance to Camp Little once stood.
The city donated the land and some basic infrastructure was installed. A groundbreaking has taken place, but the project remains slow-going Ervin said.
A Kickstarter campaign raised $16,540 in March 2012, a month before what would have been Mingus’ 90th birthday. The campaign envisioned that the park would include a performance facility with a small stage and seating area.
“These things take time,” Ervin said. “We hope to have it in time for next year’s festival.”
Ervin’s ultimate goal, and one that she has been pursuing since she returned to Southern Arizona in 2011, is to change the name of Nogales’ Western Avenue to Mingus Avenue.
“That way we’d have signage on Interstate 19,” Ervin said. “I’ve been pushing the city council. I think they are getting tired of me.”
Ervin said the efforts that she and the rest of the Mingus Project have made benefit everyone.
“To say that this is Mingus’ hometown is incorrect,” she said. “His hometown was Watts, Los Angeles. But this is his birthplace. Our goal is to continue the legacy of Charles Mingus while promoting Nogales as a cultural destination.”
