This is Roberto Carlos Lange on his second pick for the Resistance Now playlist. Check out his first, Stevie Wonder’s Happy Birthday.
Mingus wrote this as a protest against the segregationist Arkansas governor Orval E Faubus who, in the late 1950s, was refusing to enforce the law and allow the state’s schools to teach black and white students side by side.
Strangely for a jazz song it’s the lyrics which are the main focus and they satirise racist groups like the KKK, and say how we cannot accept fascism. Mingus’s label at the time was Columbia and they made him release an instrumental version of the song, rather than the overtly political track which came out on a smaller label a few years later.
It’s a song that changed my relationship with jazz, up until then I always thought it was instrumental music that was still meditative and introspective. The first time I heard the vocal version in college, when I heard it I was like, what is this? It sounds really insane and otherworldly.
It’s a wild song even in the context of jazz, and complemented a lot of political work that jazz musicians were involved with at the time: whether that was refusing to play certain venues or actively protesting.
Nina Simone was possibly the biggest jazz name to be involved with civil rights and she was one of those hybrid people who was jazz and pop and felt a duty to use her platform and did so in an exciting way. The lyrics really stayed with me: “Oh, Lord, don’t let ‘em shoot us! Oh, Lord, don’t let ‘em stab us!” and I hate the fact that lyrics like that are still relevant.
