Conrad Herwig and the Latin Side All Stars
‘The Latin Side of Mingus’ (Savant Records)

A roaring, thundering giant of 20th century music, Charles Mingus was the kind of artist who continually forced us to challenge our received wisdom, raising questions such as: What is jazz? What are the blues? What is improvisation? What constitutes a song? 

The latter, in his music, was a particularly thorny conundrum. Inarguably, the bassist and bandleader was a great composer, but perhaps it’s better to take a step backward, to consider his music from a larger framework, and describe him more vaguely as an organizer of sound.

Surely, as a composer, there’s no one like him: Mingus (1924-79) didn’t write songs with lyrics that double as pop standards, like Duke Ellington; he didn’t devise modernistic variations on familiar chord changes (including the blues), like Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker; he didn’t write terse, memorable lines that instantly imprint themselves onto our brain cells, like Thelonious Monk. His music could not be boiled down to a straightforward melody line and then reconstructed by different ensembles, as can be done with the work of most songwriters and jazz composers.

With his new album, Conrad Herwig, the trombonist, arranger-composer, and bandleader, shows how this music can be reinterpreted in “The Latin Side of Mingus.” Mr. Herwig and his band, The Latin Side All Stars, have also just launched an 11-week run of Tuesday nights at the Django, in the basement of the Roxy hotel at Tribeca.  

Newcomers to the Mingus canon would be well advised to start with the two albums that he recorded for Columbia in 1959, “Mingus Ah Um” and “Mingus Dynasty.” Here is where the rambunctious, endlessly energetic bandleader got his act together, and, as we say, put his ducks in a row.  Mr. Herwig wisely launches his new project with the most striking numbers from each of them, “Gunslinging Bird” followed by “Boogie Stop Shuffle.” 

The title of “Gunslinging Bird” is rather inside baseball; Mingus is essentially griping about the abundance of young jazz musicians who chose to imitate Charlie Parker — this was just a few years after the jazz icon’s tragically young passing — rather than developing styles of their own. It’s a valid point, but still an odd sentiment to want to express in music. The tune itself is unencumbered by such baggage; Mr. Herwig brings out the catchy melody and redecorates it tastefully in latinate colors, with two percussionists (Robby Ameen on traps and Camilo Molina on congas) and a bracing solo by trumpeter Randy Brecker, himself a veteran of Mingus’s later bands.

“Boogie Stop Shuffle” is, along with “Better Git Hit in Your Soul,” just about Mingus’s most hummable work. Indeed, Quincy Jones did Mingus and all of us a favor when he devised a pop-big-band orchestration for his 1962 album “Big Band Bossa Nova,” showing how at least one slice of Mingus’s music could have been an essential piece of psychedelic dance music.

Later in the 1960s, Latin musicians gradually started using the term “boogaloo” as their rough equivalent of the boogie-woogie beat — that’s not an exact definition, but it will suffice for our purposes. Mr. Herwig’s interpretation thus could have been retitled “Stop Shuffle Boogaloo,” or something similar. He stresses the repetitive danceable melody in a fashion that shows its similarity to the later theme from the “Spider-Man” TV show, also a boogie-woogie/boogaloo. Too bad Mingus never realized that in his lifetime: He might have been entitled to some much-needed royalty money. 

In many ways, the most notable number here is “Don’t Let It Happen Here.” Mingus was the most prominent musician of his day to get involved with the jazz-and-poetry movement, usually the province of white beatniks and coffee houses. This 1965 composition elaborates upon the classic 1946 poem “First They Came…,” by the German pastor Martin Niemöller.  Mingus offers the line, “Then they came and they took the people of the Jewish faith, and I said nothing, because I had no faith left.” He expands the ending into, “Then one day they came and they took me, and I could say nothing because I was as guilty as they were, for not speaking out and saying that all men have a right to freedom.” 

Where Mingus recited that text himself in his performances, Mr. Herwig has recruited the inestimable Panama-born singer and social colossus, Rubén Blades, to do the recitation. In this version, the speech ends there, whereas in the original Mingus continues and gets even darker, railing against past and future holocausts in a way made even more dramatic by his calm, measured voice. In Mr. Herwig’s treatment, Señor Blades returns and repeats the recitation, this time en Espanol.  

At the opening night of his Django run this past Tuesday, Mr. Herwig didn’t include anything from the Mingus album, but there were selections from his other “Latin Side” projects, including Wayne Shorter (“This is for Albert”), John Coltrane (“Lonnie’s Lament”), and Horace Silver (“Song for my Father,” “Nutville”), the latter climaxing the show in an epic rhythmic duel between the two percussionists. The live group included saxophonist Craig Handy and pianist Bill O’Connell, as on the album, plus Alex Norris on trumpet and bassist Rubén Rodriguez. 

Equally notable on the album is how Mr. Herwig avoids those tunes by Mingus that already have Latin allusions, like “Cumbia and Jazz Fusion” (1977) or anything from the 1957 “Tijuana Moods” album. “The Latin Side of Mingus” concludes with one of the great man’s more spiritual pieces, “Better Git Hit in Your Soul,” a rousing 6/8 number that here seems more appropriate for the dance floor than the pulpit. 

May Mr. Herwig’s run at the Django prosper, and may the “Latin side” series continue. I noticed that he hasn’t yet addressed the canons of either Duke Ellington or Thelonious Monk, so maybe next time he’ll show us how close the A-train actually comes to Spanish Harlem.