Tucson, Nogales are ready to celebrate this jazz bassist’s 100th

Mingus was born at Camp Little in April 1922, in Nogales, Arizona. His father, Charles Mingus, Sr., was a staff sergeant and a Buffalo Soldier stationed there as part of a regiment with the U.S. Army 10th Cavalry.

Mingus was still quite young when his family moved from Nogales to Watts, California, where he would grow up, absorbing the musical influences of Duke Ellington on the radio and congregational songs from his local church, according to the website charlesmingus.com.

His Southern Arizona origins had little impact on the musician he would one day become, but his name lives on in the state. And with the 100th anniversary of his birth this Friday, April 22, jazz fans across the region are ready to party.

On Thursday, April 21, The Century Room at Hotel Congress, 311 E. Congress, will host a Mingus Celebration concert, featuring the Tucson Jazz Institute. The show starts at 7 p.m. Tickets are $18-$23.

Friday, April 22, Mingus Dynasty, a rotating band of elite jazz players, some of whom performed with Mingus back in the day, will play the venue. The group will be joined by alto saxophonist Charles McPherson, who worked with Mingus on-and-off from 1960-74. Set times are at 7 and 9 p.m. Tickets are $35 in advance and $40 at the door.

The festivities will culminate with the Charles Mingus Centennial Jazz Festival, an all-day, free musical event to be held at the First Bank Yuma Nogales Business Center, 825 N. Grand Ave., in Nogales, on Saturday, April 23. The fest, running from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., will feature local and touring groups, including the Nogales High School Alumni Band and the Alan Lewine Xtet. Mingus Dynasty will headline starting at 3:30 p.m.

The Mingus Dynasty swing through Arizona, which actually starts Thursday, April 21, with a performance at The Nash in Phoenix, was arranged and sponsored by Alan Hershowitz, husband of Yvonne Ervin, a tireless promoter of jazz music in Southern Arizona until her untimely death from complications during surgery in 2018.

Ervin, who served as the founding director of the Tucson Jazz Society and launched the Tucson Jazz Festival, had long worked to raise the profile of Nogales as Mingus’ birthplace.

She held the first Mingus festival in Nogales, a jazz event that straddled both sides of the border, in 1993, and had advocated for years toward the creation of a Mingus Memorial Park, an effort she saw come to fruition in 2017.

“The folks in Nogales asked me to help out with this year’s festival,” Hershowitz said. “They were going to do their usual mix of high school bands and things like that. I asked myself what Yvonne would have done. She would have put together a tour with some major people who we knew and had worked with before.”

Hershowitz reached out to his connections with Mingus Dynasty and to McPherson

“The Jazz at Lincoln Center guys wanted to book (Charles) with Mingus Big Band on the same date,” Hershowitz said. “He told them, ‘I am doing this thing in Nogales. That’s important to me.’

“It is the resonance of having performed with Mingus, of knowing his music so well, and coming to celebrate his centennial in Arizona, in the city where he was born.”

In addition to the music, the festival will include the dedication of a memorial wall to Mingus that will also pay homage to Nogales’ Black history, within Mingus Memorial Park, 10 W. Western Ave.

The memorial wall features a likeness of Mingus on granite by Nogales artist Faith Posey, and mosaic works by artist David Fernandez and students from Nogales High School.

Plaques lining the wall are dedicated to the city’s Black community, past and present; the Buffalo Soldiers stationed in Nogales in the early 1900s; the city’s segregated grammar school, the Frank A. Reed School, which closed its doors in 1952; Major George W. Biggs, a Nogales native and Tuskegee Airman, who died in 2020.

The wall also has a plaque dedicated to Ervin.

Sharon Urman, president of Santa Cruz Advocates for the Arts, the group that spearheaded the memorial efforts, said the project has been years in the making.

“It evolved from being a memorial dedicated just to Charles Mingus, to honoring the African American historical presence in the area,” Urman said. “It is more than just a passion project. It is about community pride.”

For more information on all of the Mingus centennial events, visit mingusamongus.com