Charles Mingus Sextet with Eric Dolphy

Protean as he wants to be, Charles Mingus was all about the changes. He was a living example of the jazz maxim: Never play anything the same way once.

Nearly three decades after his death, in 1979, the composer’s juggernaut rolls on. The past year has seen the release of several first-rate recordings, whether augmented reissues such as In Paris: The Complete America Recordings, from 1970, or the previously unheard Cornell concert date that makes up this two-disc set. It’s one of the bassist’s killer small groups—a sextet with the simply amazing Jaki Byard on piano and the not-then-legendary Eric Dolphy on reeds, the beloved subject of the piece “So Long Eric,” which took on a wholly different meaning when Dolphy died a few months after this March concert.

Besides offering another chance to hear Dolphy display his improvisational ingenuity alongside the jocular Mingus, the recordings remind us how rich the bandleader’s musical vision was. It’s not only hearing Byard uncork a kaleidoscopic history of stride piano (on “ATFW You”), or the fluid ease of the interplay between the other band members (tenor saxophonist Clifford Jordan, drummer Dannie Richmond and trumpeter Johnny Coles), it’s the way half-hour epics like “Fables of Faubus” and “Meditations” become sweeping prisms of American sound, gathering up and flipping over everything in their path.

Outside of Duke Ellington, not much in jazz ever felt as generous, boisterous, agitated or tickled pink as the ever-mutable Mingus in his prime. This aural snapshot is as vivid as the day it was taken.—Steve Dollar