Mingus Ah Um just might be the most welcoming point of entry to the sprawling continent of jazz. Fierce in expression but controlled in form, the 1959 LP draws out a rootsy warmth from beneath the bebop that had consumed bandstands since World War II, forging a sound that feels at once confrontational, mischievous, and generous. Charles Mingus—bassist, composer, irascible iconoclast—had a large, rotating ensemble, a collective called the Jazz Workshop that he treated like one of the anti-mainstream theatrical troupes that had cropped up all over his home of New York City. Mingus and his faithful were about both process and product; the bandleader wanted to nurture a tradition, not rupture it.

On Mingus Ah Um, he reintroduced the ardence of the Black church to jazz, punctuating opener “Better Git It In Your Soul” with preacherly shouts. Meanwhile, his tactile upright stylings meet the clack of Dannie Richmond’s drums, fostering a clattering percussiveness borrowed from the blues. Mingus was a master of tone—as a player, sure, but more important as a composer. He knew how to capture the buoyancy and joy of a concert in the studio, how to coax sorrow or outrage from a brass section. His emotional eloquence pushed music toward the future.

“Fables of Faubus,” first released on Mingus Ah Um, bemoaned the status quo to rouse the would-be concerned from their slumber. The composition took aim at America’s legacy of oppression and, alongside Sonny Rollins’ 1958 record Freedom Suite, set the stage for political jazz as a force in the 1960s. When the recording came out, it was perhaps the genre’s most overt condemnation of Jim Crow this side of Billie Holiday’s rendition of “Strange Fruit.”

The song’s subject, Orval Faubus, was the governor of Arkansas and a featured bit player in America’s deranged commitment to anti-Black bigotry. Several years after the Supreme Court kickstarted integration with its 1954 decision in Brown Vs. Board of Education, the NAACP managed to enroll a small group of Black students in Little Rock’s Central High School. Faubus, the son of a Socialist, ended up capitulating to Confederate sympathies, as many segregationist Southern Democrats did, to appeal to his base. He deployed the state’s National Guard to greet his teenage constituents. Soldiers massed around Central, crossing rifles to prevent the Black students, who would soon be immortalized as the Little Rock Nine, from entering the grounds. An angry mob of white adults hurled slurs and spat on the high schoolers.

When these kids finally managed to attend classes, they were beaten and bullied by classmates. Fifteen-year-old Melba Pattillo Beals recalled having acid thrown at her eyes. (She ended up moving to California for the rest of high school after finishing her junior year at Central.) The house of another, Carlotta Walls, was bombed a month before her graduation, and the police subsequently tortured her father in an unsuccessful attempt to coerce a confession. Walls was the only member of the Little Rock Nine who graduated from Central—she later said that she believed that her chemistry teacher had helped other students build the explosive that targeted her. Faubus’ debacle, which garnered massive international notice, lasted for nearly three weeks, until President Eisenhower took control of the state’s National Guard and forced him to comply with federal law.

Mingus was so disgusted by bad news wafting up from below the Mason-Dixon line that he broke his career’s mold and wrote a song with lyrics, the kind of loose barroom call-and-response that his hero and former collaborator Charlie Parker swaggered through on the lighthearted Dizzy Gillespie and Kenny Clarke tune “Salt Peanuts.” Mingus’ content was grave and his exclamations thick with bile: “Oh Lord, don’t let ‘em tar and feather us/Oh Lord, no more Swastikas/Oh Lord, no more Ku Klux Klan.” Then he asks his drummer, “Name me someone who’s ridiculous, Dannie!” Richmond hollers back, “Governor Faubus!”

As the song progresses, Mingus and his band ratchet up the intensity, calling out “Nazi Fascist supremacists” and reciting the names of a litany of depraved politicians who crossed party lines and geographical divisions, among them then-New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller and President Eisenhower. “Two, Four, Six, Eight!” Richmond yells, and in unison with Mingus, “They brainwash you and teach you hate!”

These lyrics, though, did not appear on Mingus Ah Um. They were purportedly censored by Columbia, with whom Mingus had just signed a recording contract. He first laid them to tape in October 1960 for Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus, bankrolled by a smaller and more adventurous label, Candid, with Nat Hentoff in the producer’s chair—best known as a jazz critic and a feisty political commentator for The Village Voice. The band simulated a club atmosphere for the studio session, with Mingus reminding his fake audience not to applaud, “rattle ice” in their glasses, or “ring the cash register.”

Titled “Original Faubus Fables,” this version, to many, is unbeatable for its agit-prop energy. Yet the lyricless Ah Um version remains the composition’s definitive take. Mingus employs a wider breadth of horn players on this track—a trombonist, two tenor saxophonists, and one alto. Together, they seem to talk through their variations on the melody, contrasting staccato bleats and deep, soulful pulls as they bleed in and out of harmony. “Fables Of Faubus” lumbers forth, defiant and punch-drunk, before it gains speed, as Mingus handles his gut strings with heavy fingers and pianist Horace Parlan navigates a seasick solo. Phrases alternate between the satirical and sorrowful. The composer, unwilling to give listeners relief from his music’s emotional complexity, offers a more eloquent statement with this instrumental arrangement than he would with words.

The song was a forecast. Soon after Mingus finished Ah Um, Nina Simone delivered the performance that became the basis for her towering Live at Town Hall, which stressed themes of Black empowerment that marked her music throughout the 1960s. The next year, Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln recorded their monumental We Insist!, perhaps the most direct melding yet of jazz and the messages of the Civil Rights Movement. This was protest music before it was defined and commodified by jingle-jangle white folkies with acoustic guitars (a couple of whom famously signed to Columbia). Mingus was a few years ahead of musical trends, but right on time for addressing a country in distress. A decade of rage and change burned in his wake.