You’d hardly know that Charles Mingus was one of the major jazz composers from the record-store bins: readings of Mingus tunes are still surprisingly rare aside from the albums of former Mingus alumni. So Dave Young’s Mainly Mingus, a live date recorded at Toronto’s Top o’ the Senator in 2002, serves as a welcome revisiting of an underexplored body of compositions. That said, the album works best if approached on its own merits rather than with memories of the rawness and experimentalism of Mingus’s own work. The dive-bombing heads of “Wham Bam Thank You Ma’am” and “All the Things You Could Be By Now If Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother” remain as abrasive as ever, but once the improvising kicks in the band reverts to hard-bop orthodoxy. But purely as a hard-bop album it’s a pretty good one, with taut work from Young, pianist Gary Williamson and drummer Terry Clarke, and a well-matched front line: trumpeter Kevin Turcotte’s talkative, good-humoured solos are answered by Perry White’s blunt, rather hoarse tenor saxophone. The results are enjoyable mainstream jazz, even if one might have hoped for a little more from a Mingus tribute; ironically enough, the standout track is the only non-Mingus piece, Young’s bluesy minor-key tune “Bass Clef.”

Nate Dorward

Previously unpublished