The Mingus Dynasty Quintet featuring special guest artist Charles McPherson (who worked extensively with Mingus) honored the centennial year of legendary jazz bassist and composer Charles Mingus with a three-city tour of Southern Arizona.

The tour kicked off on Thursday, April 21, 2022 at The Nash Jazz Club in Phoenix, Arizona’s premiere jazz venue. The next evening, on Charles Mingus’s 100th birthday, the celebration continued at Arizona’s newest major jazz club, the Century Room at Hotel Congress in Tucson. The club’s name celebrates both the 100th year of Hotel Congress and Charles Mingus’s birth in Nogales, Arizona. On April 23, 2022, the tour moved on to participate in the annual Mingus festival held in Nogales, and to dedicate the new Mingus Memorial built at the former entrance to Camp Little, where Charles Mingus was born and his father served as a Buffalo Soldier.

The music and memory of Charles Mingus were passionately promoted in Arizona by the vision and hard work of the late Yvonne Ervin. In 1993, years before founding the Tucson Jazz Festival, Yvonne organized “Jazz on the Border: The Mingus Project,” which included youth education, a performance of Mingus’s Epitaph and the world premiere of a long-lost movement from that masterwork, and free concerts on both sides of the border (Nogales, Arizona and Nogales, Sonora). Jack Walrath, who was to be featured in the current tour, conducted the performances and appeared with other Mingus alumni at that event.

The Mingus Project inspired jazz lovers in Nogales to establish the Charles Mingus Hometown Music Festival. Upon returning to Arizona in 2011, Yvonne led the Santa Cruz Advocates for the Arts (SCAA) in expanding the festival and partnering with the city of Nogales to build the Mingus Memorial.

Over recent years, Yvonne brought both Mingus Dynasty and this tour’s special guest, Mingus alumnus Charles McPherson to Nogales to headline the festival in Nogales as well as to Tucson. The construction of the Mingus Memorial is now complete and was dedicated in Nogales on the final day of the tour after playing at The Nash Jazz Club in Phoenix, and at the Century Room in Tucson on Mingus’s 100th birthday. The tour’s lead sponsor was Alan Hershowitz, Yvonne Ervin’s widower.