WHO can resist the irrepressible musical brilliance and politically regenerative sound of the 14-piece Mingus Big Band and their tribute to the great bass man?

Crammed with powerful US virtuosi, his genius lives again in their every performance.

At Ronnie’s, the quiet and reflective opening of Todo Modo infuses the shining trombones of Robin Eubanks and Conrad Herwig and the high-note trapeze solo of Walter White’s flugelhorn while in the wry wit of Sigmund Freud, Jason Marshall’s gut-wrenching baritone saxophone chorus blows open Mingus’s soul.

In 1957, state troopers in Arkansas blocked the entry of black students into their schools and Mingus’s sonic lampoon Fables of Faubus told the story.

Now, in 2019, Philip Harper’s ear-splitting, blues-sodden chorus cries out and you think of all the British working-class youth, black and white, excluded from their schools and turning to knives.

When the great tenor saxophonist Lester Young died in 1959, Mingus wrote the eulogy Goodbye Pork Pie Hat and fellow tenorist Abraham Burton, unaccompanied at first, then with bassist Boris Kozlov, plays the tune with such moving eloquence that the tears still fall at Ronnie’s some six decades later.