They had such great plans: a live band, 200 people young and old all dancing freely together, performers and audience intermingling in a rapturous, participative party of a show. Needless to say, that picture is far from Covid-safe. The event would have been Clod Ensemble’s live staging of Charles Mingus’s classic jazz album The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, with the Nu Civilisation Orchestra and a company of dancers leading the groove. That show is on ice, but for Clod’s artistic director Suzy Willson, the music itself and the momentum of the project was just too good to let go, so she has devised a different way of taking it to the people. The project has been reborn as a “listening party” as part of the London jazz festival. It’s a chance to get engrossed in Mingus’s 1963 recording, a masterpiece of avant-garde ambition, interspersed with discussion from Willson and co-artistic director Paul Clark, along with Peter Edwards and Gary Crosby from the Nu Civilisation Orchestra. In tandem with the music is a film featuring the dancers improvising in response to the score, all shot separately in the studio but collaged together in an occasionally psychedelic way. It’s far from a standard performance film or the at-home videos we’re getting used to. “I wanted to create a world that’s beyond the domestic world,” says Willson. “To somehow lift us into a slightly alternative reality.” Watching the dancers’ responses really works to concentrate the mind on the music and help you get inside the reeds and rasps of the instruments, the sultry wail and forceful rhythms of this complex, richly textured piece. The original idea to work with Mingus’s music came about some years back when Willson and Clark went to see Nu Civilisation Orchestra play it live. It was a sit-down concert but everyone was itching to get up and dance. When Willson discovered that Mingus had originally written the six-movement work as a ballet – although it was never performed at the time – it seemed natural to take it back to the dance floor. “It’s a kind of ecstatic score,” says Willson. “It’s soulful, it’s got loads of possibilities to move in many different ways.” “There’s something a bit Bacchic about it, isn’t there?” says Clark. “It’s dirty and repetitive and wild and it has loads of catchy riffs.” The listening party audience is welcome to take a seat and get lost in sound and vision, but viewers are invited to dance if the mood takes them. Clark laments the lost connection between jazz music and dancing, citing the faster and more challenging bebop of the 1940s as the nail in that coffin (although there’s a definite re-emergence of dancing in the current London jazz scene at clubs such as Steam Down). “It’s the same with everything,” says Clark. “More people listen to music than make it. A lot of people watch more cookery programmes than cook their own meals. Being a spectator rather than a participant is a hell of a lot easier.” But make that little bit of effort and the rewards are great. “From a muso perspective, a person who is trying to dance to music is the best listener,” says Clark. “They’re listening with more focus, more detail, and more sustained energy than most people who are sitting in a seat.” How could you resist? “The music’s so sensual and visceral,” says Willson. “There’s a real feeling of being alive.” She pauses. “Which is always something to aim for.” The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady: Listening Party is available online, 19 November.