One of the many complaints hurled at Ken Burns’s PBS-funded Jazz documentary was that it dedicated only a few minutes to the career of jazz bassist and composer Charles Mingus. To some degree this was understandable: 20 years after his death, Mingus remains a controversial and often overlooked figure. His compositions, which range from hard-bop to free, symphonic, and Afro-Latin jazz, are rarely called in jam sessions or rehashed on tribute albums.

Local jazz saxophonist James Merenda has a simple explanation: “They’re hard, that’s number one,” he says over lunch at Newbury Street’s Other Side Café. “He wrote in difficult keys like G-flat or D-flat, they’re not in standard forms, you don’t find them written out correctly a lot of the time. The chord changes aren’t predictable, they’re deceiving. There’s a lot of care and craft in the compositions, and you have to spend a lot of time with the records to learn them.”

Merenda is putting in the time and doing his part to revitalize Mingus’s legacy. Over the past two years, he’s been performing and reinterpreting Mingus with a variety of groups — the Masked Marvels, Portrait of Mingus, the Mingus Three. Although the New England Conservatory grad approaches the task with the fervor of a lifelong convert, he only recently discovered this passion. Two summers ago he enrolled in class on Mingus taught by local Third Stream pianist Ran Blake at NEC. “Before I took the class I only checked out Mingus a bit, I only had a few of his records. Now I have about 59 of them.”

Merenda was attracted to the knotty complexity of the bassist’s compositions. “Every single piece almost has the effect of a classical composition, where the composition is really serious on its own, before the improvisation. There was so much already embedded in the piece. It wasn’t just here’s-the-head-let’s-all-solo-here-comes-the-head-again. There was something about the whole process that really transformed the jazz form.”

After learning a handful tunes by ear, Merenda began to arrange rehearsal sessions with other local players, developing a core group of Mingus tunes and musicians to choose from. But he’s chosen not to take his concept and crew on the traditional jazz circuit — upscale hotel bars, summer festivals, sit-down cafés. “I don’t want that slick club type of jazz, you know, like ‘Let’s buy a seven-dollar Heineken.’ “We don’t play easy-listening jazz. I’m not in it to make the club happy and have people talk or whatever.”

Instead, he’s sought out gigs at raucous rock clubs, sticky dives, and worn-down watering holes. He’s on a mission to bring jazz down from the ivory tower. His regular circuit includes bookings in the Corner at the Middle East, the Green Street Grill, the Common Ground, Costello’s Tavern in Jamaica Plain, and, most often, the Choppin’ Block on Huntington Avenue. Known affectionately as the Block, this last is Merenda’s home away from home; he’s been playing there every Thursday night for more than a year. It’s the only bar in Boston (and probably the entire country) where you can buy lottery tickets, play video games, and regularly listen to radical reinterpretations of Mingus.

“There are pluses and minuses of playing at the Block,” he explains. “They don’t sit and buy the band drinks all night, but they also don’t tell us what to do. They tell us to start at 10 p.m., and then from 10 to 2, we could all sit there and yell at the top of our lungs for four hours with no instruments and they wouldn’t care.”

Merenda and his rotating cast of improvisers serve up wild, energetic, freewheeling jazz that combines tradition and innovation. Like many young jazz musicians, he’s looking for an artistic space that balances jazz’s historical bent with its need for constant forward motion. Unsatisfied by the strict neo-traditionalist viewpoint offered by Wynton Marsalis and the anything-goes irreverence of John Zorn and his downtown crew, he’s carved out his own niche somewhere in the middle. His playing is rooted in gutbucket blues and the Tin Pan Alley melodicism, but it doesn’t ignore the woolly developments of the post-bop era.

Lester Young, Billie Holiday, Ornette Coleman, and Albert Ayler are among Merenda’s biggest influences, and his playing conjures up all four of these titans, plus a few more. Both aggressive and lyrical, gestural and bluesy, he uses the hair-raising techniques of post-Ornette jazz — overblown multi-phonics, dissonant tones and textures, angular screeches and skronks — but he never loses sight of the melody. Bobbing and moving, he plays each tune as if it were his last, digging hard into every note, attacking the chord changes, and generally overwhelming the alto saxophone with rippling runs, staccato blurts, and deep, bassy growls.

Merenda says he doesn’t want his interpretations to “sound like the original recording,” whether that means taking “Fables of Faubus” at a breakneck speed, writing new harmony lines for “Remember Rockefeller at Attica,” or just bringing his own voice to a piece. “Mingus was about fire. He was about making people’s fucking hair stand up. I think that’s what I’m trying to do, by bringing improvisers of that impact to the music. So not only are these tunes going to get played, they’re going to get pushed to the wall.”

James Merenda’s Masked Marvels perform every Thursday at the Choppin’ Block. He also leads a jazz jam session every Sunday at Costello’s Tavern in Jamaica Plain.

ALTHOUGH ENUMA ELISH are only a woodwinds-and-drum duo, their sound is much richer than you might expect. Named after an ancient Sumerian creation myth, they play expansive “electro-acoustic loop-based trance” music, as they describe it, using samples, loops, and field recordings alongside traditional instruments. The result is pancultural ethno-grooves buoyed by non-Western percussion, Egyptian street sounds, and soothing Indonesian gongs, as well as deep electronic bass lines, booming snare drums, and sinewy sax blowing. Formed by drummer Yuri Zbitnoff and woodwind player Warren Jones in the fall of 1999, the duo are equal parts ethnomusicology project and post-rock experiment. Which makes sense, since Jones is a graduate student in ethnomusicology at Tufts and Zbitnoff is a Berklee graduate with 10 years of rock gigging behind him.

Inspired by field recordings made by Jones on a trip through Spain, Morocco, India, Egypt, and China, the two combine their love for exotic rhythms, improvised interaction, and, as Zbitnoff puts it, “creating a musical shape over a long period of time.” Their debut album, When Above . . . (Lithiq), is similar in sound and spirit to the Fourth World music of trumpeter Jon Hassell, Bill Laswell’s Material project, and Brian Eno’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. The music resides in an imagined world made possible by digital juxtaposition and postmodern cut-and-paste techniques.

But Enuma Elish have more than digital trickery up their collective sleeve. While Zbitnoff keeps the beat roiling and shifting with inventive drum work, Jones supplies melody and timbre with everything from bass clarinet to tenor sax to bassoon, flip-flopping from simple melodic ornaments to full-on cathartic wails over gamelan-inspired ambient pieces (“Hanging Garden”), fierce drum ’n’ bass (“Cairo Cab Ride”), and Orientalized trip-hop (“Compression”). The music may be centered on the groove, but Zbitnoff points out that it’s not quite full-bore dance material. “We’ve had Enuma Elish ‘Dance Party USA’ at some gigs, but some people just bliss out and wave their arms in the air, and most just sit and zone out.”

Enuma Elish celebrate the release of When Above . . . this Friday, May 18, at the Milky Way in Jamaica Plain.

MEDESKI MARTIN & WOOD drummer Billy Martin is using some of his counterculture influence to help out another deserving jazz musician. Local drummer Bob Moses was one of Martin’s instructors at New England Conservatory in the ’80s, and now Martin’s Amulet imprint is reissuing and getting distribution for a handful of Moses’s old recordings, including 1973’s Bittersuite in the Ozone and 1987’s Love Everlasting (a duet with guitarist Tisziji Munoz). According to Amulet’s general manager, Jason Spies, the label is going to continue the project in 2001; he hopes to issue a reprint of Moses’s excellent 1982 album, When Elephants Dream of Music.