Performing jazz compositions by the late, great Charles Mingus.
Charles Mingus (1922-79) double-bass player, composer and pianist: Born on a military base in Nogales, Arizona in 1922 and raised in Watts, California, his earliest musical influences came from the church-- choir and group singing-- and from hearing Duke Ellington over the radio when he was eight years old. He studied double bass and composition (five years with H. Rheinshagen, principal bassist of the New York Philharmonic, and compositional techniques with the legendary Lloyd Reese) while absorbing vernacular music from the great jazz masters, first-hand. In the 1940s he played with Louis Armstrong, Kid Ory, Lionel Hampton and Billy Taylor. In the 1950s after working with Charlie Parker, Bud Powell and others, he formed his own publishing and recording companies to protect and document his growing repertoire of original music. He also founded the Jazz Workshop, a group which enabled young composers to have their new works performed in concert and on recordings. Although he wrote his first concert piece, "Half-Mast Inhibition," when he was 17 years old, it was not recorded until 20 years later by a 22-piece orchestra with Gunther Schuller conducting. It was the presentation of "Revelations" which combined jazz and classical idioms, at the 1955 Brandeis Festival of the Creative Arts, that established him as one of the foremost jazz composers of his day. The New Yorker wrote: "For sheer melodic and rhythmic and structural originality, his compositions may equal anything written in western music in the twentieth century." www.mingusmingusmingus.com
The Charles Mingus Orchestra was assembled in 1999 by Sue Mingus, and plays with the intensity of the Mingus Big Band, but with a focus on composition and less emphasis on soloing. Its distinctive sound emerges from an expanded repertory and more exotic instrumentation, including bassoon, bass clarinet, French horn, and guitar.
New York City, NY; NYC