[fount_pirat]

It's interesting that he's presenting Mingus music in a repertory context. I've long been an advocate of Mingus' stuff, and I've always felt that he's been shortchanged in the canon. I found out why when I put together a series of "Mingusmania" septets and sextettes in the mid-nineties (we played a few times at the Glass Slipper and were featured on Bravo Television). Mingus' stuff is really hard, man.

He seems to have two types of writing styles. Blues based, open ended stuff like "Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting" that's hard to play because of shifting metric structures (like his famous gambit of moving back and for between 6/8 and 4/4) and stuff with insanely hard changes like "Remember Rockefeller at Attica." That and the fact that he wrotefor many different types of instrumentation makes it hard to play a lot of his stuff without significant re-orchestration, and that task is made difficult by his unorthodox (yet utterly consistent in it's internal logic. He's like Monk that way. Got his own system of counterpoint. Ellingtonian, but funkier) way of voicing intruments in the front line.

In analysing his autograph scores, one finds that he writes small band arrangements as if for a big band, with fully realized piano parts and specific voicings , yet there's all the OTHER stuff, (like "Moanin') where there's no written music at all, he just taught the players the parts orally.

Good luck, Hugh. Good on you, and Godspeed. I wish I could be there to hear it. I'd a never of been crazy enough to attempt "Black Saint." (although "Sue's Changes" is still in my quintet's book. We don't play it often, believe me.)