Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting

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Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting is a twelve-bar jazz composition by Charles Mingus at a fast pace .

Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting is one of the compositions of the US bandleader, bassist and composer, who is strongly fed by his early experiences in church music, gospel and blues. Under this title it was recorded by Mingus for the first time during the recording for his Atlantic album Blues and Roots (1959) and performed live in Europe ( Mingus at Antibes ) the following year . Mingus later took the piece back into the repertoire. Other gospel-like compositions by Mingus such as Better Get It in Your Soul or Slop were based on the same model.

Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting embodies Mingus' strong gospel and blues influence . Mingus writes about this: The piece “is church music. As a child, I heard this type of music when I went to church with my mother. The parishioners praise the Lord, name their sins, sing, shout and shout and get a little ecstatic. Some preachers cast out demons; they call the dialogue they maintain 'speaking in tongues' or 'speaking an unknown tongue (a language that the devil does not understand)' ”. In the recording from 1959, the voices of the worshipers are taken over by the saxophones in interplay, occasionally interrupted and driven by heckling and clapping from Mingus and other players.

Charles Mingus comments on the genesis and background of the piece: “I decided to learn the compositions by heart and then play their phrasing on the piano to the musicians piece by piece. I wanted them to learn the tone sequences in this way, they should have them in their ears rather than on paper, so that they would play the through-composed parts with the same spontaneity and fire as their own solo. "

Selection discography

literature

  • Horst Weber , Gerd Filtgen: Charles Mingus , Gauting: Oreos (Collection Jazz) undated

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ This also resulted in a version published on single in two parts (Atlantic 5006); Already in March 1958, the piece was heard in his recordings for the Jazz & Lyrik production by Langston Hughes Weary Blues . See Brian Priestley : Mingus. A Critical Biography . London 1985, p. 98, Andrew Homzy , in: Charles Mingus, More Than a Fake Book. P. 147
  2. ↑ So it was recorded again in 1978 by Mingus with a big band ( Me, Myself An Eye ), for which Mingus wrote a counter melody. See Homzy, p. 147
  3. ↑ See Priestley, p. 112, and Homzy, p. 147
  4. ↑ Weber / Fitgen - Charles Mingus, p 111
  5. ↑ Weber / Fitgen - Charles Mingus, p 110