Elvis Costello is at it again. The singer/songwriter/punk rocker/new waver must have done well conducting the Charles Mingus Orchestra at UCLA’s Royce Hall in September, because he was invited to join the group at Avatar Studios in Manhattan to help record a track for the Mingus Big Band’s upcoming Tonight at Noon: Three or Four Shades of Love.
The album will feature Costello on Mingus’ “Invisible Lady,” to which Costello added lyrics. Sue Mingus, Charles’ widow, produced the sessions and the results will be heard in April when Dreyfus Jazz releases Tonight at Noon to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the legendary bassist’s birth.
In the picture, Sue Mingus and Costello take a break during the Tonight at Noon Sessions.
Related Posts
Sonny Terry/Brownie McGhee: Backwater Blues
Start Your Free Trial to Continue Reading
Become a JazzTimes member to explore our complete archive of interviews, profiles, columns, and reviews written by music’s best journalists and critics.
Jonathan Butler: The Simple Life
Jonathan Butler’s optimistic music belies a dirt-poor childhood growing up in a South Africa segregated by apartheid. Live in South Africa, a new CD and DVD package, presents a sense of the resulting inner turmoil, mixed with dogged resolve, that paved the way to his status as an icon in his country and successful musician outside of it. Looking back, the 46-year-old Butler says today, the driving forces that led to his overcoming apartheid-the formal policy of racial separation and economic discrimination finally dismantled in 1993-were family, faith and abundant talent.
“When we were kids, our parents never talked about the ANC [African National Congress] or Nelson Mandela,” he says. Butler was raised as the youngest child in a large family. They lived in a house patched together by corrugated tin and cardboard, in the “coloreds only” township of Athlone near Cape Town. “They never talked about struggles so we never knew what was happening.”
Start Your Free Trial to Continue Reading
Become a JazzTimes member to explore our complete archive of interviews, profiles, columns, and reviews written by music’s best journalists and critics.
Kurt Elling: Man in the Air
Nate Chinen makes the argument that Kurt Elling is the most influential jazz vocalist of our time
Harry Connick, Jr.: Direct Hits
Two decades after his commercial breakthrough, Harry Connick Jr. taps legendary producer Clive Davis for an album of crooner roots and beloved tunes