Mingus Big Band, Dome Concert Hall, Brighton, Wed, May 23

11:21am Friday 18th May 2007

Sue Mingus freely admits she used to shoplift bootleg albums of her late husband's work in a spirited attempt to stop his fellow musicians from being ripped off.

"There was a time when I would walk into record stores and if they had bootleg Charlie Mingus releases I would take them to keep the material off the markets," she says.

Now New York-based Sue, who was married to the bass player and bandleader until his death in 1979, has a slightly more subtle way of keeping his music alive and making sure his fellow musicians get their dues.

Sue runs the reissue label Revenge, which brings out previously unreleased collections of Mingus concerts in an attempt to beat the bootleggers, although she admits with the rise of the internet it is a losing battle.

And she is the artistic director of several groups dedicated to playing his music the way he would have: the Mingus Big Band, the Mingus Dynasty and Mingus Orchestra.

"All bring something different to his music," says Sue.

The 14-piece Mingus Big Band is about to cross the water for its first ever UK tour which takes in the Brighton Dome, quite a change from its regular weekly residency at New York's Iridium Jazz Club.

The Big Band grew out of the smaller seven-piece Mingus Dynasty, which expanded after a performance of his piece for 31 musicians, Epitaph, in 1989.

The band plays selections from across Mingus' wide backcatalogue, which amounts to more than 300 scores ranging from his complex atonal and abstract pieces to simple blues.

"What we try to do is give a sense of the enormous scale, scope and variety of Mingus composition," says Sue. "Charles wrote in all genres."

The band is drawn from New Yorkbased musicians who worked with Charles or were influenced by him.

"When I started the Dynasty it was not long after Charles died,"

says Sue. "Everyone had played with Mingus except the bass player, of course.

"I have a large pool of musicians who have been performing this music since 1980 - close to 30 years.

That pool grows and there are a lot of young musicians who have come to the music."

Sue met Charles in 1964 in a jazz club, and stayed with him for the next 15 years until his death at the age of 56 from the rare nerve disease A m y o t r o p i c Lateral Sclerosis.

T h r o u g h o u t what Sue describes as their "tempestuous relationship" she was more involved in booking his concerts than his music while he was alive, although now she has become, in her own words, "a band leader without being a professional musician".

"You can't look back," says Sue.

"Of course the music lives on and Charles lives on through his music and musicians.

"The greatest change in the perception of Mingus since his death is he is regarded as a composer rather than a bandleader and virtuoso bass player with the stage presence that he had.

"That doesn't exist any more.

What remains is what he said he was first and foremost, a composer with an enormous body of compositions."

• Starts 8pm, tickets from £18. Call 01273 709709.

See Wednesday's The Argus for a 2-for-1 ticket offer.

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