Blog: 1146 miles

“The Shoes of the Fisherman’s Wife are Some Jiveass Slippers” is the first track off of Mingus’s 1972 Let My Children Hear Music , which he described in the thank you section of his liner notes as “the best album [he] ever made.” Pianist Sy Johnson provided orchestration and arrangement for Mingus’s tremendously ambitious and far-reaching composition, which features a big band including upper woodwinds, mallet percussion, and timpani, in addition to the more traditional trumpets, trombones, saxophones, and rhythm section. The piece itself showcases not only Mingus’s excellent melody and harmony writing, but also his tasteful [...]