Chrissie Hynde Instagram – In mid-September, Mingus announced that he was heading out to the Monterey Jazz Festival in California. Along with other compositions he had written, he planned to present an extended work about integration that he called ”Meditations on a Pair of Wirecutters”. ”It’s fully orchestrated,” he said. . I wasn’t sure why the expanded band was special, but he was exuberant, and his high spirits were growing higher. He explained that the piece he had written had become a hymn to injustice, that he had dedicated it to black Americans imprisoned behind electric barbed wire in the South. . ”They don’t have ovens and gas faucets in this country yet,” he said grimly as a waitress appeared with a hunk of Gorgonzola and two giant steaks. ”But they have electric fences. So I wrote a prayer about some wire cutters. I wrote a prayer we’d find some scissors and get out!” . – Extract from NYT article ‘My Mingus’ (2002) by Sue Graham Mingus . Chrissie Hynde’s cover of Meditation on a Pair of Wirecutters can be heard on new album ‘Valve Bone Woe’ – out September 6th. Pre-order: chrissiehynde.com