Seizing the Moment
Four years ago, Diego Mongue ’25 envisioned his senior year fully dedicated to his interest in the arts. Now, as he’s approaching graduation in June, he’s living that dream.
A music major from Williamstown, Mongue spends Tuesdays and Thursdays diving into the courses “Comic Lives: Graphic Novels and Dangerous Histories of the African Diaspora,” “A History of Jazz” and “Composition IV.” Outside of classes and assignments, he spends time working in the recording studio that he built in his family home.
There, he’ll spend hours—and, sometimes, an entire weekend—composing music for his group the Diego Mongue Band, which combines elements of blues, jazz fusion and rock. Blues Blast Magazine calls the group’s first album, While You Were Gone, “a fascinating listen” and “beautifully produced … with some very impressive musicianship.”
Mongue is also doing a senior capstone project under the guidance of Sandra Burton, Williams’ Lipp Family Director of Dance, that explores questions about what it means to create art. “The relationship between dance and music has been very strong during my time at Williams,” he says, adding that he’s increasingly begun to see himself as an artist rather than strictly a musician.
His project, which he plans to perform this spring at Studio 9 in North Adams, Mass., blends music and dance with his love of classic “creature features” and films by David Lynch and Rob Reiner.
As Mongue’s three original short films play in the background, his silhouette is projected onto the screen while he dances and plays multiple instruments live in the room—an idea born from his choreography classes with Burton.
“I can choose to let my silhouette be like a true shadow of myself, or I can move separately from it,” says Mongue, who was a teaching assistant for the student ensemble Kusika, a drumming and dance group focusing on styles from Africa and the African diaspora. “It’s like my shadow is doing something that I’m not, which I think is cool.”
Mongue grew up in a musical household and was encouraged to explore different instruments. The son of Michael Mongue, who is a visual artist, and Gina Coleman ’90, the lead singer and founder of the Grammy-winning blues band Misty Blues, he began playing drums at age 5 and then learned guitar and bass. Recently, he picked up pedal steel guitar, an instrument often used in Hawaiian, country and gospel music. He’s also learned about sound engineering.
In an interview with Berkshire Magazine, Tor Krautter, artistic director of programming at Berkshire Theatre Group and leader of the bands Rev Tor and Dead Man’s Waltz, describes Mongue as “a super talented young musician” whose passion is undeniable. “He has that spark that you are just born with, or, in his case, born into.”
In the fall, Mongue recorded a live, two-hour concert on the MainStage of the ’62 Center for Theatre and Dance at Williams as part of an independent study project digging into group improvisation. “The idea of a live album has been something I’ve wanted to do for so long,” he says. Inspired by jam bands and musicians like Phish, The Allman Brothers Band and Frank Zappa, he says, “There’s something about what these people did in the moment that is truly them.”
With graduation fast approaching, Mongue’s summer calendar is already filling up. First is a tour with the Berkshires-based Misty Blues, making stops in Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama and the U.K. “When we’re on, there are not a whole lot of people that can make music the way we do together,” Mongue says of playing with the band. He’s also working on another album with the Diego Mongue Band featuring vocalist Chantell McFarland and multi-instrumentalists Chase Bradshaw ’25 and Cameron Bencivenga. After that, he plans to write percussion-driven music to accompany a dance piece by Tsedaye Makonnen, a visiting artist at Williams whom Mongue met this year through Kusika. The performance is scheduled to take place this fall at The Clark Art Institute.
Mongue says he’s excited about this next chapter and the possibilities ahead. “If there’s going to be a time in my life to not have a ton of responsibility and just tour around and see if I can make a living from playing,” he says, “now would be the time to do that.”