Mingus' Magnum Opus: 'Epitaph' In Concert

[Dave Monroe]

Mingus' Magnum Opus: 'Epitaph' In Concert

NPR.org, July 24, 2008 - As creative chair for jazz at the Los Angeles
Philharmonic, bass player Christian McBride gets to program four
concerts a year. The moment he got the job, he put Charles Mingus'
monumental, 2 1/2-hour jazz symphony "Epitaph" at the top of his list.

When you hear Mingus' music, that's about as advanced as you can get,"
McBride says. "But it's always rooted — it's always coming out of that
real indigenous black tradition. I'm talking about, like, work songs
and gospel, you know, all the way up through Ellington, all the way up
through the strife of the '60s. All of that is in his music."

Jazz historian and composer Gunther Schuller conducted the entire
concert in front of a 31-piece jazz orchestra. He says that Charles
Mingus was a man of many moods — and that he sees them in the very
fabric of Mingus' masterpiece.

"I knew him quite well," Schuller says. "He could be as gentle as a
baby, and he could also be so full of tantrums and explosive and
angry, and all of this range of feelings is in this piece. It's all
there: It's like a musical picture of Mingus' personality — from the
most beautiful gentle ballads, lyric pieces, to these extremely
chaotic, disorganized, wild pieces."

By the time "Epitaph" premiered in 1962, Mingus was already well-known
as a composer, bandleader, and virtuoso bass player, a musician who
had worked with Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, and Duke Ellington, among
others. But how Mingus came to write the piece remains something of a
mystery.

Gunther Schuller says Mingus probably composed most of the piece over
a three-year period in the late '50s. He scored it for a 31-piece
double jazz orchestra, and got an all-star group to play it. But the
first performance was a travesty.

"There's this famous, legendary disastrous concert and recording
session in Town Hall [in New York], where I happened to be present,"
Schuller says. "And it was one of the most chaotic and frustrating and
disastrous concerts that anybody has ever heard, because the music was
so difficult and so strange. He hadn't had a chance to rehearse it
properly and the copyists were, indeed, even still copying some of the
music –- it wasn't even fully ready. And so the musicians couldn't
handle it, and so eventually the concert was aborted when the union
stage crew said, 'Wait a minute, it's midnight, we've gotta stop
this.'"

Distraught, Mingus never visited the score again in his lifetime. But
10 years after his death in 1979, the score — four feet high and 4,235
measures long — was discovered in a closet in his apartment. Composer
and arranger Andrew Homzy reconstructed it, and Schuller conducted the
premiere in 1989. According to Schuller, the work was titled
"Epitaph," because a few movements in the score had that word in block
letters.

Astonishingly, when the enormous score for "Epitaph" was found, it was
missing one thing -– a finale. So Schuller says that he and the band
improvised one, using Mingus as a guide.

"I decided, in putting this piece together, that we should do what he
did so many times in his own appearances at clubs with his groups –-
that is to say, he dictated an ending," he says. "And he would cue
everybody: What they should do and when they play and be hollering and
playing on his bass at the same time. And so we did something like
that for the entire orchestra."

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