TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/091090/0910440.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.9 KB | 126 lines

                                                                                MUSIC, Page 92

An Epitaph Comes Back to Life


Charles Mingus' long-forgotten jazz masterwork is getting its
due

By JOHN ELSON


    It is the longest and most richly textured of jazz
compositions -- a suite of 18 sections comprising nearly 4,000
bars of music, with a performance time of more than two hours.
By jazz standards, the forces required to perform it are almost
Mahlerian: a 31-member band with full complements of brass and
saxes, plus such normally nonswinging instruments as piccolo
and contrabass clarinet. The work was played once in the
composer's lifetime, but in a truncated form that left him
despairing and furious. The score was put aside, abandoned.

    This botched masterwork is titled Epitaph, and its composer
was Charles Mingus, the protean jazz bassist who died in 1979
at age 56. "There has been nothing like it in jazz, before or
since," says Gunther Schuller, the multifaceted composer,
conductor and musicologist who edited the score, which was
discovered among Mingus' papers after his death. Schuller
directed a proper world premiere of the work at New York City's
Lincoln Center last year. (CBS has issued a recording of the
performance.) He was at the podium last week for another
Manhattan performance, which was to be reprised a few days later
at Tanglewood and at the Chicago jazz festival. Sue Mingus,
the composer's widow and flame keeper, is trying to schedule
performances in Europe next spring.

    Schuller calls Epitaph "a musical summary of one of the
great jazz composers of the century, from the sweet and gentle
Mingus to the angry Mingus." In style, Epitaph is
characteristic of his orchestral compositions: echoes of gospel
songs and his acknowledged master, Duke Ellington; abrupt
rhythmic shifts; fleeting lyrical passages (often scored for
piano or vibes) that unexpectedly explode into dissonant
choruses of yawps and growls; high-register solos underscored
by ostinato refrains on basses and trombones. Some of the
sections allow for considerable improvisation: a full-throttle
version of Better Get It in Your Soul -- one of Mingus'
best-known tunes, which he recorded with various groups -- is
jammed by a combo playing in front of the big band. Other parts
are rigidly scored, almost atonal in bleakness and with little
jazz feeling.

    Mingus specified most of the musicians he wanted to play
Epitaph. Two were at Lincoln Center last week: Eddie Bert on
trombone and Don Butterfield on tuba. For the performers,
keeping Epitaph alive has been a labor of love, although not
without its complications. Five or six sections of the work,
Schuller contends, are as difficult as anything in the
classical repertory, comparable in density to Charles Ives'
Fourth Symphony or Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. "These parts
are so complex contrapuntally," says Schuller, "that musicians
used to conventional jazz expression are just overwhelmed. It
leaves them huffing and puffing."

    Mingus took meticulous care with the orchestrations, and
Epitaph, as Schuller measures it, was "98% complete."
Nonetheless, reconstructing the score involved some musical
cryptoanalysis by Schuller and his associate, Andrew Homzy.
Phrasing and tempi had to be established, and the endings of
several sections were fragmentary, reflecting Mingus' common
practice of working out finales with his musicians at
rehearsals. One section called Interlude (The Underdog Rising)
was in such chaotic shape that Schuller spent days cutting the
unplayable score into 40 separate parts and then piecing it
back together like a picture puzzle.

    Epitaph's initial failure to find an audience was one of
many frustrations in Mingus' turmoil-strewn life. Born in
Arizona but raised in Watts, Los Angeles' black ghetto, Mingus
studied trombone and cello before taking up the bass. As a
member of Lionel Hampton's band in the '40s, Mingus
revolutionized the way jazz bass was played with his crisp,
lightning-fast solos. Performances with the likes of Charlie
Parker, Miles Davis and Bud Powell established him as a master
of modern jazz. Mingus was Falstaffian in his lusts and furies,
as well as in size: he once fired a musician onstage for taking
a lackluster solo, frequently chided audiences for inattention
and justifiably railed against pop music's largely white
corporate establishment for cheating black artists.

    His contempt for the industry was undoubtedly heightened by
his experience with Epitaph, on which he worked sporadically
for nearly 30 years. In 1962 United Artists agreed to sponsor
a performance at New York City's Town Hall. But the concert
date was abruptly advanced by a month, thereby cutting
drastically into Mingus' composing and rehearsal time, and the
record company allowed him only enough money to hire about
two-thirds of the ensemble his score called for. As a final
indignity, the Town Hall stagehands, unprepared for overtime,
brought down the curtain while the band was still playing. Only
two tracks from that concert were ever released, on a record
over which the composer had no control.

    Mingus gave up on Epitaph after that fiasco, although he
reworked several of its themes for combo performances. Schuller
believes the entire suite fully deserves a second life and a
wider audience. More than just an apotheosis of Mingus the
composer, Schuller argues, Epitaph is a "prophetic force" that
"goes beyond Ellington in suggesting a solution to the problem
of extended form in jazz. Some jazz musicians will argue that
even thinking of `extended form' is Eurocentric -- `Why do we
need it?' they ask -- but Epitaph is clearly an analog to the
great classical forms."

    "My music," Mingus once wrote, "is evidence of my soul's
will to live." Epitaph is strong proof that his musical spirit
is still blowing strong.