An Epitaph Comes Back to Life

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.