Charles Mingus’s Epitaph

Charles Mingus

Charles Mingus’s wide-ranging (which is not the same as sprawling) two-hour suite runs the jazz gamut, with free sections mingling with gospel, orchestral jazz and traditional swing. Duke Ellington worked on large canvases at the end of his life, and so has Wynton Marsalis, but the staggering sweep of Epitaph puts it in its own category. Following Mingus’s death in 1979, the missing score was discovered in a trunk in the musician’s house by a musicologist. The 500 pages were then adapted by American composer and bandleader Gunther Schuller, who will conduct musicians drawn from the Mingus Big Band and Mingus Orchestra.

The stylistic variety happens within single songs, too, making for a dense trip. “The Children’s Hour of Dream” begins with a twittering flute reminiscent of Gil Evans’s collaborations with Miles Davis, before giving way to a menacing march and fierce trumpet blasts. The pianist plinks out a simple line of eighth notes that could pass for Bach, which Mingus overlays with a muted brass chorale. It’s all shuffled around and closes the way it began, and that’s just in the course of a ten-minute song.

Mingus lovers already know about two excellent recent recordings, the first release of a 1964 concert with Eric Dolphy on two Blue Note CDs and Charles Mingus in Paris: The Complete America Session, another two-disc set. On top of those, there’s a local Mingus-related effort worth checking out. Trumpeter Dan Godston and his brothers Erik and Jon set up the Mingus Awareness Project to increase funding for ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease), which their mother and Mingus died of. The MAP will play a fund-raiser Wednesday 23 at HotHouse. You can think of it as another appropriate epitaph.—Marc Geelhoed