Charles Mingus’ famous last work

EPITAPH. The end, the summing up, the conclusion. The last few words to describe a lifetime. But “last few words” is not a phrase that can begin to describe Charles Mingus’ enormous composition, “Epitaph.”

“I wrote it,” he once said, “for my tombstone.” More than 4,000 measures of music running at nearly three hours in performance? Some tombstone.

In fact, “Epitaph,” which will receive its Los Angeles premiere May 16, performed by a 31-piece ensemble at Disney Hall, is a work of life, not memory. It lives today as it never did during Mingus’ 56 years (he died in 1979 of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Lou Gehrig’s disease).

With 19 movements embracing everything from elemental blues to bebop, from soul and ballads to the most extreme avant-garde music, both jazz and classical, “Epitaph” is unique, one of the most expansive works ever written by a composer with roots in the jazz world.

“Look,” says Gunther Schuller, the veteran composer, conductor and jazz historian who is conducting the piece, “I know thousands of pieces of music. And there are things in ‘Epitaph’ that I’ve never seen anywhere else -- jazz or classical. Not in Stravinsky, not in Ives, not in Ligeti. Not anywhere. Where did this man get his inspiration from? And with no precedent for it? Even Ellington, in all the suites and his advanced music, never went this far. There’s only one answer: genius.”

“Epitaph” surfaced at a now-legendary concert at New York City’s Town Hall in 1962. The event, with Mingus conducting, was something of a disaster. Segments of the work -- “Main Score Part I,” “Epitaph Part II” -- as well as pieces that eventually made their way into the more complete “Epitaph” were scheduled. But with far too little time to prepare the music, virtually no rehearsals and passages in which copyists were still preparing music as other selections were played, the performance verged on mass confusion.

If it came together any further after the concert, however, it wasn’t apparent to friends and associates.

“Once the disaster of Town Hall happened,” recalls Schuller, who was spending time with Mingus virtually every day, “Charlie never talked about it, and so far as any of us knew, he did nothing about it, just apparently put it away and out of his life.”

But not completely.

Although selections from “Epitaph’s” vast assemblage of themes and melodies were recorded over the years as independent works, the complete composition remained unknown until after Mingus’ death. Its rediscovery occurred in strikingly random fashion.

“A couple of years after Charles died,” says his widow, Sue Mingus, “a musicologist from Concordia University, Andrew Homzy, showed up at my doorstep asking to look through Mingus’ music. He was working with a school band and wanted to see if there were any arrangements.

“I hadn’t been involved in that aspect of Charles’ musical life at all, but I said, ‘Well, there’s a big wooden box that I still have in my living room, and there’s music in there.’ So he found all these loose sheets of music and came back over a period of two or three years to catalog it all.”

During that process, pieces of music kept turning up that appeared to be complete in themselves but that were marked with large measure numbers -- 2,050, 3,267, etc. Some were familiar Mingus compositions such as “Peggy’s Blue Dress” and “Tonight at Noon.”

“We suddenly realized that we were looking at something Charles had envisioned as a whole tapestry of music,” Mingus says, speaking from her office in New York. “And when the word ‘Epitaph’ began to turn up randomly on some of the pieces, it was pretty clear what the title was.”

Measure by measure

KNOWING the title was a help but not a solution. And it would take a great deal of work to finally solve the mystery. The measure numbers turned out to be the keys, the Rosetta Stone to decipher the vast conception of a complex musical mind.

“Nobody was more surprised than I was,” says Mingus. “Charles only talked about what turned out to be ‘Epitaph’ if I was complaining about something of my own. If I said, ‘Oh, I submitted something to the New York Times and they rejected it,’ and moaned around the household in martyred tones, Charles would say, ‘Well, I’ve written a whole symphony that was never performed. How do you think it feels to be a composer and have a whole symphony that’s never been heard?’ But I never saw it, and never really knew anything about it.”

She called Schuller as soon as the treasure trove was discovered.

“I remember exactly the moment she called,” says Schuller. “She called because she knew how close I was with Charles, and she said, ‘Gunther, we’ve discovered this big, big collection of music here. It’s Charles’ manuscript, a lot of it’s smudged, there are holes in the pages. And there are no parts.’ And then she added, ‘What are we going to do with it?’

“And I said, ‘Sue! What do you mean, “What are we going to do with it?” We’re going to perform it!’ We managed to get a grant from the Ford Foundation to produce a score and individual parts.”

By the late ‘80s, “Epitaph” had come together in sufficiently complete fashion to make a performance at Lincoln Center possible in 1989. The response was ecstatic. Time magazine described “Epitaph” as “a monumental composition by the protean jazz bassist ... difficult but dazzling.”

The musicians concurred, especially in the word “difficult.”

“These are the hardest parts that I’ve ever tried to play,” says trumpeter Lew Soloff, who performed in the 1989 performances -- the work toured the U.S. and Europe -- and the current presentations. “They’re not the usual kinds of parts that the instrument plays, but they still make a lot of sense.”

Wynton Marsalis, noting that Mingus is not victimized by style. He reexamines the basic elements,” agrees with Soloff on the difficulty factor. “The trumpet parts,” he says, “are something that you’d find in an etude book -- under ‘Hard.’ ”

A recording of the 1989 program was released, and “Epitaph” entered the lexicon of great jazz compositions.

But the story didn’t end there. A few years after the premiere, Sue Mingus found yet another box of Mingus manuscripts, and more pieces turned up at the Lincoln Center Library.

“We knew there were some missing measures in the middle of what we had in 1989,” she said, “and as we looked at what we found at Lincoln Center -- three pieces, including one we knew was missing, ‘Inquisition’ -- we realized that they all belonged.”

Even though the pieces did not have the consecutive measure numbers, they were on the same yellowed manuscript paper as the original “Epitaph” score, and one of them -- “Black Saint and the Sinner Lady” -- was marked “Epitaph: To Follow Main Score 1” on the top.

Mingus laughs when she recalls how these now much sought after pieces wound up at the library.

“Back in the ‘70s,” she recalls, “someone showed up one day from the library wanting to pay real money for scores. Who knew they were worth anything? They paid maybe a thousand dollars, which was a lot of money then. And Charles, whether he did it mischievously or not, stuck his hand in the closet and pulled out ‘Inquisition,’ added it and sold that as well. Whether he thought, ‘Ah-ha, I’ll show them when they finally get around to playing ‘Epitaph’ years after I’m gone!’ or not, I don’t know. But that’s how it got to Lincoln Center. Fortunately, it made its way back to us.”

An advocate for Mingus

SERENDIPITOUSLY, the availability of new pieces to create a more definitive version of “Epitaph” coincided with the appointment of bassist Christian McBride as creative chairman for jazz at the Los Angeles Philharmonic. McBride had played bass in the ensemble that performed the 1989 version of “Epitaph” in Russia, as well as at the Hollywood Bowl in 1991. And the newly restored “Epitaph” (which premiered last month at Lincoln Center) was high on his programming agenda. That, he says, has nothing to do with their bass connection.

“To me, regardless of what instrument he played, Mingus was one of the great jazz artists,” McBride says. “And I’m going to have his music featured as long as I’m around to do anything about it.”

For Schuller and Sue Mingus, the performances are a culmination of years of work and dedication.

“There’s no telling how Charles would have done this, if he were here,” says Mingus. “It would have been different, I’m sure. Probably different every night. He never looked back.”

And that capacity for constant change and variation, believes Schuller, is part of the great, unpredictable beauty of “Epitaph” in performance.

“This work covers every possible kind of mood and character and expression that one can have in music,” says Schuller. “It’s a summary kind of work. And it reflects exactly the complexity of Mingus as a person. He was as gentle as a baby at times. At the other end of the spectrum, he could be as violent as a volcano. And it’s all in ‘Epitaph.’ ”

A composition that, as it turns out, might more accurately be titled “Legacy.”