Newly Found Jazz Symphony by Charles Mingus Premiered

You would think that a 15-pound, 500-page, 3,446-measure, two-hour-long score by a major American composer would be pretty hard to hide.

Knowing that the composer was Charles Mingus, though, it’s not hard to understand why his musical associates, admirers, even his widow, didn’t know about “Epitaph,” the recently uncovered and restored jazz symphony that received its world premiere Saturday night at New York’s Lincoln Center.

It was to be performed Monday night at Wolf Trap Farm Park outside Washington by an all-star, 30-piece orchestra under the direction of Gunther Schuller.

In an unpublished interview, Mingus referred to this project obliquely, saying only, “I wrote it for my tombstone.” Now, 10 years after Charles Mingus’ death at 57 from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, that tombstone is pulsating with what Schuller calls “one of the most important premieres in the annals of American music.”

From its accidental discovery by musicologist Andrew Homzy to Schuller’s restoration, from the innovative computerized score to the mounting of these two concerts, Mingus’ “Epitaph” has proved to be a major undertaking.

There were hints of it in a 1960 downbeat interview in which Mingus spoke of creating a symphony for jazz improvisers where no one could tell “where the writing ends and the improvisation begins.” There were hints of it at a Town Hall concert in 1962, but that event was so disastrous that the work was subsequently buried by Mingus.

His widow, Sue Graham Mingus, recalls: “Whenever I complained about things, Charles would point out that this was probably the heaviest burden on his heart, having written this opus that he never performed, and that he felt never would be performed.”

“I would have thought that somehow during the 30 years that I knew him and worked with him that I would have heard of this,” says Schuller, a composer, conductor, scholar and educator. “So I was really very surprised and amazed when I heard of the magnitude of the piece. It’s a wonderful event, the first work by a jazz-related composer of such duration. The one big problem that jazz never really got around to solving is how to deal with large form, large structure and long continuities.

“Charles took a gigantic step in that direction, quite beyond where Duke Ellington left that problem.”

Ellington was an idol, a model, an inspiration to Mingus, though he himself never enjoyed the support of the arts and jazz establishment that Ellington did. Nor did Mingus benefit from the constant access to a big band that allowed Ellington to develop and refine his orchestral writing.

And while Mingus did write a number of big-band pieces, none was on the scale of “Epitaph,” scored for an orchestra almost twice as large as the Ellington band.

Still, Schuller says, “he saw himself in that good lineage, and he may have felt about this piece that it was the one that would get that idea across. He was a complicated man, with an incredible ego. He was also incredibly ambitious, not only for himself but for the art of jazz. This was the testament of those ambitions and desires, the summation of his entire career and his life.”

Of Mingus, Grove’s Dictionary of Jazz says that “his accomplishments surpass in historic and stylistic breadth those of any other major figure in jazz.”

As a bassist, pianist and composer, he was distinctive and innovative, particularly at reconciling his vanguard writing with the improvising spirit of jazz. There are other extended Mingus compositions, notably “The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady” and “Meditations on Integration,” but no one realized that Mingus had created such a monumental work, one that would go unplayed for more than a quarter of a century.

Andrew Homzy, a musicologist teaching at Montreal’s Concordia College, came by Sue Mingus’ New York apartment a few years back “to get some music for his students,” she recalls.

What Homzy found was a jumble of scores in shopping bags, boxes and trunks. He offered to catalog it, and with a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, Homzy and his wife began to do just that. That’s when the detective work began.

“I started to come across these large yellow sheets, an old-fashioned kind of duplicating done in the ‘60s, a waxy, translucent, treated paper,” Homzy explains. “I kept coming across scores duplicated on this paper, but the paper was brittle and falling apart, so I didn’t spend a lot of time looking them over. I wanted to save that for another time. But I kept finding copies scattered throughout the collection. Then Sue came in with a big art-portfolio case, and I opened it and immediately saw the same scores that I had been finding elsewhere.”