Word: mingus
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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...
...CHARLES MINGUS: EPITAPH (Columbia). Jazz, in today's approved jargon, is called Afro-American classical music. No work has better claim to that description than Epitaph, a monumental composition (more than two hours long) by the protean jazz bassist who died in 1979. Shifting from blues to Ellington-like mood pieces to cacophonous yawps, the work is scored for a 30- piece band. It was performed once in Mingus' lifetime, haphazardly. This live recording comes from Epitaph's real world premiere, at New York City's Lincoln Center last June. Composer and jazz historian Gunther Schuller led an all-star...
Ullman, who teaches English at Tufts and writes jazz criticism for The New Republic, has padded his book with stock appreciations of the recent dead-- Joe Venuti, Charles Mingus, Rahsaan Roland Kirk. These great artists certainly merit our attention, but Ullman's second-hand tributes east little light on the jazz life. The real meat of Jazz Lives lies in the words of its less celebrated subjects. Many readers will find most of the names unfamiliar, but none of them are second-rate, and they speak with authority and often with charm. Only remember that every musician in this book...
...Makers is actually a reprint of a book published by Rinehart in 1957. Although Da Capo reveals this significant bit of information only in the copyright, the text proclaims its age on nearly every page. It is difficult to imagine a contemporary anthology of jazz personalities without Davis, Monk, Mingus, and Coltrane but the only modernists in The Jazz Makers are Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, both of whose innovations were widespread by 1950. Equally dated are the trite explications of black American "customs." Charles Edward Smith's profile of Billie Holiday contains a lenghty footnote that explains the properties...
Joni Mitchell: Mingus (Asylum). An act of elaborate and loving homage to the late Charles Mingus, formidable bass player and jazz composer. The record is more emotional in its dedication than in its musicianship, however. Mitchell's lyrics for Mingus' sometimes abstruse music get a little toplofty, and her sidemen-Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Jaco Pastorius are among the most renowned-stay so aloof and mechanical the record turns to stainless steel...