Epitaph: 100 Years of Mingus
Sunday, April 2, 2023 | 2:00 pm
Woolsey Hall
Thomas C. Duffy, artistic director Robert Blocker, DeanProgram
Charles Mingus
1922–1979
ed. Sue Mingus, Gunther Schuller, Andrew Homzy & Theodore Davis
Epitaph, Pt. I (1962)
Main Score, Pt. 1
Percussion Discussion
Main Score, Pt. 2
Started Melody
Moods in Mambo / Inquisition
The Soul
Self Portrait / Chill of Death
OP (Oscar Pettiford)
Better Get Hit in Your Soul
Epitaph, Pt. II (1962)
Pinky / Please Don’t Come Back From The Moon
Monk, Bunk & Vice Versa (Osmotin’)
Peggy’s Blue Skylight
Wolverine Blues
Children’s Hour
This Subdues My Passion
Ballad (In Other Words, I Am Three)
Freedom
Interlude (The Underdog Rising)
Noon Night
Main Score, Reprise
Wayne Escoffery, conductor
Ku-umba Frank Lacy, conductor
intermission
Artist Profiles
woodwinds
Brandon Wright, alto saxophone†
Mark Gross, alto saxophone†
Wayne Escoffery, tenor saxophone†ˆ
Craig Handy, tenor saxophone†
Sam Dillon, tenor saxophone†
Wes Lewis, alto saxophone*
Alec Chai, oboe/English horn*
Michael Rabinowitz, bassoon†
Margalit Patry-Martin, contrabass clarinet*
Lauren Sevian, baritone saxophone†
Allie Gruber, baritone saxophone*
trumpets
Alex Norris†
Walter White†
Philip Harper†
Grace Burton*
Shania Cordoba*
Truth Templeton*
trombones
Ku-umba Frank Lacy†
Conrad Herwig†
Robin Eubanks†
Earl McIntyre, bass trombone/tuba†
Addison Maye-Saxon*
Max Saffer-Meng*
Declan Wilcox*
Bridget Conley, tuba*
rhythm
Donald Edwards, drums†
Chien Chien Lu, vibraphone†
David Gilmore, guitar†
Makana Medeiros, percussion*
Mingyu Son, percussion*
Boris Kozlov, double bass†
Thara Joseph, double bass*
David Kikoski, piano†
Miles Zaud, piano*
† Mingus Big Band
ˆ YSM faculty
* Yale student
Mingus Big Band
The Mingus Big Band celebrates the music of composer/bassist Charles Mingus who celebrated his Centennial year in 2022. Under the artistic direction of Sue Mingus, and building off the Mingus Dynasty septet that she formed after Mingus’ death in 1979, this 14-piece band features new arrangements of Mingus’ compositions in a larger band format that Mingus was not always able to organize in his lifetime.
Wayne Escoffery, conductor/tenor saxophone
2014 Downbeat Critics Poll Winner and Grammy Award-winning tenor saxophonist Wayne Escoffery is one of the Jazz world’s most talented rising stars and in-demand sidemen. In 2006 he secured one of the most coveted gigs in jazz: a frontline position in Tom Harrell’s working quintet. For over a decade Escoffery was mostly associated with trumpet master having toured the globe with the trumpeter, recorded seven CDs with The Tom Harrell Quintet and co-produced four of those releases. He has also been a member of The Mingus Dynasty, Big Band, and Orchestra since 2000 and has made several recordings with the group. Over the years he has recorded and performed internationally with the who’s who in jazz, including Ron Carter, Ben Riley, Abdulah
Ibrahim, Eric Reed, Carl Allen, Al Foster, Billy Hart, Eddie Henderson, Rufus Reid, Wallace Roney, and Herbie Hancock, just to name a few. Escoffery leads his own groups which tour internationally and has made
several highly acclaimed studio recordings with said groups. His current working quartet features pianist David Kikoski, bassist Ugonna Okegwo, and drummer Ralph Peterson, and has released three albums, the latest of which is The Humble Warrior on the Smoke Sessions Records label. Escoffery is also a founding member of a collaborative group called Black Art Jazz Collective, which comprises fellow rising star musicians of his generation and is dedicated to celebrating the origins of Jazz and African American icons through originally composed music.
In addition to performing, Escoffery is dedicated to music education and presents lectures and masterclasses on Jazz music. He is currently the saxophone instructor for The New Jersey Performing Arts Wells Fargo Jazz for Teens program, and teaches private online and in-person lessons for all instruments. In the fall of 2016 Wayne Escoffery was appointed Lecturer of Jazz Improvisation and ensemble coach at the Yale School of Music as a part of Yale University’s Jazz Initiative, the first of its kind for the University. The vast array of contributions Wayne Escoffery has made to the jazz world in such a short time leads seasoned industry professionals like Niel Tesser to write “Pay special attention to tenor man Wayne Escoffery whose rapid development— from album to album (and seemingly solo to solo)—has given us a jazz hero for the coming decade.”
» wayneescoffery.com Ku-umba Frank Lacy, conductor/tromboneNative of Houston, Texas, Frank chose to pursue music after studying physics at an
HBCU. His first professional performances in the ’70s were with Joe Tex and as a session trombonist at famed Allen Toussaint Studios in New Orleans. He attended The Berklee College of Music (1979–81) studying trombone, jazz composition, and conducting. He then attended Rutgers’ Mason Gross Jazz Department (1982–86). Deemed as super-exec John Hammond’s last “find,” he embarked on a career spanning almost 50 years, performing and recording with music icons of all genres, notably Lionel Hampton, Illinois Jacquet, Lester Bowie, Henry Threadgill, Bobby Watson, Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers (as musical director), McCoy Tyner, Dizzy Gillespie, Roy Hargrove, Elvis Costello, The Eurythmics, D’Angelo, Erykah Badu, Common, and Kid Cudi. Member of the Mingus Big Band for 30 + years, he recorded on 5 Grammy Award-winning albums.
Frank currently instructs as Lecturer Of The History Of African-American Music and ensembles at Manhattan School Of Music.
Charles Mingus, composer
One of the most important figures in 20thcentury American music, Charles Mingus was a virtuoso bass player, accomplished pianist, bandleader, and composer. Born on a military base in Nogales, Arizona in 1922 and raised in Watts, California, his earliest musical influences came from the church–choir and group singing—and from “hearing Duke Ellington over the radio when [he] was eight years old.” He studied double bass and composition in a formal way (five years with H. Rheinshagen, principal bassist of the New York Philharmonic, and compositional techniques with the legendary
Artist Profiles cont.
Lloyd Reese) while absorbing vernacular music from the great jazz masters first-hand. His early professional experience, in the ’40s, found him touring with bands like Louis Armstrong, Kid Ory, and Lionel Hampton.
Eventually he settled in New York where he played and recorded with the leading musicians of the 1950s—Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Bud Powell, Art Tatum and Duke Ellington himself. One of the few bassists to do so, Mingus quickly developed as a leader of musicians. He was also an accomplished pianist who could have made a career playing that instrument. By the mid-’50s he had formed his own publishing and recording companies to protect and document his growing repertoire of original music. He also founded the “Jazz Workshop,” a group which enabled young composers to have their new works performed in concert and on recordings.
Mingus soon found himself at the forefront of the avant-garde. His recordings bear witness to the extraordinarily creative body of work that followed. They include: Pithecanthropus Erectus, The Clown, Tijuana Moods, Mingus Dynasty, Mingus Ah Um, The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, Cumbia and Jazz Fusion, and Let My Children Hear Music. He recorded over a hundred albums and wrote over three hundred scores.
Although he wrote his first concert piece, Half-Mast Inhibition, when he was seventeen years old, it was not recorded until twenty years later by a 22-piece orchestra with Gunther Schuller conducting. It was the presentation of Revelations, which combined jazz and classical idioms, at the 1955 Brandeis Festival of the Creative Arts, that
established him as one of the foremost jazz composers of his day.
In 1971 Mingus was awarded the Slee Chair of Music and spent a semester teaching composition at the State University of New York at Buffalo. In the same year his autobiography, Beneath the Underdog, was published by Knopf. In 1972 it appeared in a Bantam paperback and was reissued after his death, in 1980, by Viking/Penguin and again by Pantheon Books in 1991. In 1972 he also re-signed with Columbia Records. His music was performed frequently by ballet companies, and Alvin Ailey choreographed an hour program called “The Mingus Dances” during a 1972 collaboration with the Robert Joffrey Ballet Company.
He toured extensively throughout Europe, Japan, Canada, South America and the United States until the end of 1977 when he was diagnosed as having a rare nerve disease, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. He was confined to a wheelchair, and although he was no longer able to write music on paper or compose at the piano, his last works were sung into a tape recorder.
From the 1960s until his death in 1979 at age 56, Mingus remained in the forefront of American music. When asked to comment on his accomplishments, Mingus said that his abilities as a bassist were the result of hard work but that his talent for composition came from God.
Mingus received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Smithsonian Institute, and the Guggenheim Foundation (two grants). He also received an honorary degree from Brandeis and a Duke Ellington
Medal from Yale University. At a memorial following Mingus’ death, Steve Schlesinger of the Guggenheim Foundation commented that Mingus was one of the few artists who received two grants and added: “I look forward to the day when we can transcend labels like jazz and acknowledge Charles Mingus as the major American composer that he is.” The New Yorker wrote: “For sheer melodic and rhythmic and structural originality, his compositions may equal anything written in western music in the 20th century.”
He died in Mexico on January 5, 1979, and his wife, Sue Graham Mingus, scattered his ashes in the Ganges River in India. Both New York City and Washington, D.C. honored him posthumously with a “Charles Mingus Day.”
After his death, the National Endowment for the Arts provided grants for a Mingus foundation created by Sue Mingus called “Let My Children Hear Music” which catalogued all of Mingus’ works. The microfilms of these works were then given to the Music Division of the New York Public Library where they are currently available for study and scholarship – a first for jazz. Sue Mingus has founded three working repertory bands called the Mingus Dynasty, Mingus Orchestra, and the Mingus Big Band, which continue to perform his music. Biographies of Charles Mingus include Mingus by Brian Priestley, Mingus/Mingus by Janet Coleman and Al Young, Myself When I Am Real by Gene Santoro, and Tonight at Noon, a memoir by Sue Mingus.
Mingus’ masterwork, Epitaph, a composition which is more than 4000 measures long and which requires two hours to perform,
was discovered during the cataloguing process. With the help of a grant from the Ford Foundation, the score and instrumental parts were copied, and the piece itself was premiered by a 30-piece orchestra, conducted by Gunther Schuller, in a concert produced by Sue Mingus at Alice Tully Hall on June 3, 1989, ten years after Mingus’ death.
The New Yorker wrote that Epitaph represents the first advance in jazz composition since Duke Ellington’s “Black, Brown, and Beige,” which was written in 1943. The New York Times said it ranked with the “most memorable jazz events of the decade.” Convinced that it would never be performed in his lifetime, Mingus called his work Epitaph, declaring that he wrote it “for my tombstone.”
The Library of Congress purchased the Charles Mingus Collection, a major acquisition, in 1993; this included autographed manuscripts, photographs, literary manuscripts, correspondence, and tape recordings of interviews, broadcasts, recording sessions, and Mingus composing at the piano.
Sue Mingus has published a number of educational books through Hal Leonard Publishing, including Charles Mingus: More Than a Fake Book, Charles Mingus: More Than a Play-Along, Charles Mingus: Easy Piano Solos, many big band charts—including the “Simply Mingus” set of big band music charts—and a Mingus guitar book.
Artist Profiles cont.
Program Notes
Sue Mingus (from the Preface to the score)
We are presenting Charles Mingus’ greatest work, Epitaph, more than four decades after Mingus’s first attempt to introduce it to the world in 1962.
There is nothing quite like Epitaph in 20thcentury American music. In its original handwritten form, it was over 500 pages. In our computerized version (based on Gunther Schuller’s corrected parts drawn from the edited score produced for the original performance of this work in 1989) it has been reduced to 341 pages through the process of “optimizing”. This process, overseen by our chief engraver, Pei-Chin Ho, is described below by musicology Professor Andrew Homzy, who first discovered and assembled the missing manuscript pages.
Homzy originally pieced together the disparate sections of Epitaph by consecutive measure numbers. Since its premiere in 1989, however, we have retrieved some of the actual instrumental parts from the 1962 Town Hall performance (Eddie Bert’s trombone book) which include three compositions that were not in the Homzy version: “This Subdues My Passion;” “Portrait;” “Duke’s Choice.” We have also found the original score of “Black Saint and the Sinner Lady” with Mingus’s handwritten instructions that place it within Epitaph as well. (“Black Saint” was recorded soon after as a separate work on its own.) Eventually, a supplement containing all these works will be published.
Meanwhile, a further discovery was made by Homzy when, quite by accident, he
found a Mingus work called “Inquistition,” while engaged in unrelated research at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Astonishingly, it contained the missing measures at the center of the Epitaph score— one of our most intriguing mysteries— sparking a memory that went back many years. One winter afternoon in the midseventies, a visitor from the New York Public Library came to the apartment where Mingus and I lived and offered to purchase some of his original manuscripts. At the time we considered is a marvelous stroke of fortune. Charles reached into the closet and plucked out three handwritten scores. Whether he chose them inadvertently, or because he knew his masterwork would not be performed in his lifetime, one of the three scores he handed over would become the missing movement at the center of Epitaph It is now included here.
We are proud to have completed the first edition of this monumental score, aware that there are still discrepancies and incompletions for which we ask your indulgence. Most of them will be corrected in the future; others may never be resolved. We can easily imagine if Mingus himself were to conduct this work today he would, inevitably, make changes. This is in the nature of jazz. However, we present Epitaph in this edition as he left is to us: a summary of work, a portrait for all time of his life in music.
Epitaph charles mingus
Acknowledgments
Without the support of the following, this concert would not have been possible:
Adam R. Rose ’81YCThe Yale School of Music
Ely Center of Contemporary Art
Truth in Three Colors, an exhibition about the life of the great Charles Mingus, is opening April 2 at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art, a few blocks away from Woolsey Hall.
The museum extends an invitation to all concertgoers to visit the exhibition after the concert where a free and open to the public reception will be held after the concert. We hope to see you there!
Helen Kauder Board Co-ChairECOCA
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