Yale School of Music’s Ellington Jazz Series to present Charles Mingus’s jazz-orchestra epic, “Epitaph”
In observance of Charles Mingus’s 100th birthday, and 50 years after Yale School of Music professor Willie Ruff brought dozens of jazz giants, including Mingus himself, to Yale for a historic event, the School of Music’s Ellington Jazz Series on April 2 will present Mingus’ rarely performed jazz-orchestra epic “Epitaph” in Woolsey Hall.
“Epitaph,” Mingus’s 19-movement magnum opus, was described by legendary composer Gunther Schuller as “among the most important, prophetic, creative statements in the history of jazz.”
The event, which will begin at 2 p.m. Sunday, April 2, will include a performance by the revered Mingus Big Band — which features Wayne Escoffery, a Grammy Award-winning saxophonist, YSM lecturer in jazz, and director of Yale Jazz Ensembles — student musicians from Yale College, and graduate students from the Yale School of Music. The performance will be conducted by Escoffery and trombonist Ku-umba Frank Lacy.
The event is open to the public. Tickets can be purchased online.
The Ellington Jazz Series, a concert series presented by the Yale School of Music and led by Artistic Director Thomas C. Duffy, offers performances by prominent artists and jazz musicians each year. Launched in 1972, the series has featured performances by Jane Ira Bloom, Dave Brubeck, Savion Glover, and Catherine Russell.
Mingus’s “Epitaph,” which was scored for a double big band, defies categorization while reflecting its composer’s extraordinary artistic vision and offering the world an experience of the man himself and the ideas that animated him. First performed in full at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in 1989, “Epitaph” was also presented to audiences in New York, Chicago, Cleveland, and Los Angeles in 2007.
Mingus established himself as a virtuoso bassist in the 1940s and 1950s, working with the likes of Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, and Charlie Parker, and further distinguished himself as a fearlessly idiosyncratic composer throughout his career and until his death in 1979. He was among the musical luminaries whom Ruff, now Professor Emeritus of Music, brought to Yale in October 1972 for a historic jazz convocation — the “conservatory without walls,” as Ruff described it — through which Black music was introduced and passed on to new generations.
It was at that 1972 event that the Duke Ellington Fellowship was established at Yale — but not before a bomb threat during the convocation itself cleared Woolsey Hall of everyone but Mingus, who refused to bow to “a racist act” and remained onstage, playing Ruff’s bass, as the Yale Alumni Magazine recently recounted.
The April performance will take place less than year since what would have been Mingus’ 100th birthday and a little more than a half-century after Mingus was one of dozens of jazz greats to receive Yale’s Duke Ellington Medal in Woolsey Hall.
While Mingus assumed he’d never hear “Epitaph” performed in full — he famously said, “I wrote it for my tombstone” — the sonic yield of all 500 pages and 4,000 bars of his magnum opus will no doubt capture anew the imaginations of concertgoers who experience, over the course of two hours, Mingus’ undeniable musical genius.
For more details and to purchase tickets, visit: music-tickets.yale.edu/22961/22962.
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