The personality of Charles Mingus (1922–1979) as a creator is compelling, singular, a reference point for several generations of jazz musicians. Double bassist, pianist, composer and bandleader, Mingus is a towering figure in jazz, with an extensive and varied body of work and an almost transitional style, straddling several schools: from swing to the avant-garde, by way of bop, Latin music and even classical, with an openly declared admiration for the work of Duke Ellington. Biting, irascible, sarcastic, a fighter against racism, Charles Mingus went down in history as an essential figure in 20th-century music and culture. He also left behind an unpublished work, ‘Epitaph’, discovered by professor Andrew Homzy in 1989. Musicologist and conductor Gunther Schuller arranged it and premiered it that same year in New York. In fact, Mingus himself had already presented a sketch of the score back in 1962. ‘Epitaph’ is a monumental work, with nothing to envy in the best compositions of Ellington, Stravinsky, Beethoven or Debussy; it is a compendium of Charles Mingus’s extraordinary, sprawling personality. Information courtesy of Mas i Mas.
Festival Mas i Mas
Promoter: Mas i Mas
Venue: Palau de la Música Catalana
Photography: Jordi Amela (@amela_photo_concert)
‘Epitaph’ returns to Barcelona after more than thirty years, since on 3 November 1991 the Barcelona Jazz Festival presented this work at the very same Palau de la Música Catalana, conducted by Gunther Schuller and with the same orchestra that had premiered it two years earlier at Lincoln Center in New York. This time it arrives courtesy of Clasijazz, one of the most fascinating initiatives on the Spanish jazz scene. Founded in Almería in 1998, and remarkably active ever since, the Clasijazz association and its founder, Pablo Mazuecos, have in recent years launched high-level projects, collaborating with figures such as Maria Schneider and bringing together musicians from different generations and backgrounds.
The Clasijazz Orchestra, this organisation’s flagship ensemble, brings together rising young talents of Spanish jazz — mostly Andalusian, Catalan and Valencian — alongside figures of the calibre of Perico Sambeat, Francisco Blanco ‘Latino’ and the American Wayne Escoffery, the only member who has previously performed this piece (in 2007, in a line-up conducted by Gunther Schuller). Like Mingus’s own work, the Clasijazz Orchestra is a cathedral-scale ensemble straddling classical music and jazz, with thirty-three players under the direction of Ramon Cardo, a saxophonist and big-band leader who has travelled the same road as Sambeat, Llatí and other great names of the Valencian scene. There could be no better way to celebrate the Mas i Mas Festival’s twentieth anniversary.