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One song over 2 hours long, performed by a 30 piece Jazz Orchestra!

For Jazz fans no introduction is necessary for the late, great double bassist Charlie Mingus. The L.A raised activist was a multi-instrumentalist with enough talent that he was becoming well-known in the Jazz scene even as a teen and by the time he was 21 he was on tour with Charlie Parker.

Mingus’ musical compositions aren’t pieces that one would normally hear on a “smooth jazz” station. His material combined a variety of atonal, augmented chords, a variety of tempo changes all within the same tune and wasn’t something that you could easily dance to in a nightclub. The music was something that grabbed your attention because Mingus was making Jazz as the free-flowing form it should be - a living, breathing entity. He would combine various other styles of music with traditional Jazz for a sound no one could label.

Mingus never finished making his last album, which included the talents of Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock and Joni Mitchell. He was part-way through the recording when he succumbed to ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease in 1979. Ten years after his death, the colossal task of putting together a multitude of sheet music that comes out to being over 4,200 measures long and takes more than 2 hours to perform was finalized and a performance to outshine all other performances was caught on tape.

The performance was conducted by Gunther Schuller and the show was produced and introduced by Mingus’ widow, Sue Graham Mingus. The composition known as “Epitaph” is the result and from that comes the DVD, Charles Mingus: Epitaph. The 30-piece Jazz Orchestra play the intricate music to perfection, something Mingus never got to hear since the music was found after his death; hence, never-before recorded until that evening of June 3rd, 1989 at the Lincoln Center for its world premiere.

A large majority of the orchestra are former members of Mingus’ band, so odds are a few of the guys in the band looked at it, shook their heads and smiled saying, “Yep, knew he had one more piece of greatness left for us.” There are 18 movements that make up this masterpiece but I won’t bore you down with all of the details. There is a very nice twelve-page booklet that has some history on Mingus, his music, how this musical discovery came to be and what to expect from the song.

Total running time of Charles Mingus: Epitaph is 131 minutes. It’s unfortunate that there are no extras on the disc. It’s presented in full screen and Dolby Digital Stereo. No 5.1 Surround, either. One would think that after all of the painstaking work that went into piecing together this massive score there would be a way to provide some audio options for today’s technology.

Don’t let that deter you, though. If you’re a die-hard Mingus fan or if you just appreciate some really intricate Jazz, this disc is for you.

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