About thirty musicians line up at nine o’clock on Thursday night on the stage of the Palau de la Música, an unusual formation in the jazz scene as unusual was the piece they were about to perform, Epitaph, the farewell to this world by Charles Mingus, the end of a path that last night, contradictory as it may seem, was in charge of opening the 21st edition of the Mas i Mas festival.
Few of the tourists who crowd around the modernist auditorium crossed its doors to enter the venue and enjoy an evening for jazz fans, willing to let themselves be carried away by the work discovered among the papers that Mingus left behind after his death in 1979. in his New York apartment. More than 500 pages of scores arranged in 19 movements, mostly compositions by the artist such as Started Melody or Please Don’t Come Back From the Moon, combined with bridge pieces that make up the musical testament, the epitaph, of the brilliant and irate double bass player .
The work was played for the first time in 1989, ten years after the death of the great double bass, with the direction and arrangements of the musicologist and conductor Gunther Schuller, thus fulfilling the dream that Mingus tried to carry out in 1962, when he premiered with little success. a part of the work in the New York Town Hall.
Performed for the first time in Barcelona in 1991 under the baton of Schuller himself, Epitaph returned last night to the Palau de la Música by the Clasijazz Big Band led by the Valencian Ramón Cardo. The numerous formation -“a double big band”, in the words of its director- was joined by the Menorcan pianist Marco Mezquida and the American saxophone Wayne Escoffery, a great connoisseur of a score that he has not only performed on several occasions, but has also reached to direct.
It was the fifth time that the Clasijazz Big Band faced the immense work of Mingus, a composer well known for musicians who come from all over Spain with a pre-eminence of Andalusians, Catalans and Valencians. To the credit of this group of Almería origin are performances such as Duke Ellington’s Sacro concert, the monographs dedicated to Bill Hollman or Woody Herman or the double bill by Thad Jones. Although nothing similar to what it means to interpret Mingus’s epitaph, which he requires for his interpretation of unusual instruments on jazz stages. “In brass it is quite normal, except that there is a tuba”, explains Ramon Cardo, “but in the woodwind section there are atypical instruments” such as the double bass clarinet, the bassoon, the presence of two baritones as well as the use of oboe, flutes, piccolos or “a timbre diversity in the saxophone section that is not usual in a big band”.
Last night’s was an abbreviated version of Epitaph that did not reach the almost 3 hours required for its complete performance, even forcing the scheduled program to be cut in order to finish around 11 pm. Until that final hour, Clasijazz offered a compact concert where the numerous individualities it treasures came to light, such as the saxophones of Perico Sambeat and Francisco Latino, the trumpets of Julián Sánchez and Bruno Calvo or the double basses of Pablo Báez and Bori Alfonso, who he looked right at the beginning of the concert during the performance of Percussion Discussion, in which he exchanged phrases with both Sambeat and Andreu Pitarch’s drums. Special mention deserved the presence of Wayne Escoffery, who appeared after 40 minutes of performance, during the interpretation of Started Melody, to star in the first of his solos, all of them received with applause from the public for the saxophonist, who when he was not playing was he saw nodding satisfied with the performance of the band.
Nor was Marco Mezquida short of recognition, who already did a piano duet with Daahoud Salim in 2018, during the first performance of Epitaph by Clasijazz. Last night he gave away a long and enveloping solo that he bewitched at the Palau to anesthetize Oscar Petiffors’ vertiginous outburst at The Soul. Finally, the generosity of the solos prevented the completion of the last two programmed movements, which did not spare the loud ovation of an audience that celebrated having attended an exceptional concert that shows that epitaphs do not always have to mean the end.
