Quote Stylus Magazine
With song titles like “Iggy” and “Ludwig Van Ramone” (get that razorsharp opening riff) you know you’re not in for beard-stroking tastefulness, but you’re still unprepared for quite what happens. Wareham’s sax mimics wailing electric guitars (there’s no guitar credited on the sleeve so I can only assume that the furious heavy metal in the final minute of “Deckchair” is all his doing) as well as Coltrane-esque solar meanderings and hooks, while Tom Herbert’s furious electric bass playing swings from kinetic funk licks to outrageous, driving punk/metal riffs that are likely to upset middle-aged men with patches on their jacket sleeves, and Tom Cawley paints Rhodes fills in the corners of the sound and washes electric noise everywhere else. As for the fantastically-coiffed Seb Rochford, well… good grief, his drumming here has to be heard to be believed, at times sounding like a one-man Boredoms, the energy of Moon and the control of Leibzeit tied together.

The energy, dynamic and attitude of Last Chance Disco means that at times it sounds like nothing so much as Dismemberment Plan or Morphine, while the quieter, cool moments are the kind of thing that David Holmes loves putting together for Soderbergh soundtracks. Highlights include the multi-sectioned “Om Konz”, the weird handclaps and sneering of “Perfect Bitch” and… well, the whole damn album is just great, to be honest, a relentless ska-punk-jazz-metal conglomeration that shouldn’t work but does.

thejazzscène schreef:
Gisteren David Murray gezien op Jazz Middelheim. Schitterende kerel en dat Cubaans octet achter hem kon er duidelijk ook wat van.

Epitaph (Mingus)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Epitaph
Studio album by Charles Mingus
Released 1990
Recorded 1989
Genre Jazz
Length 127:22
Label Columbia
Professional reviews
* Epitaph (Mingus) at Allmusic2.5/5 stars

Epitaph is a composition by jazz musician Charles Mingus. It takes more than two hours to perform and was only completely discovered during the cataloguing process after his death. 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. This concert was produced by Mingus' widow, Sue, at Alice Tully Hall on June 3, 1989, ten years after his death, and again at several concerts in 2007.

Ground Breaking Work

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." Conductor Gunther Schuller said that Epitaph is "among the most important, prophetic, creative statement in the history of jazz."


1989 Version

After Mingus's death, the score to Epitaph was rediscovered by Andrew Homzy, director of the jazz program at Concordia University, Montreal. He had been invited by Sue Mingus to catalogue a trunkful of Mingus's handwritten charts and in the process had discovered a vast assortment of orchestral pages written by Mingus with measures numbered consecutively well into the thousands. After some investigation, Homzy realized what it was that he had found and eventually managed to reassemble the Epitaph score. At that point Homzy and Sue Mingus got in touch with Gunther Schuller, who put together an all-star orchestra to play this very demanding piece of music. However, despite the stellar cast that was assembled, problems were again encountered. 30 years earlier, charts were being copied in the wings before the show. This time, the charts were all computerized, but the software was buggy and again charts were being sight-read at the last minute.

This was no mean feat. Epitaph resembles many other Mingus compositions in level of difficulty. Trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, pointing at a passage in the score said, "That looks like something you would find in an Etude Book ... under 'Hard'." And conductor Gunther Schuller stated "The only comparison I've ever been able to find is the great iconoclastic American composer Charles Ives." Despite all these challenges, however, the concert, at Alice Tully Hall in New York's Lincoln Centre in 1989, was a triumph, if ten years too late for Charles Mingus to enjoy it. A double-CD was later released by Columbia/Sony Records. The concert was also filmed, and broadcast on U.K. television around 1990.

Personnel

Conductor

* Gunther Schuller

Woodwinds

* George Adams (tenor saxophone)
* Phil Bodner (oboe, English horn, clarinet, tenor saxophone)
* John Handy (clarinet, alto saxophone)
* Dale Kleps (flute, contrabass clarinet)
* Michael Rabinowitz (bassoon, bass clarinet)
* Jerome Richardson (clarinet, alto saxophone)
* Roger Rosenberg (piccolo, flute, clarinet, baritone saxophone)
* Gary Smulyan (clarinet, baritone saxophone)
* Bobby Watson (clarinet, flute, soprano saxophone, alto saxophone)

Trumpets

* Randy Brecker
* Wynton Marsalis
* Lew Soloff
* Jack Walrath
* Joe Wilder
* Snooky Young

Trombones & Tuba

* Eddie Bert
* Sam Burtis
* Urbie Green
* David Taylor
* Britt Woodman
* Paul Faulise (bass trombone)
* Don Butterfield (tuba)

Rhythm Section

* Karl Berger (vibraphone, cowbell)
* John Abercrombie (guitar)
* Sir Roland Hanna (piano)
* John Hicks (piano)
* Reggie Johnson (bass)
* Ed Schuller (bass, guiro)
* Victor Lewis (drums)
* Daniel Druckman (percussion, tumba)