Mingus Sold Tickets to a Concert That Was Really a Recording Session, and Copyists Were Still Writing Parts On Stage

On October 12, 1962, Charles Mingus took the stage at New York’s Town Hall with some thirty musicians and a program of newly composed music. The plan was a “live workshop” recorded for United Artists, but the label, via producer Alan Douglas, moved the date up by five weeks, and the event was advertised as a concert. Mingus had hired a firm of copyists, and two of them were reportedly still copying parts while the performance was underway. The audience, expecting a rehearsed show, got false starts and retakes. Mingus told them to ask for their money back, blamed the press agents, and faulted promoter George Wein for turning a session into a concert. United Artists issued about 36 minutes as Town Hall Concert; a 1994 Blue Note reissue added more. Mingus called the long work Epitaph (“I wrote it for my tombstone”), and Gunther Schuller finally conducted it properly in 1989, a decade after Mingus’s death.