Mingus Speaks. John Goodman
Shepp—do you think they’re trying to con the white folks or that they conned themselves in this thing?
MINGUS: I don’t know about using their names, but I think what has happened is that they’re trying to cut Bird, to say this is a new movement. But you don’t take an inferior product and say that this is better than Vaseline. Everybody knows it’s not—everybody who’s listened seriously to the other thing. “This isn’t Vaseline; it’s got water in it.” They may be serious, but their seriousness hasn’t gotten through to me yet.
Everybody’s got ego, and everybody who lives in a human body thinks they’re better than another guy. Even if a guy’s considered to be a nigger in the South and the white man says he’s better, if the guy’s on his own and creating, he says, “Man, I’m better than that guy.” I got a tenor player (I won’t call his name), wanted to be in my band a long time, and he can’t play. But when the people see him, he’s moving like Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane at the same time, and man, they clap, and he ain’t played shit. And so I know that he feels, “Hey look, Mingus, I moved the people, you saw that. Why don’t you hire me?”
I try to explain, “Well, I don’t move no people like that, man; that’s not what I’m here to do. I guess I could kick my leg up too, spin my bass,” and he don’t believe me so I do it, do the Dixieland, spin the bass and they clap. I mean that’s showmanship, but this is supposed to be art. I mean the only time they Uncle Tom in classical is when they bow, you know those classic bows, the way they had, man? Especially the women, opera singers, that crazy bow [curtsy] when they get down to their knees? They had some class.
You know, anybody can bullshit—excuse my expression—and most avant-garde people are bullshitting. But Charlie Parker didn’t bullshit. He played beautiful music within those structured chords. He was a composer, man, that was a composer. It’s like Bach. Bach is still the most difficult music written, fugues and all. Stravinsky is nice, but Bach is how buildings got taller. It’s how we got to the moon, through Bach, through that kind of mind that made that music up. That’s the most progressive mind. It didn’t take primitive minds or religious minds to build buildings. They tend to go on luck and feeling and emotion and goof. (They also led us to sell goof.)
It’s very difficult to play in structures and play in different keys. When a guy tells you all keys are alike, he’s a liar. If so, give him a pedal point in B-natural or F-sharp or A-natural and see what he does. Even if he’s playing another instrument like the alto saxophone (which if you’re in the key of C it puts you in A-minor anyway), if you put him in A, he’s in F-sharp; if you put him in B, he’s in G-sharp. So he’s hung while you look at him. Guys like McPherson who play bebop are the best; they can run right through the changes.
I don’t do anything hard, just play the blues, and to see these guys turn . . . With Shafi Hadi we played five choruses; we modulated the second one to the key of F (in the “Song for Eric”), we then went to B-natural—and he stayed right in F all the way out. He never even heard the fact that we modulated. Then the trombone player finally came in, in the right key. That goes to show you how even musicians don’t listen. Here’s a guy paralyzed to realize something’s wrong with the bass notes: he stayed right in the key of F. It was like going wrong down a one-way street and you don’t even see the cars coming. It was pitiful.
And it wasn’t only Shafi Hadi. Eddie Preston soloed and stayed in the same key. He finally caught himself after three or four choruses. You can tell when the piano player and I were doing it for fifteen-twenty minutes, changing keys all over the place, and finally the guy came in, in the key the tune was written in, a blues in F. But by then we had gone to B-natural and chromatics.
There are some famous avant-garde guys playing only in C-natural, man, and it’s very sad that Bud Powell played in F all the time. I remember him playing in D-flat once and B-flat, but the key he always chose was F. If he played in bands, the tunes Bird played, he played ’em, but if he chose it was always in F.
GOODMAN: When I interviewed Teo Macero [Mingus’s friend and producer of Let My Children Hear Music] a few days ago, he was moaning about Ornette Coleman, saying just what you did, that he couldn’t play a straight chorus if he had to.
MINGUS: He couldn’t, man. It would be pitiful if he was forced into a jam session and somebody called “Body and Soul.” He couldn’t make it, man. When we played the Protest Festival some years ago at Newport [1960], we played “All the Things You Are,” and Ornette was lost after the first eight bars. It’s OK to play avant-garde and say, “I meant to get lost,” but Max Roach clearly said, “Let’s do something simple like the blues or ‘All the Things You Are.’ ” He couldn’t even play the melody, man.5
But if a test comes by, man, to say, “I’m a jazz musician,” you should be able to play the blues, or “All the Things You Are,” or “Sweet Lorraine.” I got a son named Eugene, and all over Europe, man, he said, “Boy, can I play the piano!” So people thought he was a piano player. And he could play a little bit, he’s got talent enough to go where his ears tell him to go, but then he starts picking up other instruments, flutes and things. Now if someone tells me my son can play the flute, saxophone, bass—he’s plucking the bass too—so if he got famous, man, I’d have to tell you something is wrong, somebody’s fooling somebody.
I got in a fight with my piano player [Don Pullen] about Art Tatum. I said that Art Tatum was the world’s greatest. I was going to say Bud Powell too, but I said he’d never be cut, man. He said, “Why do you want to tell me that? I never heard of Art Tatum.” He’s never heard of Art Tatum? How could a guy play piano and never hear of Art Tatum? Look him up! Art Tatum can play with his left hand what most of the kids today do with their right and left. And don’t mention Bud Powell—he’s creatin’ every moment.
And I heard a record where Ornette tried to play some [familiar] tunes. You hear that one? He played some melodies, but it was like a lot of kids who try to play Charlie Parker: he never made it. Once when I heard him play in California, I got to understand him better. See, when you play without a piano, you can sound avant-garde up front, ’cause a piano boxes you in. Unless you got a piano player who’s gonna play like Monk does—everything in a minor key. Monk is smart; he doesn’t block you in.
Ornette had a piano with him, and he sounded like a poor man’s Charlie Parker. I couldn’t believe it, that this is the same guy everybody was saying was so creative. Very strange. I think that he’d be a hell of a musician if he’d continue to study the alto. He may be a lucky composer. That may be his natural thing, ’cause I don’t know anything bad about his writing.
GOODMAN: The first records he made—for Atlantic, I think—were kind of exciting to me.
MINGUS: For his own good he should try to learn from his own solos off the record, play them back. The other guy, Albert Ayler, [does a flutter-tongue trill] and those guys: let those guys try to play one of their solos back. They’ll make up a new one every time. It’s sick, man, it’s sick shit. You can bullshit some people, but see, they came in and said, “Let’s see how far out you are, we can make a living like this!” But they can’t enjoy doing that, man. It’s impossible to enjoy that.
You want to hear some of that music? Get me and Clark Terry and some guys who know music to play like that and put ’em on. Nesuhi Ertegun was talking to me about doing an avant-garde date with some guys who can really play.6 I called Clark and he said, “Baby, let me get at it.” That would upset those guys, because he can play to begin with, and if he decided not to play he would unplay playing [laughter]. I want to get with Clark and make an avant-garde record. And Teo Macero.
Take John Coltrane: he went back to Indian-type pedal point music, but he got in a streak [rut]. Why couldn’t he do other things too? Why do guys have to stylize themselves? Don’t they know that in the summertime you wear thin clothes and straw hats and in the wintertime, you know, you got a right to play a different tune? You don’t have to be stylized. A preacher preaches a different sermon each Sunday. He don’t preach the same one. They turn a different page, and I’m turning pages all the time because I have a special page I want to get to and if I’d thrown that page open many years