Mingus Speaks. John Goodman
keys at once, atonal, whatever you want to call it. But I couldn’t just lay it on everybody at once, because the musicians have to read and improvise at the same time. I had to train the guys to improvise; I’ve got a few of ’em now. I’ll be able to inject ’em into a reading band, and when I get that thing going, you’ll see.
GOODMAN: You’re going to start that in the Mercer [Arts Center] band, or what?
MINGUS: Well, you heard a little of it on this last date [Children], ’cause I used improvisation in all my writing on the record, like on “Shoes of the Fisherman’s Wife,” where I overdubbed the solo. Now on “The Clown,” I couldn’t have written that and had the guys do it right, so I had them overdub it. But I knew before recording that I was gonna do that.
I had two spots in there that definitely make fun of the avant-garde musicians. If you listen, you’ll hear McPherson and [Lonnie] Hillyer playing Charlie Parker, and then at the end of the “Fisherman’s Wife,” you hear Ornette Coleman, played by Teo Macero, and then playing all over, this beautiful alto sax, just like Bird, but McPherson’s tone cut everything they were doing. Teo got [the rest] so soft you gotta listen for it. But the idea is that with all this noise going on, here’s this guy playing music and going to good notes behind or against this bass melody [demonstrates], and [McPherson], he’s playing pure honesty, not saying, “Look at me, I’m a king” or “I’m better than you.” Just doing his best he can, like Bird did through the changes, and it’s beautiful, man. [Pause.] This tenor player I got yesterday [Bobby Brown] got a helluva sound too, man.
It’s a drag to have to put down people. But I’ve always known there’s something else to learn, and I really found out what it was just recently when I started saying: “Wait a minute, man, I used to play with Art Tatum, and he used to say, ‘ “Body and Soul,” Mingus.’ ” Or he wouldn’t say nothing; he’d just start and I’d come in in the key of D-flat. And all of a sudden here’s a guy starting on D minor and I’m used to playing E-flat minor. Or some night he’d come in and play in C minor. And I got all hung up on the chords and positions. He’d say, “I’m in the key of B, man, come on, let’s go.” Or, “I’m in the key of G. Can’t you think like this?”
So I go to the piano and realize I can’t do [my old style] no more. So for the rest of my life, I do what all these guys gotta do: study the keys they can’t play in. Then as they study them, minors and majors, they’ll be able to play in ’em. And that’s the truth of music, and that goes for symphony guys too. They are still trying to play in the hard keys. It’s simple to write in D-flat because we play in it all the time. And F, we done wore it out, and we wore out B-flat. But nobody wore out B-natural yet. They ain’t wore out E-natural or D[-natural] or F-sharp.
GOODMAN: But why can’t a musician catch the modulation in a tune? How can that pass them by?
MINGUS: Because we all want it to be easy! I would know something was wrong, but I’m talking about the guys who can’t do it, who haven’t got the fingering to do it, yet they call themselves musicians. You gotta know how to do the fingering. You play piano? You can’t play the C scale the same way [crossing your thumb, etc.]. So you gotta know what you’re doing. It’s like starting over and admitting that even professionals gotta study and practice. Plus go to teachers. I’m sure all the guys I know do it, who are in the good positions. Buddy Collette talks about going to his composition teacher. Red Callender’s going to a teacher; these guys are my age. Who else goes?
This little kid trumpet player, Lonnie Hillyer, said, “Man, I wish I had his chops.” Wish he had his chops? He was talking about John Faddis, and I said, “He didn’t have no chops, he studied to get that proper embouchure.”
Lonnie said, “No, he was just born like that.”
“No,” I said, “he’s got a teacher right now.”
“No, he don’t need no teacher right now”—and now Lonnie wants to study. But it took a long time to prove that to him . . . First of all, his parents should be shot. They sent him to Barry Harris, who’s a piano teacher, to teach him to play the trumpet. Well, the proper start would be send him to Barry Harris for theory but Barry doesn’t know anything about an embouchure, you know, how to blow through a straw and strengthen your chops and all that. It’s Barry’s fault too; he should have told the parents, “I can teach him theory but you need a trumpet teacher, a good one—one of them old men who can sit and blow B-flats all night long.”
One thing I’d like to clear up a little more in case I haven’t is the fact that all those eras in the history of jazz, like Dixieland, Chicago, Moten swing, all those styles, man, are the same and as important as classical music styles are. The movements—like you remember Moten swing? Count Basie swing is another swing. And Jimmy Lunceford had another swing. Remember Jimmy’s band? The two-four rock [demonstrates].
Well, man, there should be a school set up where all those styles and movements are exposed to the students, and they find their medium, what is closest to them, and come out with that. I don’t mean copy that, I mean they should be able to copy it and then find themselves, as most composers do in classical music. Find which one they like and that’s where they are, through direction.
You think about it, man, even the guys in jungles, they weren’t just born as a baby and picked up a drum. Their daddy taught them how to play drums, to send messages and all that. “Somebody’s talking something.” They heard it and loved it, went and fooled with it for a while, and daddy would say, “Well, here’s how you do that, son.”
They didn’t just say, “I’m Jesus born here, hand me a drum, baby; lay a flute on me, run me a clarinet next; now I’m gonna play a little bass. Where’s Jascha Heifetz’s violin? I’ll play that for you, better than him. When we get through, hand me Isaac Stern’s.”
Yeah, that’s where the guys are today: “Give me a violin and I’ll play it for you. Jascha played it, I’ll play it too.”
And intelligent people still listen to this crap, man. I don’t want to be fooled anymore: I know when I’m out of tune, and I’ve done it intentionally and watch critics applaud. And that’s when avant-garde has gone too far. “Let’s see, here’s a B-flat seventh. I’ll change the chord from a B-flat major seventh, I’ve got an A-natural in B-flat; I’m gonna play a B-natural.” And I’ll get applause for it. Well, on the major seventh chord, that’s the wrong note. Now if the chord was not a major seventh and was a B-flat cluster, and if the chord is a row, then I can play all the notes. But [not on] a major seventh. I can play wrong notes in a chord if I want to sound wrong and have a clown band like—what’s that guy had a clown band? Shoots guns and all that?—Spike Jones. If you want to say Spike Jones is avant-garde, then we got some avant-garde guys playing, some Spike Joneses.
GOODMAN: Only he made music.
MINGUS: He could do everything, man. I don’t want to be so junglish that I can’t climb a stairway. I got to climb mountains all day long? We’re going to the moon, right? Well, I’m with the guys that wrote music that got us to the moon. Not the guys who dreamed about it. Bach built the buildings, we didn’t get there from primitive drums. In a sense we did, because primitive drums was the faith. Primitive music is the faith—like Indian music—of people who want to find out how to get there. Bach was the intellectual pencil that figured out mathematically “does this work?”
“Yes, this does, now put that aside.”
And finally, “Does this work with this?” Bach put all these things together and called them chords. Well, we go with progress and call it scales, and these things have been broken down by Schillinger and a whole lot of other guys. Now if you work in that form and then go back and say, “Man, we don’t need to know this theory,” fine, then I accept that you’re a primitive. But when you come on the bandstand with a guy who may not want to play primitive for a minute, can you play with him? That’s what the question is.
Maybe I can play