Mingus Speaks. John Goodman
what Bach could do, because that’s the foundation, and then he could put the D-flat major seventh against that. Now then you got a building, black and white, concrete and stone, and it can grow taller. Now that’s the way it is, man. Though I’m not saying that’s as modern as you want to be.
But I can’t hear for a moment when Bach was in the church. I can’t hear for a moment when he left his theory-ism. He’s the greatest theorist that ever was, man, the greatest mathematician ever lived, I know that. But he was never in church, he never realized he was in the church, man. Excuse me, he was never a minister in the church. He only wrote his self, his theory.
GOODMAN: You mean he wrote church music without being a believer?
MINGUS: Without being a member, without being a teacher. But he taught another way, man. It’s too intricate for church, unless they played him too fast. There’s this theory that they played Bach very fast.
GOODMAN: Yeah, Glenn Gould holds to that.
MINGUS: You play him slow, and it’s another story. Well, who was there to know?
GOODMAN: Now let me ask you something . . .
MINGUS: We’ll go back to Bach later.
GOODMAN: I wanted to go back to the wailing and the African thing.
MINGUS: You want to talk about John Coltrane.
GOODMAN: Well, yeah . . . because I wrote a piece once, I’ll send it to you, with the idea that all the people who were making the biggest noise about African music—talking about it more than playing it—were misunderstanding what African music was really about. African music is really . . . tribal music.7
MINGUS: Tribal music?
GOODMAN: A man plays a drum to convey a specific message, and if he’s playing for a dance he’s playing to arouse very particular emotions. The African music I know is very specific. The New Thing, as they used to call it, was totally unspecific, like an expressionist painting.
It seemed to me that people who said they were trying to get back to Africa in their music were just putting a lot of con on everybody. Or they didn’t know what they were talking about.8
MINGUS: See, I’m closer to America in a lot of ways than Africa, never been to Africa and I don’t have any African friends, but I tell you I’ve done a little reading, and I used to go with an Indian girl whose grandfather was Sicilian born. I’m sure tribal people are all the same, African or Indian, like this girl. The high-degree order monks, they write music in the cloisters. Now we have guys in the police department, they have a police band, in parades, and a dance band. The Marines have a band, sailors have one. This girl showed me a funny thing—that even though we look at people as being primitive, that the guys who played the drums for the war dance weren’t the guys who played the drums for the religious dances.
Now the people who were going to meditate and do these long five-day hikes in the mountains—what the kids now use LSD for instead of peyote—these were another set of Indian guys. What I’m trying to say is where was the governing of where the music was for all the people? When the chief was involved, elected by the tribe, that was someone who everybody respected—in primitive music—and they had dancing and celebrations. So that meant—
GOODMAN: A different music for each purpose.
MINGUS: I imagine the warriors brought their drums too, but they didn’t all play at the same time. Now, what music they did respect as being Indian music is mainly the dance music or the folk music for people who were enjoying themselves. Now, religious music—John [Coltrane] was a preacher, and I accept that.
He was trying to tell the people, “Stop shooting up dope, stop getting high. Go on a vegetarian diet, get yourself together. Get your body and mind together and see what the society’s done to the poor black man.”
He was trying to get it together. The fact that the white kids liked it, some liked it as much as they did rock, right? Like at rock concerts, they were packed in, I saw ’em. It wasn’t done exactly like the Indians did it, it was done with new religious tones. You say African, I heard more Indian in his music—Indian-Indian music.
GOODMAN: I think that’s true, and I don’t mean that John was playing African music, but a lot of the people who were talking all this pro-Africa stuff at the time used him as an example. And they’re full of shit.
MINGUS: They are, and they never heard Indian music, man.
GOODMAN: And they never heard African music either.
MINGUS: I’m sure if John had wanted it to be, he’d have gone to Africa and studied it out. But presently there’s not that much African music other than Olatunji, if you want to call that representative of African music.
It’s just drums. African music I’ve heard—there’s a tribe—I can call Farwell Taylor and ask him—but this tribe had this huge saxophone they’d sit on, and they’d all blow into it. Four, five men would play it, and it would sound o-o-voo-voo, o-o-voo-voo, like a drum played by a mouth.
GOODMAN: Like a bagpipe, sort of?
MINGUS: Man, this was like a rock, the picture I saw of it, like a rock they was blowing into and sitting on it, like a big mountain, and it was an instrument. It was from the Belgian Congo, I remember that. It was the first music I heard as a kid, seventeen years old. And this man [Farwell] loved African music, he had everything you could get.
But then one day he got some records and found out that some of them were made in Los Angeles in a studio with bamboo and shit on the floor and some local cats. And it broke his heart, ’cause he thought it was real. Here’s how he found out.
I said, “Farwell, I can’t imagine them going out to the jungle—’cause they found some very dangerous music, music from the Pygmies, who were going to shoot the warriors with darts, poison arrows. How did they get all the equipment out there? They had stereo and hi-fi. Where did they get the electrical stuff to record them?”
They didn’t have these little things [taps my recorder] in them days. And they couldn’t get those lows and highs the way they got ’em. Unless they got a powerful truck in there, and the scene was set up so Hollywood.
And wait a minute, man. What is African music? Don’t bullshit me, man. Let me go there and then I’ll know, [I’ll] come back and report the truth to you. Don’t tell me what they do. So now they send some people over, like Miriam Makeba and her brother who played trumpet, but they were black people, Africans, influenced by American jazz. What is their music? I’m still waiting for them to show me. Don’t tell me that John Coltrane gonna show me, ’cause he ain’t been there yet. Randy Weston ain’t come up with nothing yet that says “this is Africa.”
GOODMAN: There were some old African records on Folkways, remember? They used to do all those wonderful ethnic things from around the world.
MINGUS: Yeah, I don’t doubt that. [On Farwell’s records] they had a sacrificial suite, and I thought, “Wait a minute, man, they really killed somebody on this record?”
Farwell says, “Well, that’s what it says.”
Sorry, man. These nice American guys go in with cameras and sound equipment and watch ’em have a sacrifice? OK, and it sold a million copies. I mean this country’s so full of bullshit it’s ridiculous.
John was a very good man, very nice person, and the music he played told that. He was a very serious person and seriously in love with his music, a very religious man. He actually invented a new music in his so-called attempts to display African religious music. Which I haven’t heard yet, I haven’t heard him playing African.
GOODMAN: What burned me most was an article in Jazz & Pop, about five or six years ago, with some hip white asshole [Frank Kofsky] coming on about how Coltrane is the African messiah—and that’s what made me write my piece.