Mingus Speaks. John Goodman
A. B. Spellman or some black guy.
MINGUS: Well, that’s why I don’t read too much because how can you say someone’s a Watts exponent unless he [the critic] lived in Watts? Let alone Africa, which is over the water. How’s a guy gonna tell me how they play music in Watts when he’s sitting in New York City? I’m not being biased, but saying he represents a new music for the black people? That’d be nice because they sure need one to bring ’em together again, man.
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MINGUS: Does history show that there has always been a battle between the avant-garde, the up-and-coming artists, and the established artists? In painting, in anything? When the king said, “I award this man, I want this man to paint my portrait”? Maybe Van Gogh was one of the great portrait painters, and was there a critic around to say, “He did a lousy job on the king”?
GOODMAN: Talking about the last two or three hundred years, yeah, critics were around. They’re easy now, compared to then.
MINGUS: Yeah, because then they tore you up. Tore up everything about you, as a human being, where you came from, who’s your father, your mother . . . Has there always been the avant-garde?
GOODMAN: In a sense, yeah.
MINGUS: I got the word from Barry Ulanov, who laid the word on me. He once called me avant-garde, and it’s not so, man.
I’m not avant-garde, no. I don’t throw rocks and stones, I don’t throw my paint. How could he say something like that?
GOODMAN: Well, a lot of people think avant-garde means anything or anybody that is making a new sound, or a “new thing.” And that’s wrong; it means more than that.
MINGUS: Well, where did the word come from?
GOODMAN: It’s a French word, and it means literally the advance guard, like in the army, troops advancing, the front rank—
MINGUS: The best—
GOODMAN: Yes, and everybody else follows along back here.
MINGUS: So this man was saying that Coleman Hawkins and Charlie Parker were all behind Teo Macero and John LaPorta and myself?
GOODMAN: That’s why it’s wrong.
MINGUS: He’s an idiot. I’m just discovering this, man. I didn’t really know it was a French word, it never really got into me. All I know is that he said these people were the avant-garde, and he named ’em—John LaPorta, Lennie Tristano, Charlie Mingus. This was Barry Ulanov. He’s an idiot, man.
GOODMAN: Well, no, because he was using the word in a 1950s, labeling way. But in terms of the arts, it also means somebody doing really new things. See, this is what we were saying about Varèse the other night—
MINGUS: Varèse! That’s the composer, that’s the one I was telling you I was listening to, when I was listening to Red Norvo.9
GOODMAN: Varèse started all kinds of wild things, began to do electronic music before there was even tape!
MINGUS: Right, and he was avant-garde.
GOODMAN: He was called the most avant-garde composer around. And he knew better. He once told somebody who called him the leader of the avant-garde, “No, there’s no avant-garde. There are only people who are a little bit late.” And that’s beautiful, because it really shouldn’t be a question of people being either advanced or late.
The reason the critics use this is because it’s a handle, a label, an easy kind of way to put people in categories. No musician, no artist likes that because they all say, “Oh, I just play music, I just do my thing, I paint.” Well, OK, that’s fine, but—
MINGUS: But when their system has shown up what they’re doing—
GOODMAN: Yeah, you want to say, “All right, what do you relate to, man? What the hell is your thing? You do your music, your painting, your dance, but how do you relate to whatever has happened before?”
So a term like avant-garde comes into being, meaning in shorthand someone who is doing things that haven’t been done before. So when Barry Ulanov said that about your music, he probably was saying it in a complimentary way, you know?
MINGUS: Yeah, but when you think about how painters go about doing their paintings—or some of the painters—I’m told they put blindfolds on, go over to the canvas with any color they want and smear it on. Or they stand back, take a big bucket of paint and splash it on the canvas, then they go to the canvas and clear it up.
GOODMAN: Or the thing about the baboon, a couple of years ago, remember that? They had a baboon throwing the paint. He had a good time. Everybody loved the painting, man [laughter].
MINGUS: Yeah, I remember the baboon. Now, I love children, man. I have some of my own, less than teenagers. But finger painting, it’s beautiful for kids.
GOODMAN: Yeah, my kids are doing that.
MINGUS: But it’s not beautiful for adults. They should grow up.
Let’s say it like this, man. The guys who throw paint on the canvas with rocks and glue have won. They destroyed us, the guys who can play, the guys who can paint, man. They have won the game. I go to museums now, I see shit.
GOODMAN: Literally, on the canvas.
MINGUS: On the canvas, man, and they’re winning now. I went to the Louvre, man, and I saw shit. They are catering to—you know whose fault it is, man, in this country? I don’t know whose fault it is in Paris or in Copenhagen, but the fault [here] lays on Nat Hentoff, Barry Ulanov, they’re like all the guys who left the ship when Jesus stayed on. They’re like all the guys who stayed under the canoe when Jesus Christ got out and walked the water. They left the boat when it was sinking, man. No, they didn’t leave, they stayed on and it sunk. He had to come back and save ’em. It’s sad, man, it’s very sad.
GOODMAN: OK, I got a question for you about what the aesthetic people call form. I hear a piece of Ornette’s music and, for the sake of argument, I hear the form there, I know what he’s doing.
MINGUS: Wait a minute, are you saying that Ornette Coleman is avant-garde? Do the critics call him avant-garde?
GOODMAN: Let’s take somebody else.
MINGUS: Do the critics call him avant-garde? Down Beat hasn’t said anything in the last ten years.
GOODMAN: I wouldn’t put that label on him because it means two things—a person’s doing things that have never been heard or done before, and it also means that he’s a creative genius, or at least that’s the figurative meaning.
And both of those meanings are bullshit, so all you can really do is throw out the term. Like you wrote in that Changes piece [“Open Letter to the Avant-Garde”], where you said Duke Ellington told you about doing avant-garde music—“Let’s not go back that far”—[meaning] we shouldn’t even deal with that. He was right because it’s a term that you want to avoid.
MINGUS: I like Duke’s word better than the other guy’s [Varèse]. No, they’re both just as good.
But you know why it concerns me so much? Because it’s keeping jazz musicians out of work. This classification, it’s keeping jazz musicians out of work. All the fights that are going on in jazz, the rock-and-roll guys are still working—that’s the enemy—and they can’t even blow their nose yet.
GOODMAN: And they’ve got their avant-garde too. Shit, rock-and-roll’s been going for twenty years, as bad as it is, you know. So they got an avant-garde too, John McLaughlin and people like that.
MINGUS: That’s good to know. John McLaughlin’s out of work?
GOODMAN: Far from it.
MINGUS: But [our] avant-garde is out of work, man. That’s me, I’m out of work.
GOODMAN: You always said that they