Mingus Speaks. John Goodman
Right, that kind of piece. He could have easily gone someplace else with that music. It isn’t like a John Lewis composition, for example, which is inevitable. One thing inevitably follows everything else. John will never forget exactly the sequence of things happening. With Mingus, the options are open, they’re open to change even after the piece is played, recorded. He’s responding to another drummer or another source in his head. And some of the most volcanic music he has written has been written in that way.
GOODMAN: Then you’re suggesting this is a kind of polarity in his music. I mean, the “Clowns” Mingus and then the Black Saint Mingus?
JOHNSON: Right. Or even with that piece for Roy Eldridge—the “Little Royal Suite”—which is that [second] kind of Mingus. It’s the volcanic, volatile music that is very difficult to get people to play because they frequently have to make noises and he has written nonmusical instructions to them on the music, and they are expected to supply a wide palette of sounds. Again, it’s helpful to enumerate: he’s got the very disciplined Mingus that can write a piece like “Clowns” or like even “Shoes of the Fisherman’s Wife,” which is somber and very, uhh, controlled—although that could have gone other places too. “Shoes” is one of the pieces, once you see the structure of it, that he could have taken some other place. But “Clowns” is quite unique. He was very surprised to find out that that was not a sixteen-bar phrase.
And that’s another thing. His music frequently comes out into odd numbers of bars. He sometimes has a tendency, if one thing comes out at fourteen bars, to make the next section eighteen bars long. So that in totality, it turns out to be a thirty-two-bar phrase. He thinks that it should be more regular than it is. He’s a little suspicious of his own instincts in that regard. But if he breaks a three-bar phrase, then he will follow that with a five-bar phrase.
In “Taurus,” he had written a brilliant series and built the whole piece on three-bar phrases. The recording of it was left off the album for space reasons and because Mingus actually finished the piece after the recording was done. But it was brilliantly written in three-bar phrases.
On the recording date, Mingus yelled something about “we need to settle down someplace.” He inserted one four-bar phrase, just extending one of the three-bar phrases for an extra measure, which killed me. I hated that. It drove me right up the wall because it was such a perfect structure before. Mingus very obstinately decided that he needed to settle down somewhere in the middle and added one measure to it, which destroyed that beautifully conceived framework that seemed to have been entirely subconscious on his part. It wasn’t planned: he was following his ear, and whatever his muse was telling him. Only after the fact of dealing with it, when trying to record it at an earlier time, did he want to “settle down” and make it more regular at one place. He just had to change it.
So it still galls me slightly that he would fuck with that perfect structure that he made. ’Cause it was perfect. He just had to lengthen one of them out to conventional length to satisfy some other requirement that had nothing to do with the act of writing the music. It was separate from the creative impulse of putting the music down.
But, his music is just full of earth and it’s always got its feet in the dirt. I mean it’s jazz, it has human cries in it, and it’s full of humanity. Mingus’s humor is [unintelligible].
GOODMAN: I suppose in his sense of form he’s got to have something to grab onto.
JOHNSON: Right, I know that. He mistrusts though, sometimes, his own . . . So he will, after the fact, regularize something. He’ll come across a chord sequence that seems to exist, it doesn’t even have a melody sometimes, just a series of chords that seem designed to do nothing but finish a phrase. He doesn’t have anything particular he wants to write there but he feels he should have a certain number of more bars. It will be just some chords that will finish it. Then he will have written sixteen bars and that will be the end of it. It’s just an interesting thing.
NOTES
1. There is a good discussion of the subject in Eric Porter’s What Is This Thing Called Jazz? African American Musicians as Artists, Critics, and Activists (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), with a full chapter on Mingus. See especially 22–23, 37, 192.
2. Mingus intended to move to Majorca to “work on his autobiography and composition,” according to a Jet magazine notice: “Bassist Mingus Heads for Venice, May Quit U.S.,” August 30, 1962.
3. The full Time article is here: www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,827882,00.html.
4. Kenneth Rexroth, “Some Thoughts on Jazz as Music, as Revolt, as Mystique,” reprinted in Bird in the Bush (New York: New Directions, 1959); or see www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth/jazz.htm. As of 2010, the Mingus Orchestra continued the explorations into jazz-poetry performances that Mingus, Rexroth, and others began in the 1950s. See www.mingusmingusmingus.com/MingusBands/ChamberMingusPR.pdf.
5. Ornette could read; that wasn’t the problem. There’s no “simple” answer as to why he couldn’t or wouldn’t play straight, despite what he said in talking with critic Whitney Balliett: “The other night, at a rehearsal for the concert I played in of Gunther Schuller’s music, Schuller made me play a little four-measure thing he’d written six or seven times before I got it right. I could read it, see the notes on the paper. But I heard those notes in my head, heard their pitch, and what I heard was different from what Schuller heard. Then I got it right. I got it his way. It was as simple as that.” Balliett, Collected Works: A Journal of Jazz 1954–2000 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002), 116.
6. Nesuhi Ertegun partnered with his brother Ahmet to produce some of Atlantic Records’ best-known jazz and pop musicians, including Mingus, Coltrane, Coleman, the Modern Jazz Quartet, and many others. He was also Mingus’s friend.
7. It would probably be more politically correct today to use the term “ethnic,” but this was 1974 and I meant “tribal” in the sense of totemic, a specific and integral part of the culture.
8. A good discussion of Coltrane’s “Africanism” and related issues is found in Ben Ratliff, Coltrane: The Story of a Sound (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007). See especially 154–78.
9. Recently, the story (rumored for years) came out about Varèse’s fascination and work in 1957 with New York jazz musicians, including Parker, Mingus, Teo Macero and others. The “improvisations” are diagrammed and recorded for playback by the International Contemporary Ensemble in “Varèse, Charlie Parker, and the New York Improv Sessions,” Edgar(d) (blog), July 19, 2010, http://iceorg.org/varese/?p=200.
10. Sue Mingus has published the full Children liner notes online as “What Is a Jazz Composer?” See www.mingusmingusmingus.com/Mingus/what_is_a_jazz_composer.html. It is a brilliant, rambling, ranting piece in which Mingus declares his allegiance to tradition in jazz and classical music. “An Open Letter to the Avant-Garde” broaches the Clark Terry idea he followed up on here, of getting really accomplished jazz musicians to show up the pseudo-avant-garde players. Read it at www.parafono.gr/htmls/mingus_openletter.htm.
11. The piece is entitled “All the Things You Could Be by Now: Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus and the Limits of Avant-Garde Jazz.” No longer available online, it has been collected in Uptown Conversations: The New Jazz Studies, ed. Robert G. O’Meally, Brent Hayes Edwards, and Farah Jasmine Griffin (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 27–49.
12. Alex Stewart, Making the Scene: Contemporary New York City Big Band Jazz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 224.
13. Sy added this note in a follow-up interview in 2011: “I was doing