Mingus Speaks. John Goodman
used ‘the way Duke uses Harry Carney in the band.’ The Spanish vamp, and the ending which I really liked, he wanted to [use to] flesh out the piece. I wrote the open harmonics and the counter-motifs to fill in the spaces and reflect Carney, I guess.”
| 2 | Studying, Teaching, and Earning a Living |
| “Lloyd Reese . . . was more than a genius.” |
I asked Mingus to talk about his first days in New York, when he was married to Celia. A good part of what he had said about that period in Underdog was fiction, and I wanted to hear the true version. He couldn’t make a living by teaching, he said. He got into describing his work at the post office, which led him to the problems of writing music for a living—and how Bach and Beethoven handled that, with some asides about Beethoven’s living style—and finally some musings on the high life and the low life for a musician.
Many of his thoughts on classical music and musicians concentrated on the conditions under which that music was composed and played, the economics of writing and performing it, if you will. There were lots of bons mots here—among them, “the best job [Bach] could get was to write for Christians.” For Mingus, at least in these interviews, it was mostly about how to make a living in music.
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MINGUS: When I first came to New York I was teaching—Percy Heath, then I had Jimmy Garrison, several white students—one of the guys became a big gambler, Italian kid, can’t remember his name now. He went to the horse races and found he could make money that way and quit playing—and he was a very good player. Had them as private students, singly. But that wasn’t enough money.
Anyway, Celia told me in these very words before I got started teaching: when she finds herself getting loose or wanting to go to bed with another man—she said she had been working at living with her [former] husband, John Nielsen, and every day the stairs just got higher and higher. So she came in one day, before I started teaching even. I was practicing, we were living in New York, and I’m getting ready to go to work in the studios—because I didn’t come here just to go to work with Charlie Parker.
She opens the door, and I say, “Hi, how you doin’, baby?”
She says, “Whew, those stairs are getting higher and higher.” And that’s all she said, man.
I said, “Well, I’ll tell you what’s going to happen, baby. I’m going to get me a job, quit playing music.”
She said, “You can’t quit playing music,” but she said it in such a sour way that I knew she wanted me to help her get some money.
I said, “I’m going to work, find a job.” I wanted her to say no, but she didn’t say no.
She said, “All right, if you feel you should do it. What can you do? You can’t do nothing, you’re a bass player.”
GOODMAN: Sounds like my wife, man, about what I do.
MINGUS: “Yes, I can, baby. I can carry mail. ’Cause I’m a stone mail carrier; my father was a mailman.”
So . . . I went to the post office, it was around Christmastime, man, and she was getting tired of the stairways, and I didn’t want no woman cheatin’ on me. So I went to the post office and got signed up for temporary service. I got to carry mail, I think. No, I didn’t, in California I carried mail. In New York, they gave me the bundles and the chutes, that’s all I got to do, the heavy work. I worked my ass off, and I remember the guys who were there permanently used to laugh at me ’cause I’d still be working when they were sitting down eating sandwiches. Not at lunch time: they had breaks, little breaks, coffee breaks.
They said, “Mingus, what are you gonna do? There’s always another sack coming, you can’t win.”
But I stood there every day. I said, “Fuck ’em, man,” and I kept throwing the mail, you know. When the chute packs up, the conveyor belt stops. And they all began to like me because I wanted a permanent job. I was doing their work in a way. But they laughed at me, man. Reason I know I was a winner for the post office, which is not much of a claim, but I would just as soon be in the post office as to be here where I am now. I would rather I had stayed there, and I could have stayed. After Christmas came, I stayed on, all the guys liked me, foreman and everybody. You know who got me to quit? Charlie Parker. [Usually] you only worked about two months and then you’re through with it. I worked three and four months, going over the period. I’m bragging about this, man, ’cause not too many cats can work in the post office.
GOODMAN: I think it’s in the Ross Russell book where he says Bird got Mingus out of the post office.1
MINGUS: Well, he didn’t get me out of the post office, man. You know how I feel about it? I feel like this, man: I don’t know what Bartók or Beethoven did for a living, but they didn’t write music for a living. There’s rumors around from the avant-garde and the collectors of history, like Phil Moore will tell you. But what I heard about Beethoven is that he used to go to a nightclub [sounding a little drunk here] or where musicians would go to hear their music, because in those days they didn’t use their horns, they used their pencils. Said, “Let’s write some counterpoint, let’s write some fugues.”
Bach could be sitting in the corner, you know, not being bothered with the jazz musicians, ’cause he knew he was Bach. But you know there had to be a scene like that. Finally, someone would come up and say, “Well, I wrote the baddest. This is the best.” And they find a judge, and ask Bach to come over. And Bach walk over and say, “Well, I don’t know, I can’t compare, but I’ll write you a fugue.” So, what was he doing for a living? He was walking to church on Sundays to pay his rent, he played in church.
GOODMAN: He had his church position, and that’s what paid his bills—
MINGUS: Well, put that in the book!
GOODMAN: Right, and a guy like Beethoven had his patrons, because the system was a little bit different then. He was writing a symphony for Count So-and-So, and he had to make his living that way. But Bach had a stipend, a regular thing.
MINGUS: He was [subsidized] to one position, put that down. Suppose he ever had a chance to write for some dancers, what would he have written?2
GOODMAN: He did, he wrote dances. They are transcribed and sometimes altered, but you’re right, and it all had to be appropriate for his church position. He was the cantor of Leipzig, for Christ’s sake.
MINGUS: Put that in, make me sound intelligent.
GOODMAN: I will [laughs], I’ll try—I mean I’m not that intelligent!
MINGUS: Phil Moore made the classical guys relate to me the same as the jazz guys did. So, fuck it, if Bach was a guy who went to church, the best job he could get was to write for Christians [laughter about this]. . . .
FIGURE 2. Mingus, Sue Graham, Alvin Ailey (at end of row), and dancers rehearsing “The Mingus Dances,” 1971. Photo by Sy Johnson.
GOODMAN: Want to get out of here?
MINGUS: No, not done in here, I ordered a hamburger. My friends are bringing you and me some fine smoked Nova Scotia salmon and bagels. Well, that’s like about nine-thirty or ten, so that’ll be our little snack, you know. . . .
Phil and Red [Callender], they knew the history of music, but they’re musicians. But I never saw ’em, I never went to school, I went to a private school. They were more concerned with the fundamentals than with what Bach did. They would play Bach for you, the music, and write it for you. But listening to it was for guys like you and me.
Beethoven used to shit in his house, in the corner. Did you know this? You can read that.
GOODMAN: Sure, I’ve read it, but I don’t necessarily believe it.
MINGUS: But it’s possible to read, right, that he lived like an animal? That’s what