Mingus Speaks. John Goodman
I’m gonna take you there. You ever see it?
GOODMAN: Sure, you took me there once. Fuck it, who cares?
MINGUS: I can’t help it, man. If I were so organized to put things on shelves, I couldn’t find nothing.
GOODMAN: I once wrote a column about a writer who criticized Beethoven for his “slovenly habits”—that he lived like a pig, you know, and was a terrible person. He insulted and was rotten to everybody. And all these books about Beethoven and how impossible a guy he was—that is the worst kind of music writing.
I mean, if he hadn’t written the greatest music in the world, would anyone have cared one good fuck whether he lived like a pig or like a king?
MINGUS: Well, you know pigs are very important, you know, you eat pigs. So if you live like a pig, you don’t bother me, man.
GOODMAN: It’s irrelevant and dumb.
MINGUS: We should talk about it though, man, we should talk about it in a different way. I think that this showed that the man wasn’t making any money. That’s what I was talking about. The fact that he had to live the same way as I live.
Everybody in the band gets $450 a week; I’m making $2,500, and I pay the agent, the plane fare, expenses—I don’t make nothing, man. It’s like doing it for kicks. And I can’t go on for kicks anymore. That’s why I’m writing this book. That’s why you’re going to write a good book. That’s why I can’t fuck around. [Pause.] You got to go inside my head and take out all the cobwebs and take out all the real things and all the bad things. I think you can do it, man.
GOODMAN: I hope so.
MINGUS: Well with the Playboy thing, I thought we could do it.
GOODMAN: I’m glad you think that, and I’m happy because I think we can do it.
MINGUS: Why don’t you talk about some things that bug you? You should talk about the fact that people write criticisms on Beethoven that talk about him living as a pig. We should talk about it, and the fact is that maybe he did, and maybe a pig’s life ain’t so bad, man. Maybe he was so busy with what he was doing—
GOODMAN: Obviously, right. You know, Sue said something to me the other night: “If only Charles had gotten that nice studio overlooking the river, he could have gotten rid of that lousy apartment he’s got.”
I said nothing but I thought, well, if he really wanted to get out of that apartment he’d get out of there, and why should he have to get out of there? It doesn’t mean anything. I live in a very nice house, and I’m thinking of getting out of that.
MINGUS: This is good material, man. I’ve lived on Park Avenue, 1160, I lived in one of the best houses they have for white folks. I had to send a white man in to get the apartment for me. They wouldn’t rent it to me. Sent in a guy who said his name was Mingus, introduced himself and got the apartment for me. And I’ve lived in Harlem, the best apartments in Harlem—which are just as good as the best apartments on Fifth Avenue. And I wrote the same kind of music, but I still haven’t written the music I want to write. It’s weird.
I’m still playing jazz, on the bandstand, in pigpens—’cause Max’s Kansas City is a pigpen—still playing with people, one of these days, ding-ding-ding-ding, I’m gonna get a chance to write some music, ding-ding-ding-ding, ’cause you can’t work in these clubs like this, ding-ding-ding-ding, with Dannie Richmond and these kids who don’t even believe in what I believe in. You can’t write a composition of what you are, you can’t even improvise a composition of what you are and play it in these kind of places. And play this often. And travel in the airplane, travel on the train, travel on the bus. You can’t do this, man. This is tougher than Beethoven had to do, man.
GOODMAN: Yes, it is. He could sit on his ass.
MINGUS: He had no travel problem. That’s what I’m saying. If Beethoven had been a garbage man and wrote the way he wrote, if somebody could hear what he’s doing and say, “Here’s a guy who wrote beautiful music, more than beautiful music, he wrote real music, pertaining to his society completely, wrote music pertaining to the hereafter.” [Chuckles.] He had a hell of a belief—he had more of a belief than Bach. I don’t notice in any of Bach’s writing any fact for a moment where he believes in Jesus. Yet in Beethoven’s music, I hear where he might have believed in Jesus, and he never wrote for church.
GOODMAN: I’d argue with you on that, but it’s another discussion.
MINGUS: Well, the way they play it, man, the counterpoint or fugues, on piano especially, I’m talking about piano music, Bach on piano, I can’t hear no more where he believes.
GOODMAN: But Bach on piano is not the real thing, you know.
MINGUS: I’m glad you’re here, man. . . .
• • •
In discussing classical influences and how Mingus used them, we rambled and zigzagged as usual. His talk started with how he used music to seduce women—writing string quartets for them—and, after some excursions, finished again with that theme. Mingus’s string quartets were known only to a relative few, and I never got to hear them.
The most obvious example of classical influence in his music is “Adagio ma non troppo” from Children, which, as Mingus says below, uses classical forms and procedures to highlight jazz improvisation. It is the most obvious recorded bow to classical sources and forms he ever wrote, though “The Chill of Death” from the same album clearly owes something to Richard Strauss.
Symphonic suggestions are sometimes woven into his other work—obbligato parts and voicings in the big band music particularly—yet the result is nothing like Third Stream music. What he did learn from the classicists was how to use tone color. But I don’t hear much in the way of “classical,” neither concert analogues nor direct borrowings, in Mingus. When he says he “always wanted to play classical music,” I think he means music with that depth, structure, and complexity. When he talked with the Italian interviewer (see Introduction), he said he was waiting for the chance to write, not Western concert music, but “classical, pure, serious music that came out of all the musics.” Mingus the composer was a synthesizer, a true eclectic, one who totally integrated those multiple sources into his music.
As Alex Ross has pointed out, the compositions of Mingus, John Coltrane, and Ornette Coleman expanded the tonalities of bebop, and as composers they had “much in common” (well, something in common) with Stravinsky, Debussy, and Messiaen.3 Along with the music of Ravel, the music of these composers was in the air, and many jazz musicians were listening. They wanted to be taken as serious musicians.
Yet here’s a guy who loves the “bitches” and is desperate to get laid, while at the same time he’s at the piano “improvising in symphonic form”! I took that as some kind of epitome of Mingus.
• • •
MINGUS: It’s funny, man, I know the name Mary Campbell [see chapter 11] means something to you now—Campbell’s soup maybe, and she told me about that later—but before she told me about it I was still in love. When I looked at her I just forgot all about the bitches I looked at at home base. I figured this broad had been in some kind of church and knew classical music. I had some classical repertoire. She asked was I trained in school and all that, and—Lloyd Reese never taught me this, I was born with this—I used to improvise in symphony [form]. I got proof of that, a composition on Columbia, an improvised thing in Let My Children Hear Music, one of the tunes in there, “Adagio ma non troppo.”
GOODMAN: Are those tunes that early in your life?
MINGUS: That kind of playing was.
GOODMAN: “Half-Mast Inhibition,” that wasn’t an improvised piece?
MINGUS: No, that was partly jazz too. But the basis of my playing was always the desire to get over the music I was playing, to make enough money