Mingus Speaks. John Goodman
on you—for the Whitney Museum.
I didn’t write [the quartet] out, I composed it on piano. But when people heard the composition, they thought I had spent months writing it. I played it on my piano. I reveal this in my book. And it was not for critics, because I played it at Newport. Most people picture me in there writing, taking time, because it takes six months to write a string quartet with all the bowings in it.
GOODMAN: I remember when I last saw you [in 1972] you were writing them. You had done two.
MINGUS: Well, I did one with the pencil and never finished it. I have sketches for about four more that [unintelligible]. I only have the copy of the one of ’em here, the one I did already, six-seven minutes.
GOODMAN: Did you perform the other? Kermit Moore was going to play it.
MINGUS: Yeah, Kermit Moore played it, and he also did it in Newport.
GOODMAN: Who else played? I wish I’d heard that, goddammit.
MINGUS: I wish you’d heard it too, man.
GOODMAN: Matter of fact, George Wein is the guy who said “[Whistle], Mingus’s quartets—I never heard anything like them.”
MINGUS: Yeah, well, don’t tell him yet. Don’t tell him till the book comes out. He doesn’t know about my writing them on piano, he thinks it’s a [composed,] written-out thing.
GOODMAN: You transcribed it, then?
MINGUS: Same as you and I are doing now. But the one I did with a pencil, I could see myself cutting the writing I did on the piano. Started one on the piano, it was one of the poems, poems for that guy, a whole concert was for him, at the Whitney Museum. Sue told you about it—the guy that got killed on the beach at Fire Island, a poet.4 Funny I don’t know the name.
That’s one thing I did write down and memorize, though: the word part, the slurring, legato thing that went through the melody that the cello and violins and all were playing. I sang that, didn’t play it, couldn’t play it [sings it]—those kind of sighing things, like in Hindemith, Bartók—Bartók, the theory was Bartók.
As a kid I was always very gifted in hearing something done by a classical composer and then going to the piano in the middle of it and just playing it. I don’t have perfect pitch either. This [would be] after the record [was] off, and I’d say, “I know what that is” [sings a phrase]. Red Norvo, I did it once for him, they were playing, umm, some difficult composer, a Spanish composer—know any?
GOODMAN: Albeniz, Villa-Lobos—
MINGUS: Villa-Lobos, they were playing Villa-Lobos at this house, and I was with Red Norvo then—this was many years later—and they said it was quarter tones, a quarter-tone piece. So I told Red, “This isn’t quarter tones; I can show you it’s not.”
Well, his attitude was, “Go away, boy,” you know.
And so when the concert was over with, I didn’t say nothing. So fuck it, I just went to the piano and did [sings melody phrase] and I played every note that every instrument was playing—not too long, I couldn’t play the whole piece.
They said, “How’d you do that? How’d you do that? You got perfect pitch?”
No, I haven’t got perfect pitch, man, and that’s not quarter tones. If it was quarter tones, I couldn’t have played it on the piano. That shows how the public can be fooled. They put on [the album description] that it’s a quarter-tone piece done by so-and-so, and the poor public buys it, and it ain’t quarter tone.
GOODMAN: And if the public can be fooled, you know damn well that musicians can be fooled too. Red Norvo is a good musician, and he got fooled.
MINGUS: Sure, musicians can be fooled, sadly. Red got fooled. Tal Farlow’s a guy who’s got perfect pitch, and he got fooled.
GOODMAN: Chuck Wayne was the guy I was trying to think of the other night when we were talking—
MINGUS: Bad man!—the one who was playing with the other guitar player at Bradley’s?
GOODMAN: Double session, yeah, he’s awful good, goddammit . . . So let’s talk about Stravinsky and Bartók and all those people—
MINGUS: That’s where we are now.
GOODMAN: Very honestly, I don’t hear a hell of a lot of that in your music, but I know that they are important to you and that you’ve been involved in a listening way.
MINGUS: It’s funny. I was talking to a piano player, Tommy Flanagan, in Copenhagen—he’s with Ella Fitzgerald—and we were talking about Coleman Hawkins, and so I was telling about how great his library, record collection, was; he had records all over the house. Flanagan said he didn’t have no jazz. All he had was Beethoven, Bach, Brahms, Stravinsky, Bartók. He’d try and play Bartók in the middle of “Body and Soul”—and this cat knows.
We had a whole discussion about piano players, because I love piano players, good piano players. So I made him go to the piano and play the changes to “Body and Soul,” and a couple of things that guys don’t do any more. He says, “Hawk would take and play this against E-flat, Mingus. Wasn’t he crazy? That’s called ‘Clair de Lune.’ ”
GOODMAN: Same intervals, you mean?
MINGUS: Same intervals but not in the same key. You’d think he’d play in the original key he’d get off the record.
GOODMAN: Well, that’s the kind of thing Debussy did too, you know. So Tommy Flanagan heard that?
MINGUS: Well, he’s a musicologist. I was so embarrassed, man, he knows so much music, listening music. We were sitting in a nightclub, and they played some music [on record] with Bird on tenor, and he knew who all the guys were—Sonny Rollins and Bird. He said, “Sonny Rollins didn’t play good here, he played wrong.”
And that’s what a musicologist is, because Tommy Flanagan is something else. He said, “This cat missed. Bird fucked him up.” That’s on Prestige, I guess, eh?
GOODMAN: Yeah, I have it, it’s a great record.5
• • •
MINGUS: The way I feel now is I should be having some students over at my place. But I’ve still got to work until that day comes when I can build a school and get some students to play some real music.
GOODMAN: And an audience that knows you. Like what classical music is doing, but they are in hard times too.
MINGUS: Kids should be educated to music, man; [classical is] not bad music. Our society should be listening to operas and everything else by now. It’s just noise to them, they can’t relax for a minute, it makes them sick. If a guy came in and played a beautiful violin for two-three minutes, they’d go crazy—over an ordinary microphone or no microphone.
Don’t you think they could appreciate Pablo Casals if he was young today? Sure they could, man, if this damn country would push it. I don’t know why they don’t want the kids to hear good music. Is it because it would make them healthy? They might throw their pot away. They might, man. You going to print that? And the young Casalses, they’re stopping them.
GOODMAN: The conservatories and the system for making it in classical music is hard, it’s a hard apprenticeship. But they’re still playing the same old Beethoven’s Third Symphony for the same old ladies in fur coats.
MINGUS: What about classical modern composers? There are some good ones. We had a guy named David Broekman that to me was great as anybody who ever lived.6 But they killed him. I heard his symphony, an unaccompanied cello concerto, no comparison, and he knew he was a master. He first played down in the East Village, Third Ave. and St. Mark’s—what’s that place? across from the Five Spot [Cooper Union].
David Broekman, I used to study with him. He used to come to all our concerts. Teo had a thing called Composers Workshop with