Mingus Speaks. John Goodman

      JOHNSON: Oh, I did too. As I say, there were great players in those bands and they worked very hard to make the music happen. They should have gotten some credit for it.

      Anyway, two of the pieces had no music available—none, not even a lead sheet. They were on a very poorly recorded album that somebody had made at UCLA after the great [1964] Monterey concert that Mingus had done. That was one of his really creative periods and as great as that [Monterey] album was, there was a lot of music that never got recorded. His output was enormous at that point in his life.³

      And so there was a lot of music in that [UCLA] album that had never been released by anybody, and Mingus . . . just felt the music should be played. So we considered several things in doing that. [One was] the instrumentation that we needed to play “The Chill of Death”—which Mingus had written years and years before, in the late ’30s, like 1939. I think Ted Nash had something to do with helping Mingus then. They were friends at that time and Mingus told me once that Ted Nash helped him orchestrate it, gave him some advice and looked his score over, something like that. It is a very ambitious orchestration, but it was done years and years ago and he never had gotten the opportunity to record it. But I think that they did play it: Ted Nash assembled an orchestra in Los Angeles back before 1940, I think, and they played it once.

      So “The Chill of Death” had been dormant since that time. He wanted to record it and it called for six basses plus Mingus. [On the Children date] we actually had three jazz bass players and three classical bass players. The jazz bass players were Richard Davis, Ron Carter, and Milt Hinton. And then there were three legit bass players also, and they were all playing arco. It is interesting in that company that the concertmaster for the bass section was—there was no question among the basses [about] who was the concertmaster—it was Richard Davis. Whenever something had to be decided they turned to Richard, and he let them know what was happening.

      So, there were a lot of woodwinds, ten woodwinds. Just four brass: two trumpets, a trombone, and bass trombone. Two percussion and rhythm. The most fascinating instrument in the orchestra for me was the contrabass clarinet, and having a contrabass clarinet to write for was so luxurious. Danny Bank played it so fantastically that I went apeshit with it. You can hear that contrabass clarinet all the way through “Shoes of the Fisherman’s Wife.”

      GOODMAN: I always thought it was a bass clarinet.

      JOHNSON: No, it is a contrabass clarinet, and it has that low G-flat on it. So the piece has a G-flat tonality at the very outset and you can use the lowest note on the contrabass clarinet at the beginning and end of that opening section. And the basses are bowing along with that, and there’s a chance to really exploit the low sonorities. It is a very light orchestra as far as brass is concerned. There are only four brass. So a lot of climaxes that I might have liked to have gotten were limited by the number of brass players I had to deal with.