Mingus Speaks. John Goodman
you very well. However, I wish you could give, you know, for our audience, a sort of little rundown on how you started, from the very beginning. It has to be brief, you know, but I really would like to start there.
MINGUS: I’ll do that for you, only be sure I answer the question, the first question. You said, you know, does the music reflect what is happening or what did happen. And I say again, it can’t because no one, no black man, knows what happened yet. Maybe me, maybe a couple of others, I’m talkin’ about musicians that know. I’m not too sure of that—McPherson [Mingus’s alto player] said he thought the riot was a fake, looked fake to him.
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In typical Mingus fashion, he leads off by throwing a bomb at the interviewer. His point of view about such things was generally to take the inside track from his own experience, whether the subject was politics, music, or social concerns. It’s no wonder that he and the poor Italian guy were often at cross purposes. This happened frequently in his other interviews too, and sometimes Mingus would deliberately exploit the disconnect. Later, Bobby Jones would tell me that this was a trick to throw the interviewer off the track.
Watts and race (theme 1) would reappear shortly. Now he was getting into music as food for the spirit (theme 2), a favorite topic.
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INTERVIEWER: Well, as a matter of fact, you know, I heard an awful lot of black Americans speaking in terms of, we are acquiring a new sense of awareness, or something. Do you feel that music, and in particular, jazz, can help, you know, these people to better understand themselves?
MINGUS: Well, if good music could get to the minds or the subconscious of people, it could help everybody, not just racists. Music has been used as therapy, you know, in mental wards. I was told about a program on NBC television about using poetry with schizophrenics. When I was a child, in 1942, they were using music as a shock treatment to patients. For example, I think music was used to uplift people in the first Russian revolution. So you don’t even need me to answer that question.
If the people are separated from their music, they die. If the black people have a music, if jazz was their music—umm, although the masses of black people never went for jazz; they were segregated from it; they went for rhythm and blues. Not rock blues, rhythm and blues. That’s probably why they’re so confused and so separated, because they don’t have a religious music like the Jews, who never changed their music; the Greeks, who never changed their music; the Armenians; the Italians never changed their music. But the black people don’t have a music, actually, unless that is gonna be jazz. But I would say jazz is for a progressive black man; it’s not for the masses.
I still think that the black people like the blues—the original blues, the T-Bone Walker blues. I don’t think they’re growing out of that or ever should grow out of it, until the blues is killed, you know, until the reason for the blues has died away. It shouldn’t be a sudden change, it should be a gradual progress of society to rid itself of the things that causes the blues.
INTERVIEWER: You see, you as one of the most outstanding representatives of the jazz world, how do you view, how do you visualize, this new revamping of gospels and spirituals here in the States?
MINGUS: Revamping? It’s Madison Avenue doing that. Gospel went away in a sense, but it never went away for the people who liked it. They still bought the records and listened to Mahalia Jackson, things like that. And we haven’t lost any jazz fans, it just seemed that way [because jazz] wasn’t publicized. The concert I just gave at Philharmonic Hall proved we never lost anybody. We had three thousand people. (I give Bill Cosby five hundred because he wasn’t actually performing) and most people just came to hear the music. I’m saying that, uhh, I never lost any fans. I stopped recording, but the people never forgot, the ones who originally heard the music.
I’m not sure I could put it on a competitive basis because I don’t know if an artistic music is supposed to appeal to masses of people. The black masses didn’t go for our song; America went for it, but those were mainly white people. The black people still was for gospel music, and, uhh, blues, not rock. They used to call it race music, way back in the ’30s and ’40s. Then they called it rhythm and blues. And later, country and folk which was for the white people. [To me:] Do you remember those days—were you around then?—country folk music?
And then one day they kind of amalgamated all of it—Madison Avenue did—because the thing was to sell to both black and white, and jazz would not have sold if they had kept on pressing rhythm and blues records. But you can’t beat the system. Right now if one company had enough guts to stay with the rhythm and blues and with the country and western—you got a lot of cowboys who still want country and western only. My mother used to listen to cowboy music, what they call country and western, and she wasn’t white.
INTERVIEWER: What part of the country was that?
MINGUS: I was born in Arizona and lived in Watts. And that’s why I know the Watts riot was a fake. Many of my friends were out there, and Peter Thompson and Dr. Ferguson—they don’t even mind their names being called—when they saw the riot happening, one of these guys was a doctor and he went to his roof to get his gun to protect himself from the people who were starting to riot.
It was strangers, black people breaking down doors of groceries and stores, and they disappeared immediately on a truck. It was very organized, like a strategic plan. And as soon as they got on the truck, three, four, five minutes later, in come the police shooting at everybody that was black. So, as I was gonna say, it was a Madison Avenue race riot in Watts. A few people would say Newark [1967] was the same way. . . .
INTERVIEWER: An awful lot of black intellectuals say [musicians should] bring the African tunes, you know, from Africa. For example, I’m speaking in terms of a musician like Quincy Jones, like Ornette Coleman—they have gone to Africa and then they wrote some music stating their inspiration had been African, like Mataculari or something, it’s the name of one of the latest LPs [Gula Matari] by Quincy Jones. How credible is that supposed to be for you?
MINGUS: [Calmly, not provocatively] I don’t know what they’re talking about, but I’ve been exposed to African music for about forty years. I’m trying to think—l know they’ve got music of the Bushmen on records, but I was never there. But I found that they’re making a lot of these records right here in Harlem.
INTERVIEWER: Excuse me, where did you go to?
MINGUS: This was in California.
INTERVIEWER: No, no, I mean for the Bushmen music?
MINGUS: This was, I’m trying to think where it was, South Africa, Bushland. A friend of mine in Mill Valley named Farwell Taylor always used to play African music for many years.4 He had this huge drum that he used to sit on. It was kind of like a drum in the shape of a tree, and you blow into it. I used to know the names of the tribes of music, but it’s been so many years ago, I’ve forgotten.
INTERVIEWER: Bushmen Negroes in Jamaica, and in Surinam—
MINGUS: It’s nice that these guys are discovering the music, when it’s been there all the time. Hollywood has used it, you know, and Phil Moore did the score for a movie, The Road to Zanzibar.5 You can look it up in [Joseph] Schillinger and find most of the theories of African music.6 You can’t really learn how they send messages, and all that, from the music, but you can get the nucleus. There’s nothing new, there’s always been African music.
INTERVIEWER: Probably it is new for us, because we are not used to it. Now, how about going back to my second question that I proposed to you before. We would like to have a little bit of rundown on your past life.
MINGUS: Well, I don’t see why I gotta do that, cause you can get a book and read that. My whole life is in it.
INTERVIEWER: But if you say that to my audience, my audience may even believe that I’m shitting around, whereas if you do say that, and they hear that, from your very voice, then they probably, you know, really . . . would lend their attention.
MINGUS: Well, take an average record[’s liner notes]: they tell you some history