Mingus Speaks. John Goodman
artistically speaking, you know—say, if you have changed from one style to the other style and how are you—
MINGUS: I don’t change styles. I’ve always been a musician, whatever kind you want to call it. I studied music in school, and I always did things to get a job—if I could get a job playing any kind of music, I would do that, you know, but I had one music in mind, as a goal, and there’s only one music. And that’s all music, you know. It may encompass a lot of other musics, but in the meantime I’m working in jazz, and I play in that medium. But my goal is much higher than that. Not that I think black music or African music or any kind of music is inferior—it’s just one kind of music, you know. I can’t say to myself there’s just one kind of music ’cause I like all kinds of music, if it’s good. I like all kinds of music, particularly folk musics from different tribes of people.
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I think Mingus looked at all music as basically deriving from folk music, and he certainly heard the folk forms in concert music, particularly in Bartók and Stravinsky. Disguising them, “revamping” them, putting them in stylistic boxes for sale, was a way to dilute, if not kill, the folk spirit.
The black blues for him was a way to reunite black people musically and spiritually. Avant-garde free jazz was simply an arcane way to deny the spirit because you could play it without being a musician (theme 3). You had to study and know the blues-in-jazz tradition to be any kind of serious jazz musician and play for the people.
This idea came up frequently in the course of our later talks.
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MINGUS: As I’m sayin’, the black people of America don’t have a folk music, unless it be church, which is pretty corny, or the blues. Joe Turner is closer to it and T-Bone Walker’s closer to it than some of the people they have today [that] they call blues singers. But the spirit of Billie Holiday, she has the blues spirit; so did, uhh, who else? Sorry, she’s the only one I know that’s got a jazz, a pure blues spirit, which is religiously involved without the Christian tones. [Pause.]
I don’t know how to say it, man—[whatever] music the black people would adopt would have to give them a chance to hear all kinds of music and then find what they like. I find certain types of black people like, still dig, Charlie Parker. They took that as an awakening to them. There’s a certain type or class of person who still digs Bird. They’ll always dig Bird, or an extension of Bird. They like Charlie McPherson and the way he plays ’cause it reminds them of Charlie Parker.
Bird’s music is a very hip thing, but, uhh, I find there’s something lacking in it for me. It’s not enough. There’s not enough complex harmony, theoretically, for me. I enjoy more complex harmonies, or no harmonies. I don’t particularly like chord changes all the time. I like many melodies at once, created without a chord in mind, that may form a harmonic chord, you know? I can tell, usually, if it comes from one man’s mind, or if it’s mechanically done, or if he heard all these melodies at once. I feel that if a man writes four melodies at once, he’s got to play them at once, and he hears them at once. If he expects people to listen to those four melodies at once—or five, like a Bach fugue—then he must conceive these all at once. Not mechanically put them together because he has a theory that says it will work.
I’ve been working—rather than doing written compositions—to do spontaneous compositions where I’ll do some string quartets, some of ’em by meditating and playing, some composing from the piano. “Adagio ma non troppo” from my latest album on Columbia, well, that was a spontaneous composition. It had about two or three melodies going at once. It’s not that complex, it’s a lot of feeling and emotion, but it’s not meant to be intellectual, or anything like that. I don’t know any intellectual niggers—what’s an intellectual black? Is it that intellectual blacks are going back for African music?
INTERVIEWER: Yes, as a matter of fact, you know, an awful lot of them do. I’m not speaking only in terms of musicians, but even of playwrights, writers, artists, visual artists, or performing artists. There is a tendency now, you know, which strangely relates well to the first Harlem Renaissance, that politically was probably reflected by Julius Garvey and Booker T. Washington, this kind of back-to-Africa movement.
MINGUS: You mean Marcus Garvey?
INTERVIEWER: Marcus Garvey, that’s right. So I was wondering whether you too were on to this, cognizant of that.
MINGUS: See, I don’t know how to deal in terms, like you say, this guy’s avant-garde, or this guy’s intellectual. I don’t know how to be any of those things. I’m just me, man. I don’t see how you could possibly be in these 140 years a black intellectual. A black intellectual means you should be able to cope with Einstein, a guy goin’ to the moon, plus cope and communicate with the guys in the Bowery. That’s what a black intellectual means to me. But he don’t exist—[someone who will] go down where the bums hang out—and so anybody who’s been sittin’ in front of a television set claiming to be a black intellectual to me is a phony. I haven’t met one yet, ’cause he doesn’t know the people.
I been tryin’ to get to be—I didn’t force myself, but by being kicked out of my position, my financial position and everything else, for the last six years—I got to become a bum, and live with people who were poor. And [to] even like them more than people who were successful, and not want to move away from them, because they were more for real than the rich people I’ve been around before, or the half-assed rich black people, you know, the ones who are satisfied with selling their own people out for a few more write-ups and a few more dollars.
[Pause.] What else?
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End of solo. One of the reasons you have to love Mingus is for his capacity to demolish such concepts as “black intellectuals.”
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INTERVIEWER: Yeah, well, what else now? I just would like to go back to your music, you know, if you don’t mind. You mentioned your latest record on Columbia—are you now working on a new album?
MINGUS: Well, it probably will be an album because George Wein’s people always record at Newport [in New York], and some way I’ll have a big band there, and a couple of weeks before that I’m going to be at a theater. If everybody comes from Italy, tell them to come to the Mercer Arts Theater.7 I’ll be working the band out there, plus I’ll have a string quartet, not the usual—I’ll have two cellos, a viola, and violin. And I’m going to write some music for that. It’ll be at the foot of the program; we’ll do Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, too.
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Enter new theme (4): electronics in music.
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MINGUS: I think it’s time that good musicians get rid of electric instruments, because a good musician can’t play an electric instrument; it plays you. For instance, if you want to bend a note, you’ve got to push a button to bend it. You can’t control the dynamics. You play soft-loud with the bow on a violin, but it all comes out the same volume on the electric machine. You’ve got to have another hand to turn it down soft and low. So it’s not meant for real music, it’s meant for someone who is not sincere about playing how he feels.
INTERVIEWER: You may probably clarify for me one idea I’ve been acquiring by being here, by interviewing other people. Is it really true that jazz is getting a little, uhh, shall I say, is getting into rock and rock is getting into jazz?
MINGUS: I don’t know what musicians you’re talking about—not me. All I know is if you guys are going for electric instruments, I’ve heard nothing better than a Steinway yet, all over the world. I’ve heard nothing better than a violin. Electric music is electric music. If a guy uses this music, then he’s not a serious musician. I mean, they’re not gonna make a better piano, man.
INTERVIEWER: Then wouldn’t you agree with me that electric music today is probably 1972 stuff. I mean the equipment is sophisticated, the gadgets are kind of hard to grasp, you know, wow.
MINGUS: Well, I’m tryin’ to