MINGUS: God rest his soul. I never heard him. I read an article about him.
CHAPTER 1 COMMENTARY
John Goodman on Mingus and the Avant-Garde: Reflections over Time
When we had our talk about the avant-garde, I was really rapping about a term I had obviously grown to detest. Mingus had been burned by it but wanted to know more, so it was a good discussion. On many occasions he had a lot to say about avant-garde jazz, so-called, but his major points are in two pieces: the original album notes to Let My Children Hear Music, and a 1973 blast, “An Open Letter to the Avant-Garde,” that codified some of the opinions he expressed in this 1974 interview.10
By then the avant-garde concept had been debated up and down, in part because of confusions over where and how it applied. Some of this confusion was reflected in my comments. We talked about it in cultural, artistic (formal), critical (categories), and economic terms. A major point I didn’t get to is that the avant-garde is nearly always in some sense oppositional—either in a political way (there is lots of that in Mingus’s music) or in response to attempts to co-opt it by mass culture, as art critic Clement Greenberg discussed back in 1939.
When he and Harold Rosenberg did famous battle in the art world of the 1960s, jazz too was more than ever subjected to ratings, polls, sales figures, and bookings, and a few critics began to talk very negatively about these things. “Avant-garde” in their eyes was just a marketing label, though Barry Ulanov might not have agreed.
The term also means “cutting-edge” or innovative and in that sense has become so inclusive and commonplace as to be worthless. Rosenberg saw that the interaction of art and business and politics was crippling artists. As the champion of action painting and the abstract expressionists, he talked of painting as “an event” and seemingly stood with Mingus’s enemies, the guys who throw paint at the canvas.
Rosenberg also loved to throw brickbats at the art establishment: “What better way to prove that you understand a subject than to make money out of it?” Being so dependent on commerce, jazz has always fought for its independence—not only from the record business but from many of the pressures of mass culture. Bebop’s insistence on being regarded as art music—not entertainment or pop—is only one example, and Mingus was always and forever on the side of art. Our subsequent interviews go into the economics of the jazz business and how they frequently collided with the demands of his art.
So the avant-garde concept seems to contain two contradictory sub-meanings. One makes it an expanding, liberalizing, form-breaking, democratic, sui generis force à la Rosenberg; the other, as in the Greenberg view, makes avant-garde art a breakaway outgrowth of an outmoded but still valuable high-culture tradition.
Salim Washington, jazz musician, teacher, and critic, wrote an interesting piece proposing that Mingus represented the true avant-garde spirit in jazz (as opposed to some of the noisy revolutionaries of the ’60s), that Mingus synthesized tradition and “self-expression” functionally and more musically than anyone else in jazz has done.11 By that assessment, Mingus’s music would subsume, to use my terms, the Greenberg-Rosenberg controversy.
Washington looks at Ornette Coleman’s music and its influences on Mingus (a subject I haven’t seen treated anywhere else—and the influence is there: listen to 1960’s Mingus Presents Mingus, for instance). This musico-sociological approach to jazz history prompts one to look at Mingus through a new lens, though Washington tries to show (not always convincingly, I think) that the avant-garde aspect of jazz has deep historical and performing roots, going back even beyond Ellington and Bechet.
He wants jazz to contain the avant-garde, not segregate it as some weird 1960s offshoot: “The historical [European] avant-garde, in its seeking to shake up the foundations of the art world, strove to separate itself from the traditions upon which they were commenting. By contrast, jazz artists—of all stripes—have not tried to flaunt their prestige and artistic standing or mock the sacral aura of the art world, but rather have been preoccupied with attaining such prestige that European art music routinely enjoys.”
From all the comments Mingus made on many occasions—not just in these interviews—I think he would agree with that. As he concluded here, it boils down to making a living. And further, he would maintain that there is no real avant-garde unless it’s great musicians like Clark Terry who have learned their craft and mastered their art.
Alex Stewart, in his book Making the Scene, offers an interesting comment on Mingus and the avant-garde:12 “Many of the techniques championed by Mingus—additive composition or layering, collective improvisation, lack of concern with playability, rich unisons—form the core of the experimental or avant-garde composer. Although Mingus often disparaged the avant-garde movement, many avant-garde musicians continue to cite Mingus as a prime influence.” Yet Mingus’s innovations always built on either following or fracturing tradition, and “avant-garde” seems a real misnomer for that kind of development. His music is, above all, eclectic. The only sense in which the term avant-garde really applies to Mingus may be in his political-cultural stance.
Perhaps his greatest breakthrough was to reconcile collective improvisation in a modern context with the formal demands of the music. Nobody has been able to do that with such gutsy power and joy since Jelly Roll Morton, another so-called avant-gardist, the first to make jazz into a compositional art. If Morton led the way to modernism in jazz, Mingus was its first true postmodernist.
Sy Johnson on Collaborating with Mingus
As one of the insiders participating in the creation of Let My Children Hear Music (he orchestrated and arranged much of it), Sy had exceptional stories to tell about how the album came together. Our talks also contributed a great deal to my understanding of Mingus and his music. As frequent arranger and sometime orchestrator for Mingus, Sy became (I will say it even if he won’t) the man’s musical right hand.
These comments also help explain how Mingus used traditional—even classical—procedures and methods to produce music that was anything but traditional. That is to say, how he both used the rules and broke them. Maybe all “avant-gardists” do this, but Mingus was very precise about which rules and how they were to be broken.
Sy refers in this 1972 conversation to a piece that was done in concert and did get recorded but was only issued later, “Taurus in the Arena of Life.” How Mingus infused Art Tatum into that work gives insight into how he used musical materials of all kinds and how the band participated in that process. Yes, his approach sounds like the way Ellington did things—but Duke never stitched the quilt together quite the way Mingus did here. Sy’s description of the process in “Don’t Be Afraid, the Clown’s Afraid Too,” reminds me of how Mingus typically worked in the small-band context, the Jazz Workshop, and how he invariably got musicians to play things his way, though with their own voices.
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GOODMAN: Two things I thought of that I wanted to ask you. One was precisely what kinds of innovations you hear in Mingus’s music. The other is your idea of where his music comes from, what kinds of sources you hear him using, besides the obvious with Ellington and so forth.
JOHNSON: Right. Well, I think the fact that Mingus came on the scene when he was about eighteen or something like that, about 1938 or 1939, when he first began to come out in Los Angeles, he came out as a fully developed artist at that point. He was a bass virtuoso and he had his thing very fully developed at that point. He had influences. Everybody knows about the Duke Ellington influence. It is not as well known that Art Tatum was a very important influence on him. Mingus keeps referring to Tatum voicings. He played with Art Tatum briefly and there was also a teacher he had, Lloyd somebody—
GOODMAN: Lloyd Reese?
JOHNSON: Lloyd Reese, right, who was an important influence. But basically with Mingus, the music came out of experience. I mean, he is constantly transforming material that he picks up from [all kinds of sources]. There