He gets expansive every now and then and says, “Hear that? Well listen to that real carefully and you’ll hear that it is really—” and it’s some old obscure pop tune or something like that. He just transforms material, a lot of material that’s around him. Composers have always been doing that; it is a perfectly legitimate thing. But he just takes in enormous amounts of music from every source that he can. And it all gurgles around in there and is finally spewed out as something that is quite uniquely humorous.
We are doing a piece that we did in the concert but [that] has not been recorded yet [“Taurus in the Arena of Life”]. Partly because I helped him make the orchestration for it, because he thought he might like to do it in the album but he hadn’t finished writing the piece yet. There is a whole middle section that he has completed since then that we are going to have to deal with, I guess the next time we record, and I’ll [orchestrate] the whole thing.13
But there is one section of that, at the end, and he just said, “There is an Art Tatum voicing and I’ve always wanted to use it someplace.” And he played this Tatum voicing on the piano for me. He said, “I have always wanted to use that someplace. I think I’m going to use it right here.” So he immediately took that fabric, and it was like a quilt and he stitched it into the piece and it immediately became part of the piece. It was not capricious at all.
GOODMAN: That also makes me remember your story about adding the 8/8 piece toward the end. Then he comes along and changes the whole thing.
JOHNSON: On “Clowns”—“Don’t Be Afraid, the Clown’s Afraid Too”—our original routine on it, the tune didn’t seem to come to any conclusion. It was lacking a final section to it, at least I felt it was. So I called Mingus the next day and explained my feelings about it. I told him I thought he should write something to open it up. Maybe just something with one chord but something that would get away from the very strict structure that the whole piece had going for it.
He agreed, thought that would be good, and he says, “You write something. Just write something that you hear and if it doesn’t work, you’ll know.” So I wrote an 8/8 section, a very funky 8/8 section. In a sense I was thinking, well, this will probably be the first time that Mingus has ever played anything in 8/8 on record. I thought it would be interesting to see whether he responds to that as an extension of himself or how he gets to it. It was like a vamp with solos running through it.
So we got to the date and started to rehearse that part (we were rehearsing in sections because it was such a long piece) and we finally got to that section, and the band seized on it as something familiar that they could get their teeth into. They began to get a good feeling right away. Dannie Richmond particularly began to really cook on it. We ran it a couple of times, and then suddenly Mingus stopped the band and said, “That’s rock and roll.” He says, “You’re not going to find any rock and roll in my album.”
And he just started walking around telling people what to play. He walked up to the tuba player, Bob Stewart, and said, “I want you to play in 3/4, I want you to play just um-pah, um-pah. Eddie Bert, I want you to play something like this . . .” He assigns specific roles to two or three different people and then he says, “Anybody else who feels like adding to that, we are going to play some clown music. Now I want you to make it sound like a clown.” And so we went back and it worked immediately. It was obviously what the piece needed at that point. Then later on, in the overdubbing of that, he deliberately included references to the old bebop themes that are in there.
GOODMAN: Oh, that came after.
JOHNSON: Right, that came after, and he just wanted a subliminal reference to another kind of music. It is his own private little inside thing. It is not terribly audible. Teo was dying to play his alto. He loves to play and does not get many chances anymore. And Mingus likes his alto playing and talked him into bringing his alto around to one of the overdubbings. So he got Teo to play and Teo sounded, you know, he can play space music like a freak. And so Mingus kept saying, “Yeah, we are going to have the masked marvel on this album,” and actually Teo didn’t get credited in the notes with it, but he was delighted that he got Teo actively participating as a player. And Teo was having a ball. He was really elated.
GOODMAN: So after they were playing your 8/8 section, and then he stops it—you said the band was getting into it, it was going well. That reminded me of another story you told when you all got cooking and he was off the stage, not participating, and then had to jump back in there and destroy the tune. Of course, this time he did not.
JOHNSON: No. He just made a decision, which I couldn’t get him to make before.
GOODMAN: And I don’t know what to conclude from this except I guess he has to always have his hand in it.
JOHNSON: Oh, I think that’s true, but in some ways he impresses me as not being egotistical about his music. Or about having to take charge constantly. And that he’s willing to let it go.
One of the things he understands is that other people may be performing some service that he doesn’t care to. Because he can orchestrate but he does it in a very deliberate, slow way. I mean, he just—it’s laborious. He actually leans on the pencil. It’s quite a process. And so under those circumstances it would take him forever to orchestrate something, orchestrate a body of pieces, and so he has used other people to orchestrate his music.
Bob Hammer was very successful at that. He’s a piano player who was around here, in 1962 or something like that, when he did Mingus’s masterpiece, as far as I’m concerned, a brilliant piece of orchestration and brilliant performances of The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady. That texture, as far as I’m concerned, is the definitive Mingus texture. It was the texture also, in doing the writing for this album and the [Mingus and Friends] concert, that I decided to deliberately not emulate.
I told Mingus, it isn’t adding anything to simply find whatever secrets I need to know in order to make the band sound that way and then go ahead and write. There were some other qualities I could bring to the music, that I was hoping he would find acceptable, and he has. I know in particular—with “Shoes of the Fisherman’s Wife,” he’s very moved by his own recording of that now. He always holds it up to me as an example of success, as far as my efforts were concerned.
So he constantly says now, “You really worked too hard on this, Sy.” He says, “On ‘Shoes of the Fisherman’s Wife,’ you were really working on that one.”
But it’s been . . . a fascinating experience. And he’s quite content to give responsibility to other people when he prefers not to do it. He doesn’t like to conduct, for example.
Oh, another interesting note about his compositional thing is that, in going over to talk with him about music that frequently only existed on a tape of some kind, or on an old record with no written notation or score—in talking about that, I found that he hears the music in a very emotional way.
I mean, he knows when it goes up and when it comes down. He has got the emotional peaks and valleys of the piece down, and frequently the specific pitches aren’t terribly important. He could just as easily have written down other notes that would have satisfied his needs at the same time.
So when he talks about it, he’ll say, “Oh that probably goes here,” and he will take it to another place in the piece and move on right from there.
GOODMAN: Kind of like tape editing?
JOHNSON: No, it’s just that what he hears is not as much specifics as far as pitch is concerned, as [it is] intensely emotional energies, flows of matter and volume and all that business. The pitches in a lot of his pieces are very specific. I mean, you can’t fuck with “Clowns.” When he gets into that kind of thing, it takes an enormous amount of discipline to sit down and just keep channeling those lines, one on top of the other. I mean, layering the thing.
But in a lot of cases the music is just much more expansive than that, so there is a big contrast between the tightly disciplined Mingus of “Clowns,” which I think is one