2. Mingus collaborated with the Joffrey Ballet to create music for “The Mingus Dances” in 1971, choreographed by Alvin Ailey and performed at New York’s City Center (see figure 2). Mingus explored music for dance in many compositions—from “Ysabel’s Table Dance” in Tijuana Moods (1957) to what he called “ethnic folk-dance music” in The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady (1963) and as late as Cumbia & Jazz Fusion (1976).
3. Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (New York: Picador, 2008), 519.
4. The poet was Frank O’Hara, and the Whitney had commissioned a competition to commemorate him. See Gene Santoro, Myself When I Am Real: The Life and Music of Charles Mingus (New York: Oxford, 2000), 308.
5. Miles Davis, Collectors’ Items, with Miles in two sessions (1953, 1956), the first of which includes Sonny Rollins, “Charlie Chan” (Bird’s recording alias), Walter Bishop, Percy Heath, and Philly Joe Jones, Prestige LP 7044. Parker is not in the second session.
6. A noted Hollywood film composer, classically educated in The Hague, Broekman became prominent for his film scores in the 1930s and 1940s—among them, All Quiet on the Western Front and The Phantom of the Opera. Before his death in 1958, Broekman was quite involved with jazz and conducted Teddy Charles’s “Word from Bird” in Holland in 1956, with the composer performing. See “David Broekman Revival,” YouTube video, from a Nov. 6, 2008, performance, posted by “doeszicht,” Nov. 7, 2008, www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCoJEbOMtmk.
7. Teddy Charles, one of Mingus’s closest accomplices (see chapter 11) and fellow musicians died April 16, 2012, on Long Island, age 84. See Tim Kelly, “North Fork Jazz Great Teddy Charles Dead at 84,” Shelter Island Reporter, April 18, 2012, http://shelterislandreporter.timesreview.com/2012/04/15388/north-fork-jazz-great-teddycharles-dead-at-84/.
| 3 | Recordings: Children and Friends |
| “The music is very original. Nobody’s heard a band like it.” |
Let My Children Hear Music was recorded on several dates, September through November 1971. A smaller band with many of the same people played the Mingus and Friends concert that followed in February 1972. In June of ’72, when we did the following interview, Mingus was rehearsing a big band for the Mercer Arts Center gig (see Introduction), again with some of the same players, most of whom had formed his Village Vanguard band in March. You will hear mention of and discussion about all these morphing “big” bands throughout our conversation.
Children contains some of Mingus’s most astonishing and powerful music. The fact that the album came off as well as it did is also astonishing, given the problems that occurred in its recording and the personalities involved. The commentaries that follow our interview describe some of what went on. Yet with all the difficulties I would make the case that Children is Mingus’s masterpiece, and there is evidence that he thought so too.1
• • •
GOODMAN: I hope that Mercer gig goes well for you, that would be marvelous. Everybody I talked to thinks of you as fronting a big band, somehow. I don’t know why that is. Are you happier with a big band, or small? Or do you need ’em both?
MINGUS: I always wanted both.
GOODMAN: Is the Mercer band gonna be pretty much like the one you had at the Vanguard?
MINGUS: I can’t change the book. I made up a few new tunes, and I’ll get a chance to write ’em as soon as Sue stops booking me.
It’ll be a good band, probably one of the best. The music is very original. Nobody’s heard a band like it.
GOODMAN: Any way you can get it on a more permanent basis? Is rehearsal time the main problem?
MINGUS: I don’t know. Sue’s trying. You have to find some guys who want to rehearse [for free], that’s the main thing. Duke Ellington’s band doesn’t pay for rehearsals—[unintelligible]—but with no rehearsals, you don’t get the job.
GOODMAN: I hear Teo [Macero] played on the Children album.
MINGUS: We had him playing alto like Ornette Coleman for a reason. I knew he could do it, he had done it before.
GOODMAN: Does he play much any more? Publicly?
MINGUS: Hadn’t been playing in a long time, but he keeps up with his horn. He was a great tenor player, very underrated.
GOODMAN: It’s a beautiful album, Charles.
MINGUS: It’s old-timey, but then, you know, I like old-time instruments. If I decided to do an atonal piece, I would go to it gradually, I wouldn’t just stop what I’m doing. Before I did that I would use the small combo, because I want to do some things that are modal, brooding music. You know [hums bass figure], those kind of things.
GOODMAN: The six basses you had—they didn’t come through well on the record. I don’t know whether it was Teo’s recording, mixing, or editing, but the sound was muddy.
MINGUS: See, Teo could have done that better, man. It don’t sound like six basses, does it? It sounded good on their equipment in the studio, but in the playback at home it’s just not six basses.
GOODMAN: Didn’t they mike them individually?
MINGUS: No, and they should have used individual mikes, up close plus some mike catching the room sound. You could hear those basses in the room but not on the record when he [Teo] recorded. He put the mikes far away on “Chill of Death,” then decided to do it close the next time. I made that same record in ’39 with Red Callender, Artie Shapiro, Artie Bernstein, Dick Kelly from the Philharmonic, Gil Hadnot, Dave Bryant. I didn’t play then, I talked [the vocal]—and it sounded better than when Columbia did it, with one or two mikes only. Then [in ’39] they put the mikes near the basses and got the bass section sound. They didn’t block us off, they got the room sound. I still think that’s the best way to record, man.
GOODMAN: Sure it is, particularly for jazz. I don’t understand that sixteen-track stuff.
MINGUS: Those basses should be like the Chicago Symphony, on top. Did you tell Teo about the record?
GOODMAN: I told him I thought some of it didn’t come through as clear as it ought to, and the basses were part of it. I wasn’t going to get into a big discussion with him about it . . . since he spent a lot of time mixing and overdubbing.
• • •
In other words, I didn’t want to antagonize the guy. In a later 1974 session with Mingus, Sue, and myself, we got into discussing the recording and editing of Children and the first Mingus and Friends concert. Charles said he wasn’t happy about the results on either album, but in fact he had permitted both to be issued and, according to Sy Johnson and Teo, definitely had his say in the editing room. I said some things about Teo that were pretty harsh—and should have realized that he and Mingus went way back, both as colleagues and as friends.
• • •
GOODMAN: Well, have you talked to Teo? What does he have to say about all this?
MINGUS: I hadn’t even left the company [Columbia] then. I was telling him about how bad he edited the record. He says, “Well, let’s bring it in, Charles. Show me what you’re talking about and let’s do a new one. Remaster it all over again.”
GOODMAN: Which one? Children? The first concert?
MINGUS: Yeah, the first concert.
SUE: Mingus and Friends.
MINGUS: Ain’t no baritone sax on it.
SUE: What, no Mulligan?
MINGUS: