GOODMAN: Well, I’m glad you said it, because when I got that record in the mail I thought the recording was pretty bad, and I didn’t know who did it.
MINGUS: Teo did it.
GOODMAN: And the editing is worse. I remember the concert; I was there. And nothing went together on the record. It was terrible.2
SUE: Teo was conducting, wasn’t he, that night?
MINGUS: Yeah.
GOODMAN: Well, let me ask you: I spent some time talking with him, and I must say he really bugged me. Supposedly, the subject was you, we’re talking about your music, what you were doing and all that and some of the history of you and him. And all he did was—
MINGUS: Talk about Miles?
GOODMAN: Right! I’ll play you the tape if you want to hear it, it’s embarrassing. He talked about Miles and he talked about himself.
MINGUS: Yeah.
GOODMAN: And he talked about how he had to be objective and cool and sit back and listen to these things and provide another set of ears for people, and how important his function as a producer was—
MINGUS: Yeah.
GOODMAN: Well, what a lot of crap that is. And in fact, a guy came into the studio while I was there and kissed his ass all over the place, bowing and scraping: “I just hope I can someday learn the business as well as you’ve learned it, Teo,” which he loved, you know. And I must say I came away from that interview thinking the guy’s a pompous ass. [Long pause.]
CHAPTER 3 COMMENTARY
Sy Johnson on Let My Children Hear Music and Mingus and Friends
When he came to New York from Los Angeles in 1960, Sy played piano with Mingus for two hectic weeks. (He talks about that experience in chapter 4.) Later, in 1971, he arranged and conducted most of Children. In our conversation, Sy offered valuable insights into what went on in those sessions. While Children was very much a unique album for Mingus, the processes of making such complex music come alive also demonstrate how Mingus often functioned in the studio.
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JOHNSON: After playing with him at the Showplace [in 1960], basically Mingus was out of my life for about eleven years. Then one day he came into the office that I have, an arranger’s and copying office in [Emile] Charlap’s office on Forty-eighth Street. He walked in one day last September [1971], and said that Max Roach had sent him up there, so he could find an arranger.
And we chatted awhile and he asked me if I was an arranger. I said I was. He said, “Well then, I want to talk to you about something.” So then he promptly opened his briefcase and pulled out all these scraps of music and different things he had, and we went into the back room and began to talk about writing the album.
It was a stunning situation. I was not prepared for that kind of thing. And it has been marvelous. It’s been frustrating, confusing, everything. You know, you can’t deal with Mingus without running the gauntlet of emotions. But, in general, I have been very excited about the whole project. To begin with, it was exciting to work on a bona fide jazz album again. I mean, my association with jazz has been writing jazz-oriented arrangements for the Mort Lindsay Orchestra or the Doc Severenson band or something like that, and writing arrangements of “Mack the Knife” for singers. I mean, it has been a peripheral kind of work. So to really get both feet firmly planted on such a totally jazz experience was really refreshing. I mean it revived my whole spirits.
GOODMAN: How many records like that come out every year, or even every five years? I mean, Children, that’s a major statement.
JOHNSON: No question about it. In a sense I’ve had a sort of historical wonder. A little part of myself is looking at this whole experience in its historical perspective, you know.
GOODMAN: Teo thinks of it that way. I interviewed him yesterday and he’s impressed with the fact that they’ve done some kind of milestone.
JOHNSON: Oh, yeah, I am sure he does. And there isn’t any question about Mingus’s historical significance. He is such an important figure. He just is such a catalyst for music. For example, 6/8: there wasn’t any jazz 6/8 being played until “Better Get Hit in Your Soul.”
GOODMAN: Really?
JOHNSON: No, that was the first, the beginning of the whole 6/8 feeling. Now it’s just a common part of our jazz and also rock and pop experiences. But that was the first time anybody did that. I mean, it was a gospelly kind of device before. But to make a jazz composition based on that in such a compelling way as “Better Get Hit in Your Soul” just transformed everything overnight. All of a sudden everybody was into 6/8. And that record did it, single-handedly.
And that’s not the first time Mingus has had that kind of effect. I mean he was writing polytonality, he was writing pedal tones, and using so many devices long before they were current, like writing in modes. . . .
GOODMAN: On the Children album, how much of that did you actually arrange?
JOHNSON: All but three [pieces]. “Hobo Ho” is Mingus’s own arrangement, which was dictated to Bobby Jones, who actually wrote it out. But Mingus, in effect, sat down and did the whole thing.
GOODMAN: The album got kind of botched up with the editing and so forth, as I understand.
JOHNSON: Well, I am not thrilled about the editing. I just think it was capricious. The music was also terribly difficult to record. We spent about a day and a half on “Hobo Ho.” Well, a day and a quarter, maybe four hours altogether, four and a half hours on that one piece. And it goes on in layers.
Mingus is suspicious of the devices that arrangers use to make music play easily. He thinks people are trying to charge him for more pages of orchestration. When he writes himself, he will have a thing repeat eight times and, with directions written out, there is more English to read than there are notes: “Second line, play this,” “Third time, lay out,” and “Fourth time, ad lib on the beat.” And everybody’s part is covered with dialogue. It’s just an amazingly confusing document.
People just lose it: “How many times do you repeat that?” and “How many times have we gone through that?” There are entrances in there in which somebody will come in with a figure on the down beat and somebody else will come in on the second beat with the same figure, and somebody else will come in on the third beat with the same figure. It is just layers of music. And people were just losing track.
So, as conductor I was up there and, I mean, it is not a thing that you conduct like Leonard Bernstein. My main function was keeping track of everybody, letting them know where they were at any given time. So I was counting frantically, you know. If somebody played a particularly energetic entrance off the beat some place, the tendency was to go with that, you know. It was a pain. It was a difficult thing to do.
It is a brilliant piece, but it needs editing. Not the same kind of editing that Teo did, which is done after the fact, and Teo was trying to make as exciting a piece out of it as he could, considering the difficulty we had in writing it down. But Eddie Bert, for example, who is a very enthusiastic player, just loves to play—
GOODMAN: Is he playing on it?
JOHNSON: Yeah, he’s on the date.
GOODMAN: Why in the hell they didn’t put the personnel on the liner notes? That just bums me out. All the great people they had playing, James Moody and—
JOHNSON: I know, but the one who decided not to put all that information in—he will kill me for saying it—was Mingus. I was there when he decided not to put it in. Apparently, he did not want it known how many people were in the band at different times and on different dates, you know. He was the one who approved the notes and all that business, and he decided to just credit soloists. And he left some of them out. He fired off a telegram to Columbia accusing them of being prejudiced about musicians for not putting all the people in there, but he’s the one