Electronics are doing the same thing in music as elsewhere: they’re replacing people. Push a button, it sounds like an oboe, but not a good oboe player; another button, sounds like a French horn. The guy who plays this stuff is a nigger because he can’t afford to get a violin player or a French horn or oboe player. He might like to have the oboe—I would—but [he] will go to the commercial extreme because it’s popular to use electric instruments.
And the great men like Charlie Parker and men who played legitimate instruments would laugh at these guys because they’re not in it for the love of music but because they think they’re going to make a lot of money—like Miles Davis did. Miles didn’t even need to make any money; he was already rich, or his daddy was rich, so I’m not even sure if Miles made that much money, I just assume he did in music. But I know he’s an electronic man, and eventually somebody like me is going to make him come back and start playing again, put that bullshit down and play his horn. He’s gonna have to because [otherwise] he’ll be laughed out. Because you can get a little kid to push a button, and with these machines they got now, it’ll sound like they’re right.
Look what happened for seven years in this country. Most of these kids couldn’t read a note or sing in tune. But electronics can make ’em sound OK: they hit a wrong note and you push a button and it’s in a vibrating machine plus an echo chamber, and it’s [sings] wooo-wooo-wooo-wooo, so you don’t know what note he’s singing. But I want to hear a singer, man, I don’t want to hear nobody bullshitting.
I want to be able to go to a hall with no mikes and hear the guy play his cello like János Starker. If he can’t play it, send him home. Give him a rock-and-roll instrument and let him play. But don’t tell me he’s no musician, don’t put a musician label on him. Say he’s an electric player, find something else to call him.
The guitar players, they have a little bar on the neck of the guitar, so if you want the key of B-flat, they move it to B-flat position; for the key of A, they move it down to A. That way, they only have to learn one key, they can play in the key of C all the time. I was on a TV show with a guy like this and I say, “Do you move the bar on your guitar?”
He says, “Yes,” and I say, “Why do you do it?”
He says, “It makes it easier.”
I say, “Well, why doesn’t Jascha Heifetz do it? Why shouldn’t he play everything in the key of C?”
I mean, are you goin’ to kill the fact that people can play in B-natural and A-natural? That’s what Madison Avenue is trying to do, man. [Pause]
I don’t believe in everything about classical music. I don’t believe in stiff classical singers. I think there should be more folk voices in it. A lot of things could be changed, improved on, and people are doing that, like Henry Brant.8 He did an opera, with classical singers, but he also had a hot-dog man—and other people who would just be singing what they felt, really. [Sings:] “Hot dogs!” you know? “Peanuts!” you know? [Laughs.] That’s the way the old Italian operas were, and weren’t they kind of for real? [Imitates basso voice singing:] “Would you buy my popcorn?”
• • •
They took a break after some talk about Northern Italians, blond Italians, Sicilians, and pizza men. But Mingus wanted to get to one of his favorite points, about jazz tradition, styles, and “progress.” He understood that art moves by fits and starts, that there is rarely a straight line of influence or stylistic development. At the same time, if an artist couldn’t understand and incorporate tradition, he’d never be a creator. And if he couldn’t master the fundamentals of music, he’d end up being a fraud.
All the previous themes were coming to a recapitulation.
• • •
MINGUS: See, this thing you call jazz: if Lloyd Reese, Eric Dolphy’s teacher, my teacher, had become famous, Dizzy Gillespie would have never made it—because Lloyd played like Dizzy back in 1928. So I’m trying to say that even though Louis Armstrong and King Oliver and those guys came along, here was another guy who knew a little more, had a different kind of education in music where he could have been playing atonal then: Lloyd knew Schoenberg, Beethoven, Bach, he’d studied that. He’d be playing those kinds of solos, and guys would say, “He’s out of tune.” Therefore people have to come in line, follow the next guy, step by step, “OK, that’s progress.”
Charlie Parker was the most modern thing, but actually I should have come before him because I had a whole new thing that had the weight and had to do with waltzes and religious music—a period of my music was like that. Then Bird should have come in, but instead they completely ignored me and I had to go play Bird’s music. Which I’m glad I did—I learned a lot from that—but it’s not honest because it makes kids come up and think [jazz has] gotta fit to this form right here.
Now it’s gone to the other extreme: each guy’s gotta be different, and now this is where they all full of shit. If you’re a musician today, man, you shouldn’t be playing like Louis Armstrong. If you’re a trumpet player, you should be playing like Dizzy, Roy, Cat Anderson, Maynard Ferguson, all them guys or you ain’t no trumpet player. If you play bass, you play like Mingus, Oscar Pettiford, Ray Brown, all them bass players or you ain’t no bass player. You should be able to play like Art Tatum first or quit. I was a piano player and I quit cause I couldn’t do Art Tatum. I knew I couldn’t make it.
It’s like when you go to Juilliard, they give you all the things composers have done, and they say “study it.” After four-five years of you studying, one day they say, “Now, let me see you write something that’s good.” And you’re going to think, because you know damn well that teacher knows when you’re lying and stealing from over here or over there. You’ve got to throw all that out of your mind and compose something. And only the person himself knows, and most of the other guys quit if they know they can’t cut the guys in the past.
But America gave us a new thing, it’s called avant-garde, which nobody has ever explained, for Negroes. Some of these guys, you know [does flutter-tongue trill and a squook-squawk] as long as it sounds undescribable [they think it’s music]. It’s not music, because in the olden days a guy had to play his solo back. I met one of these guys and said, “Can you play this off the record?”
“Of course not, man, I don’t want to.”
I said, “What if I wrote it down, could you play it?”
He said, “You couldn’t write it.” That’s bullshit. I can write it but he can’t play it ’cause he doesn’t know what he played.
And I’m tired of these people fooling our people. Because if you’re going to be a physician or a finished artist in anything, like a surgeon, then you got to be able to retrace your steps and do it anytime you want to go forward, be more advanced. And if I’m a surgeon, am I going to cut you open “by heart,” just free-form it, you know?
We’re on an island and you say, “Look, man, use a book.”
“No, I don’t need no book, I’ll just ad lib it.”
“Well, look, Mingus, we’re out here by ourselves, it’s dangerous, and I don’t want you to make no mistakes, so just look in the book.”
“I can’t read, man, I don’t read no music, but I’m going to cut you open and take out your appendix ’cause it’s bursting.”
Well, you’re gonna hope that, since I’m the only guy there, I will look in the book. Don’t take me for no avant-garde, ready-born doctor. Don’t let nobody fool me and tell me that they’re avant-garde, don’t need to study—and make the black kids think they don’t need to learn how to read to play flute, oboe, French horn, and all the instruments.
Let these people know that there gonna be openings in all symphonies everywhere in the world for them and that jazz is just one little stupid language hanging out there as a sign of unfair employment. Jazz means “nigger”: