Now we know goddamn well that we got a cello player better than any you all got—what’s his name? Kermit Moore—he’s better than János Starker, man, warmer, plays more in tune, I couldn’t believe him. You’ll hear him in my string quartet.
Yet the white man can go on forever saying, “Well, we’ve got Jascha Heifetz . . .” Sure, but we may get one of them if you free the kids, I mean little babies, let them come up and think there’s a place for them. Wouldn’t you feel good to think that someday we’d have another Jascha Heifetz, regardless of what color he was? It don’t have to be Isaac Stern or Yehudi Menhuin. They don’t always have to be Jews, right? It’s kind of weird they all Jews [laughs].
I’m trying to say let’s find out what jazz is. Jazz is, or was, a very powerful force before seven years ago to a certain group of white people. They hid the sales of the records, they didn’t let you know how many they were selling, they gave the guys a lot of write-ups, very little money. First place, second place in the polls—when you took third place, you didn’t work no more. White or black, Red Norvo, all the guys, once you’re voted out of first place, you’re in trouble, from Lionel Hampton to all the rest of them.
SUE: He just sent all his medals back [from the polls he had won].
MINGUS: I don’t want none of them damn polls. I know what kind of bass player I am. I auditioned with the San Francisco Philharmonic in 1939 and I was the best one except for one guy, his name was Phil Karp and he got the job. But they hired three bass players and I was better than the other two, and the conductor told me they just couldn’t do it. So I know where I’m at.
And I’ve been waiting till the day when I get a chance to write classical, pure, serious music that came out of all the musics. For a guy to go study Africa—fuck Africa, man. Now here’s the guy I’ll study with: I want to know how those guys do this [beats a complex rhythm] and send a message in Haiti. You go to Western Union and you live in the mountains like Katherine Dunham, when you get a wire it don’t come on no piece of paper. In the mountains it comes to you on the drums. And they bring it to you by mouth. Now, those guys, when you get to that, I’d like to study that. ’Cause some guys in America think they can do that—one is dead, Eric Dolphy.
• • •
Now the coda. After an hour of turning the interviewer’s mostly general questions inside out, Mingus changed key again and offered up an analysis of the jazz audience, bending the question to his own purposes.
• • •
INTERVIEWER: One last question, what is the American audience like towards jazz . . . nowadays?
MINGUS: Well, each town is different. Let’s put it like this: I’ll try to tell you the best towns in America. For Charlie Parker’s music, the bebop period, when we went to Philadelphia, I couldn’t believe how people loved Bird. And they listened like you could hear a pin drop. Bird played there ten to twenty times a year when he was popular. I’ve always had the same following and I recognize the same faces in New York. At the Half Note Club, the Five Spot, and the Vanguard for the last thirty years, I recognize the faces, can call a lot of the names. Some get married, bring new husbands, new wives, but they still come back.
Now what are they like? My audience is very, very hip, and some of the young hippies are starting to dig me, I don’t know why. Maybe because some singer called my name on a record—do you know that guy, Sue? Right, Donovan. I think it did me a lot of good. I was in San Francisco when it first came out and I used to walk by this college, and kids would say, “There goes Mingus,” you know, and before the [Donovan] record came out nobody’d say anything.
American audiences are not like Europe. But I tell you what is better than Europe is Georgia, Tennessee, the South—they are just now waking up to jazz. They got jazz in by television. And the places where Martin Luther King picketed, they’ve changed, the integration is there. It’s not overdone, the people sound like me, they’re for real, they try to be serious about it, listen like it was classical music, same way I listened when I first went to Europe. It was a hell of a feeling to go to the South and have that happen, man. ‘Cause when I went to the South [in the late 1940s] with Lionel Hampton, man, there was just noise, dancin’, jumpin’ around, and drunkards. I couldn’t believe [the change], man.
So I haven’t been to Europe in quite a little while, but the audiences there have always been the same as—what’s the closest thing to classical? Sarah Vaughan when she was first making it? They used to give her a lot of respect, just like a classical singer. They’d treat her just like Marian Anderson or Duke Ellington in the ’40s and ’50s. When you went to his concerts some people wore tuxedos. They knew it was a pure music.
Bird never got that. Bird always got the balling crowd, people high on something, very hip, swinging, hustlers and pimps. Which is nothing wrong, just saying what he had. And from all races. In Philadelphia he mainly had the black hustlers and pimps. As far as people accepting—the last crowd I had in Philly was a pretty good crowd, pretty good audience, because I recently had a concert there with the big band. I guess there were some of Charlie Parker’s people there too, because I’ve been there with him so much. I guess they remembered him and especially because I recorded with him too, ’cause there’s a mixture of audience there, plus the hippies are starting to show too. The clean little kids with the Levis. I can tell you how they look, but how they feel—they don’t feel together yet. I feel this is an assorted crowd, they’re searching for something. It’s not like it used to be.
Like when you went to see Count Basie you saw a Count Basie crowd. You go to see Duke, you saw a Duke crowd. The two didn’t meet, man. The people who dug Basie did not dig Duke. If you had put jazz together like George Wein does now, you wouldn’t have made it. You would have had one section booing the other. I can’t prove this, but I’m pretty perceptive about feeling out audiences and things.
For instance, I’ve always had the knowledge about how to please an audience, which I don’t do. Anytime I’m uptight, I got a thing I do with an audience which I guarantee will get applause for one of the guys in the band. Not what I do physically but do musically. But I don’t like to do it. I call a solo and stop everything behind the soloist, leave him play by himself, and then when the rhythm section does come back in, the people always go crazy. What are the reasons, I don’t know, but that’s the way you do it.
To answer your question better, I’m glad there is a European audience. I’m trying to think where the best in Europe was for me—France, and Italy, and Germany—all very close. In Italy we were near Rome. Do you think in Europe it’s always the same audience that goes to hear [someone]?
INTERVIEWER: No, I wouldn’t say so. They actually are not so prone, like here, to be a one-man audience. Maybe probably a two- or three-man audience.
MINGUS: I haven’t checked this, but there’s a club in Boston, and after I closed there, I went back and didn’t see anyone I saw when I was there earlier. It was a whole different kind of people that came to see that next group. Plus, that was a good sign because they were known there, and it was packed. So whatever you call jazz is coming back, evidently, in this country.
• • •
If you read the interviews and books in which jazz players talk candidly—like Arthur Taylor’s great compendium Notes and Tones (Da Capo, 1993)—many if not most support views like Mingus’s, in particular about the necessity of education and training in jazz. Other musicians have been willing to broach the phoniness of the New Thing, the false call of Africa, the need for black people and their culture to reunite. But few have come down as emphatically as Mingus did about these things. You know, there’s a strong “don’t criticize your brother” injunction among jazz people.
Despite that last remark about the club in Boston, I think he saw traditional jazz culture (and the audience) disappearing and wanted to save it.
NOTES
1. The first comment is from Ross Bennett, writing the Disk of the Day feature