2. This is the first of several mentions of “seven years” or “six years” as the dark period in Mingus’s life. This term seems to signify, variously: a period of social turmoil, a bleak time of withdrawal for him personally, a time of musical decay and decline for jazz—perhaps all lumped together, as in some gloomy and sustained minor ninth chord. For this period, see Brian Priestly, Mingus: A Critical Biography (New York: Da Capo, 1982), 159–71. As to causes, Priestly mentions: the impact of Eric Dolphy’s death (June 1965), the growing displacement of jazz by the pop musical-industrial complex, the noisy rise of the jazz “avant-garde,” the diminishing size of the Mingus bands, a reduced number of club and concert dates, and, finally, the public eviction from his loft and school in late 1966.
3. The Watts riot occurred in the summer of 1965 and shocked the country. A Washington Post piece thirty years later, nominally about Waco and the Oklahoma City bombing, may help explain Mingus’s paranoid reaction. In it, author Virginia Postrel notes that those who burned Watts were never caught or tried. She affirms that “black inner-city communities are rife with conspiracy theories, with paranoia, some of it spread by talk radio: AIDS is a plot by white people in the government to wipe out blacks. So is crack. A few years ago it was widely repeated that an upstart soft drink made black men infertile.” Because inner city blacks believe the government’s message that “officially sanctioned violence is okay,” their paranoia continues, Postrel says. Virginia Postrel, “Reawakening to Waco: Does the Federal Government Understand the Message It’s Sending?” Washington Post, April 30, 1995.
4. Farwell Taylor was a painter and lifelong friend of Mingus, who introduced him to the culture and thought of India. Among other sources, see Todd S. Jenkins, I Know What I Know: The Music of Charles Mingus (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2006), 7.
5. Phil Moore, was a pianist, arranger, band leader and accomplished studio musician prominent in the 1940s. See “Phil Moore,” Space Age Pop Music, www.spaceagepop.com/moore.htm; and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Moore_(jazz_musician).
6. Composer and music theorist Joseph Schillinger influenced many in the 1930s, including George Gershwin and Benny Goodman. See Daniel Leo Simpson, “My Introduction to the ‘Schillinger System,’ ” Joseph Schillinger: The Schillinger System of Musical Composition (blog), Dec. 16, 2008, http://josephschillinger.wordpress.com/; and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Schillinger. Mingus mentions in chapter 5 that his second wife Celia studied Schillinger.
7. Once labeled “the downtown Lincoln Center,” the Mercer Arts Center was an ambitious venture created by some off-Broadway heavy-hitters to provide venues for the performing arts. Management had booked Mingus and his Vanguard big band (see chapter 7) for a couple of weeks in July, and at the time of this interview he was excited and had begun rehearsing the band. Unfortunately, a neighboring hundred-year-old hotel collapsed on August 9, 1973, and caused the Mercer to close. See Emory Lewis, “Hotel’s Fall Was Also a Cultural Disaster,” The Sunday Record, August 19, 1973.
8. Iconoclast and experimental composer Henry Brant died in 2008 at age ninety-four. He promoted acoustic spatial music which combined different styles—classical, Indian, Javanese, jazz, burlesque, and others—with the special placement of instruments of his own invention. See David A. Jaffe, “Henry Brant’s Home Page,” www.jaffe.com/brant.html; “Henry Brant, 94; Daring, Prize-Winning Composer,” Washington Post, April 29, 2008, www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/29/AR2008042902918_2.html.
| 1 | Avant-Garde and Tradition |
| “Bach is how buildings got taller. It’s how we got to the moon.” |
The history of the jazz avant-garde is interesting, even if the music frequently is not. Could a white person have any business writing that history? Or even understanding the music? That’s the kind of question that was being asked in the late 1960s.
I didn’t form my opinions on this music based on what Mingus had to say; I came to them after a long period of trying to be sympathetic to the widely advertised intentions, protests, and sounds of much so-called free jazz. One of the problems I had, as our conversations demonstrate, was trying to separate the apparatus of protest from the concerns of music.
Mingus always claimed to play “American music,” and yet his idea of creating a music to appeal to the spiritual and cultural needs of black people, a revitalized ethnic blues, is an old one in jazz, though not widely recognized.1 The free-jazzers wanted that too, and Cecil Taylor, for one, tried to bring music to the black masses. Still, it is hard to imagine a worse way to reach large numbers of people than through avant-garde free jazz. Mingus at least thought a broad-based blues might be the answer.
He also brought politics overtly into his music, which generally worked because the politics were subordinated to the musical concerns. Avant-garde jazz came alive in the ’60s as part of so much other political protest, of course, and was a response to that political environment, the rise of rock and roll, the growing exclusion of jazz by the record industry, the diminishing jazz audience, the entrance of jazz into the academy, and more.
Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) has been a great champion of the avant-garde, and his writings in Blues People (1963) and later in Black Music (1967), a mixed bag of essays, reviews, and notes, frequently get close to the essence of the New Thing and its people. Yes, there is a lot of “Crow Jim” in Baraka, but he knew the music, its players, their aims—and he was black. Finally, a literate black jazz critic spoke out—going beyond Ralph Ellison, one might say.
It’s difficult to read the old Baraka/Jones today, at least for me, because of the ethnic venom that took him over for a long time. It’s also hard to make that jump back into a period when art was so deeply politicized, in every sense of that term. Politics and art have never merged easily and have frequently failed, as they did in the New Thing, to merge at all. The Africanism in much of that music was often just an overlay, and it was simply not cool to stress the importance of training and tradition: that was too Western, too white, too Brubeck.
Not everyone saw it that way, of course. Time magazine in a basically sympathetic 1962 piece entitled “Music: Crow Jim,” begins by reporting Mingus’s angry threat to leave the United States forever (for Majorca).2 The article concludes by quoting Cecil Taylor on the destructive effects of this kind of prejudice: “Noting that modern jazz owes much to the European classical tradition, pianist Taylor points out: ‘Crow Jim is a state of affairs which must be remedied; jazz can never again be music by Negroes strictly for Negroes any more than the Negroes themselves can return to the attitudes and emotional responses which prevailed when this was true.’ ”3
A 1958 piece by Kenneth Rexroth, one of jazz’s best and least-acknowledged critics, predates this observation and presents “Some Thoughts on Jazz as Music, as Revolt, as Mystique” with references to Mingus (whom Rexroth knew well) throughout. I don’t know of a more interesting, quirky, “I’ve been there” approach to these subjects.4
Regarding jazz as protest, Rexroth says, “The sources of jazz [as dance music] are influenced by racial and social conflict, but jazz itself appears first as part of the entertainment business, and the enraged proletariat do not frequent night clubs or cabarets.”
Many members of the New Thing scorned the entertainment and business side of jazz. But trying to be “relevant” while making a living playing any kind of jazz