“ There was no way you could jive him. You had to forget all your defenses.” “ Even by a white man's standards, you’re supposed to be a genius. ’ ’ So Mingus stayed, though none of the teachers was ever persuaded that he was a genius. A few months before his death, Mingus was talking about being educated. It was in his airy, comfortable apartment in Manhattan Plaza on Tenth Avenue, looking over the Hudson River and also providing a long, clear view uptown. Without crowding, the living room accommodated four basses, recording equipment, a high fidelity rig, a piano, a sofa that looked as if it had been made out of a tree trunk, various tables, chairs, and a wine rack. A magnum of Scotch was nearby, but we were drinking wine. That is, the glass of wine had to be brought to Charles’s lips. In his wheelchair, he could no longer move his hands, either. Mingus was in good spirits, as he was much of the time until the heart attack last January prevented amyotrophic lateral sclerosis from finishing him. Suddenly though, he became rather wistful. “ I wish,” he said, “ I had been bom to have good school teachers who understood the personalities of children. Then I would have gotten a good fundamental education on which I could have based my natural talents. If I’d had that, and kept the same personality, then nothing could have stood in my way.” I asked him what more he might have accomplished with that kind of start. Mingus finally grinned, “ Well, I’d be in the bass section of the Boston Pops, with no name. ’ ’ His eyes still savoring the twist, Mingus told of a conversation years before with Mercer Ellington. “ He was saying he was better than Duke, that he learned 20 years ago at Juilliard how to do what Duke does. ‘My father isn’t doing nothing new,’ is what he said. ‘I got some things that’ll really upset him.’ ” “ What did you say?” I asked Mingus. He smiled. “ I just nodded my head.” In his notes to Let My Children Hear Music, Mingus told of having to wait 30 years to get a piece recorded because it had been too “ advanced” for so long. “ Had I been bom white,” he wrote, “ I am sure I would have expressed my ideas long ago. (But) maybe they wouldn’t have been as good, because when people are bom free...the struggle and initiative are not as strong as they are for a person who has to struggle and therefore has more to say.” I knew him for nearly 30 years, and I always looked forward to seeing him. He was so open, so utterly without guile, so direct and yet so warm and often so playful that he was literally disarming. “ There was no way you could jive him,” one musician said. “ You had to forget all your defenses when you were with him.because they wouldn ’t work. ’ ’ Mingus made you honest, at least so long as you were with him. And he made you think. He had the kind of mind that never stopped analyzing— politics, the economics of the music business, the roots of so-called avant-garde music, parenting, and especially why people do what they do, no matter what they say motivated them. For instance, this is a story Mingus told me about the Birdland era of jazz: “ I was driving to work with Lennie Tristano and two black musicians. Lennie asked why we objected to being called ‘niggers.’ ‘Hell,’ he said, ‘you use it among yourselves all the time.’ The way he asked showed he was just bugging us. He knew. He kept it up and everybody was getting pretty tense. Now this was a guy I really loved, and especially at that time. But this was too much. I finally tole him: ‘You keep this up and when we get to the gig, I’m going to turn off all the lights and kick your ass. ’ “ Lenny laughed, kind of. Then he was silent for a while, and finally told us about something that had happened to him at Birdland a few nights before. Woody Herman, who’s supposed to be a very nice guy and a funny one, came over to Lennie. He asked Tristano if he were really blind. ‘Yes,’ Lennie said, ‘ I can ’t see anything.’ Woody wouldn’t let up. He kept passing his hand over Lennie’s eyes. ‘Can’t you see something?’ ‘No, I can’t. I told you I can’t . ’ ‘Good,’ said Woody. ‘Good, you motherfucker, I’m glad you can’t see!’ ” “ The car got very still,” Mingus recalled. “ The other guys were shocked at such wanton cruelty. But I knew Lennie; I knew how destructive he could be. And I asked him, ‘But what did you do to get that guy so hurt and angry?’ It tore Lennie up. It was the first time I’d ever seen him tremble.” Sometimes, Mingus didn’t have to use words—or music—to make his feelings penetratingly clear. “ It was at a concert in Europe, ’ ’ Mingus said to me last spring. “ Dizzy was on stand. I was some distance away. His back was turned, and I was looking at him, thinking how important he was and how I hoped he’d live forever. Suddenly Dizzy turned around and said, ‘Where’s all this love coming from?’ He looked at me. ‘You really do love me, don’t you? I felt like I was in heaven. ’ Mingus was very fond of that story. The phone used to ring, and there would be no voice at the other end. Instead, sometimes a piece I’d never heard before being played on the piano. Or the sound of a combo, and even, on occasion, a full orchestra. After a few minutes, Mingus would come on. “ What’d you think?” He was really less interested in my opinion than in explaining his new inventions. As Mingus said, he never repeated himself. Each piece was a new leap into possibility. But then, after showing me how the lines intertwined this time, Mingus would often say, “ What counts is what stays in your head after you hear it. ” Feeling. Mingus had no use for music without plenty of emotion. But it also had to cohere. And it had to be original, with the caveat that “ there can be originality in stupidity.” At bottom, of course, it had to be real. “ Art,” Mingus said, “ is beautiful, ugly, horrible, smelly, faggoty, carefree. You should have all that in it. And on ballads, I like people crying in their music. Like Freddie Webster and ‘Lockjaw’ Davis. I cry on ballads. I put in all the pain I’ve ever seen in my life. Another thing a player has to do is make you think that whatever he’s playing he’s doing it for the first time. That’s what Bird did. And Ben Webster, especially on ballads.” As a leader, Mingus made his credo clear, sometimes belligerently so, to his sidemen. Pianist Sy Johnson, for instance, remembers how Mingus, during a set, would roar, like a volcano: “ Respect the melody! Play in tune!” And a sideman who fell back on stale licks would see Mingus turn into a veritable Medusa before his frozen eyes. Like Pierre Boulez, Mingus heard everything. And he could hear ahead. Toward the end of his playing life, Mingus told me, “ A guy came into the club and wanted to sit in with my band on tenor. Man, he couldn’t play nothin’ . He didn’t know the tunes, he didn’t know the chords.” But Mingus heard something rattling around inside the musician’s rampant incompetence, and he told the apprentice to play all by himself. Mingus and his sidemen left the bandstand, and the newcomer dove into a series of his own compositions. “ There were long lines,” Mingus recalled with pleasure, “ and he was cutting my own tenor saxophonist in terms of what he could do on the horn. I told him to go home and study, and I told him what to study. ‘Learn how to read; learn more about your horn. But don’t study any composition. You’ve got an ear and a sould for composition, and that’s something nobody can teach you. ’ ’ ’ If somebody tried to teach you that, you might wind up in the Boston Pops, with no name. Next week: more forms of Mingus, including a waking nightmare in Birdland with the falling Bird himself, and Bud Powell. Thinking on Mingus, I remember another musician who cast thunderbolts and was just as stubbornly autonomous as Mingus. He too could not abide players just skimming their horns; and when one of his sidemen started playing one night as if he had just taken on the soul of an investment banker, the leader left the stand, took a seat below, and started throwing shot glasses at the insufferably placid musician. This force of nature from New Orleans, Sidney Bechet, was also like Mingus in that he never ceased marveling at the infinite possibilities of the music. In his autobiography, Treat It Gentle, there is a melody that is not without relevance to the insistent life of Charles Mingus: “ I can remember when I was young. I didn’ t have toys like o the rs ....! wouldn’ t have known what to do with a toy if you gave me one. I started once to write a song for a boy like that. The song, it was called Sans Amis. He had nothing to play with and no one to play with. But he had a song. He kept making that song over and over out of himself, changing it around, making it fit. That boy, he had this song about being lonely, and as soon as he had the song, he wasn’t lonely any more. He was lucky. He was real well off; he had this thing he could trust, and so he could trust himself.” Toward the end, when it was taking 10 minutes for Mingus to say one word, his spirit, says his wife, Susan Graham, was unbroken. “ He had,” she was thinking aloud afterwards, “ that marvelous music in his head. All of it, and all of it is his. That must have helped. ’ ’ Reprinted by Permission the Village Voice © The Village Voice 1979. Restoration Refinishing 11-6 Tues. - Sat. 2387 N.W. Thurman Portland, OR 97210 222-3181 HU - ■^estergear (Original ^Nostalgic Apparel 1950’®8c prinr-also tty ^ • ^ e U Crabe •^Rentals • Consignment • 823 23rb ^ortlanb, ®^R 248-0518 23
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