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Оглавление| 3 | Recordings: Children and Friends |
| “The music is very original. Nobody’s heard a band like it.” |
Let My Children Hear Music was recorded on several dates, September through November 1971. A smaller band with many of the same people played the Mingus and Friends concert that followed in February 1972. In June of ’72, when we did the following interview, Mingus was rehearsing a big band for the Mercer Arts Center gig (see Introduction), again with some of the same players, most of whom had formed his Village Vanguard band in March. You will hear mention of and discussion about all these morphing “big” bands throughout our conversation.
Children contains some of Mingus’s most astonishing and powerful music. The fact that the album came off as well as it did is also astonishing, given the problems that occurred in its recording and the personalities involved. The commentaries that follow our interview describe some of what went on. Yet with all the difficulties I would make the case that Children is Mingus’s masterpiece, and there is evidence that he thought so too.1
• • •
GOODMAN: I hope that Mercer gig goes well for you, that would be marvelous. Everybody I talked to thinks of you as fronting a big band, somehow. I don’t know why that is. Are you happier with a big band, or small? Or do you need ’em both?
MINGUS: I always wanted both.
GOODMAN: Is the Mercer band gonna be pretty much like the one you had at the Vanguard?
MINGUS: I can’t change the book. I made up a few new tunes, and I’ll get a chance to write ’em as soon as Sue stops booking me.
It’ll be a good band, probably one of the best. The music is very original. Nobody’s heard a band like it.
GOODMAN: Any way you can get it on a more permanent basis? Is rehearsal time the main problem?
MINGUS: I don’t know. Sue’s trying. You have to find some guys who want to rehearse [for free], that’s the main thing. Duke Ellington’s band doesn’t pay for rehearsals—[unintelligible]—but with no rehearsals, you don’t get the job.
GOODMAN: I hear Teo [Macero] played on the Children album.
MINGUS: We had him playing alto like Ornette Coleman for a reason. I knew he could do it, he had done it before.
GOODMAN: Does he play much any more? Publicly?
MINGUS: Hadn’t been playing in a long time, but he keeps up with his horn. He was a great tenor player, very underrated.
GOODMAN: It’s a beautiful album, Charles.
MINGUS: It’s old-timey, but then, you know, I like old-time instruments. If I decided to do an atonal piece, I would go to it gradually, I wouldn’t just stop what I’m doing. Before I did that I would use the small combo, because I want to do some things that are modal, brooding music. You know [hums bass figure], those kind of things.
GOODMAN: The six basses you had—they didn’t come through well on the record. I don’t know whether it was Teo’s recording, mixing, or editing, but the sound was muddy.
MINGUS: See, Teo could have done that better, man. It don’t sound like six basses, does it? It sounded good on their equipment in the studio, but in the playback at home it’s just not six basses.
GOODMAN: Didn’t they mike them individually?
MINGUS: No, and they should have used individual mikes, up close plus some mike catching the room sound. You could hear those basses in the room but not on the record when he [Teo] recorded. He put the mikes far away on “Chill of Death,” then decided to do it close the next time. I made that same record in ’39 with Red Callender, Artie Shapiro, Artie Bernstein, Dick Kelly from the Philharmonic, Gil Hadnot, Dave Bryant. I didn’t play then, I talked [the vocal]—and it sounded better than when Columbia did it, with one or two mikes only. Then [in ’39] they put the mikes near the basses and got the bass section sound. They didn’t block us off, they got the room sound. I still think that’s the best way to record, man.
GOODMAN: Sure it is, particularly for jazz. I don’t understand that sixteen-track stuff.
MINGUS: Those basses should be like the Chicago Symphony, on top. Did you tell Teo about the record?
GOODMAN: I told him I thought some of it didn’t come through as clear as it ought to, and the basses were part of it. I wasn’t going to get into a big discussion with him about it . . . since he spent a lot of time mixing and overdubbing.
• • •
In other words, I didn’t want to antagonize the guy. In a later 1974 session with Mingus, Sue, and myself, we got into discussing the recording and editing of Children and the first Mingus and Friends concert. Charles said he wasn’t happy about the results on either album, but in fact he had permitted both to be issued and, according to Sy Johnson and Teo, definitely had his say in the editing room. I said some things about Teo that were pretty harsh—and should have realized that he and Mingus went way back, both as colleagues and as friends.
• • •
GOODMAN: Well, have you talked to Teo? What does he have to say about all this?
MINGUS: I hadn’t even left the company [Columbia] then. I was telling him about how bad he edited the record. He says, “Well, let’s bring it in, Charles. Show me what you’re talking about and let’s do a new one. Remaster it all over again.”
GOODMAN: Which one? Children? The first concert?
MINGUS: Yeah, the first concert.
SUE: Mingus and Friends.
MINGUS: Ain’t no baritone sax on it.
SUE: What, no Mulligan?
MINGUS: I had two baritones; you can only hear one.
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.
• • •
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 who decided not to do it. As I say, I was there when he made the decision. It would have taken up half the insert on the album to list everybody who was on there. There was an enormous number of people.
GOODMAN: Well, I missed that, I really did. With that caliber of band.
JOHNSON: Oh, I did too. As I say, there were great players in those bands and they worked very hard to make the music happen. They should have gotten some credit for it.
Anyway, two of the pieces had no music available—none, not even a lead sheet. They were on a very poorly recorded album that somebody had made at UCLA after the great [1964] Monterey concert that Mingus had done. That was one of his really creative periods and as great as that [Monterey] album was, there was a lot of music that never got recorded. His output was enormous at that point in his life.3
And so there was a lot of music in that [UCLA] album that had never been released by anybody, and Mingus . . . just felt the music should be played. So we considered several things in doing that. [One was] the instrumentation that we needed to play “The Chill of Death”—which Mingus had written years and years before, in the late ’30s, like 1939. I think Ted Nash had something to do with helping Mingus then. They were friends at that time and Mingus told me once that Ted Nash helped him orchestrate it, gave him some advice and looked his score over, something like that. It is a very ambitious orchestration, but it was done years and years ago and he never had gotten the opportunity to record it. But I think that they did play it: Ted Nash assembled an orchestra in Los Angeles back before 1940, I think, and they played it once.
So “The Chill of Death” had been dormant since that time. He wanted to record it and it called for six basses plus Mingus. [On the Children date] we actually had three jazz bass players and three classical bass players. The jazz bass players were Richard Davis, Ron Carter, and Milt Hinton. And then there were three legit bass players also, and they were all playing arco. It is interesting in that company that the concertmaster for the bass section was—there was no question among the basses [about] who was the concertmaster—it was Richard Davis. Whenever something had to be decided they turned to Richard, and he let them know what was happening.
So, there were a lot of woodwinds, ten woodwinds. Just four brass: two trumpets, a trombone, and bass trombone. Two percussion and rhythm. The most fascinating instrument in the orchestra for me was the contrabass clarinet, and having a contrabass clarinet to write for was so luxurious. Danny Bank played it so fantastically that I went apeshit with it. You can hear that contrabass clarinet all the way through “Shoes of the Fisherman’s Wife.”
GOODMAN: I always thought it was a bass clarinet.
JOHNSON: No, it is a contrabass clarinet, and it has that low G-flat on it. So the piece has a G-flat tonality at the very outset and you can use the lowest note on the contrabass clarinet at the beginning and end of that opening section. And the basses are bowing along with that, and there’s a chance to really exploit the low sonorities. It is a very light orchestra as far as brass is concerned. There are only four brass. So a lot of climaxes that I might have liked to have gotten were limited by the number of brass players I had to deal with.
