Joni

Ben Sidran, Rolling Stone, 28 December 1978

‘This is a very dramatic life lesson,’ says Joni Mitchell. ‘It’s a great opportunity to study a classical form and to breathe new life into it.’

The ‘dramatic life lesson’ is the album on which Mitchell is collaborating with legendary jazz bassist/composer Charles Mingus, 56, who, according to sources close to him, is fighting amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (a.k.a. Lou Gehrig’s disease) [known as motor neuron disease in the UK], which is usually terminal.

Mitchell’s album, as yet untitled and, she says, about half-finished, features her lyrics set to six tunes Mingus wrote for her and two Mingus chestnuts (‘Goodbye Pork Pie Hat’ and ‘Self-Portrait in Three Colors’) that Mitchell selected. Mingus was present at some early New York sessions that will not be used; the bulk of the album work has been done in Los Angeles, with Herbie Hancock on Fender Rhodes piano and Weather Report’s saxophonist Wayne Shorter, drummer Peter Erskine and bass guitarist Jaco Pastorius.

Mingus either will not or – because of his illness – cannot be interviewed at this time. (His management tries to minimise the severity of his condition, and says Mingus is ‘vacationing and visiting friends’. Those who have worked with him over the last year, however, confirm that he is gravely ill.) Ironically, Joni Mitchell, who rarely grants interviews, is more than willing to talk about the project.

Mingus, already ‘reclusive with the illness’, as Mitchell puts it, sent word in May this year that he was interested in working with the singer-songwriter.

‘Originally,’ Mitchell explains, ‘he had an idea for T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets to be read, a symphony playing one kind of music and a small combo – an acoustic guitar, maybe myself, and a bass player doing an overlay of another kind of music. He wanted a formal, literary voice reading T. S. Eliot and he saw me coming in as the colloquial voice of T. S. Eliot. In the tradition of the Baptist church, they have a reader reading the Bible in the old way and somebody translating it into the colloquial.’

That project never got off the ground. ‘I got the T. S. Eliot book,’ Mitchell recalls. ‘I called him back and said I couldn’t do the project because, first of all, I would rather distil the Bible than T. S. Eliot.’ She assumed this was the end of the working relationship, but weeks later received another call from Mingus. ‘He said he had written six melodies for me to set words to. He called them “Joni One”, “Joni Two”, “Joni Three”, up to six.’

Mitchell flew to New York to meet Mingus and hear the music for the first time. ‘He has a reputation for being a very violent and ornery person,’ she says, ‘but I seem to like those kind of people. I always suspect that there’s a heart beating under there that’s very sensitive, which turned out to be true. He has a wide emotional spectrum. Our relationship has been very sweet.’

The ironies of this unique student/teacher collaboration will undoubtedly be more apparent to Charles Mingus’ fans than to Joni Mitchell’s. Mingus’ reputation in the music world is based not only on his musical virtuosity but also on his unrelenting criticism of whites. He hasn’t simply been voluble on the subject; he has been volcanic. To think that now, so late in Mingus’ life, his music will be heard in hundreds of thousands of homes interpreted by a leading white female pop singer is perhaps the ultimate twist to an extremely stormy career.

Born on 22 April 1922, Charles Mingus grew up in Watts, a few miles from downtown Los Angeles, where he spent most of his first thirty years. Although he studied bass with a classical musician – H. Rheinschagen, formerly with the New York Philharmonic – his Baptist church upbringing and his studies with a music teacher named Lloyd Reese appear to have shaped his ideas most profoundly. Reese, a legend within the Watts community, taught his students formal composition, but he also insisted that they consider all the world as musical and include natural sounds – birds, animals, street noises – as part of their conception of music. Mingus, of all of Reese’s students with the possible exception of Eric Dolphy, seems to have taken this lesson most to heart.

His first gigs in Los Angeles included work with Louis Armstrong and Kid Ory in the early ’40s, but after some pressure from his friends, Mingus left the old-timers and became part of the bebop vanguard. His career as a bass player advanced steadily during the ’40s, particularly after he did some West Coast gigs with Charlie Parker. But Mingus’ first fame came as a leader and composer after his move to New York in 1951. He led a series of experimental combos, which included players like Thad Jones, Teo Macero, J. J. Johnson and Kai Winding, and in the late ’50s he established the revolutionary Jazz Workshop.

In the workshop, Mingus led various aggregations of handpicked players through exercises in spontaneous combustion, drawing on such diverse sources as the gospel church, Yiddish, Spanish and Arabic music and adding literary and historical references. He ignited this mixture with a volatile personal style that often seemed more newsworthy than the music itself. Mingus fast developed the reputation of being a genius who either freed a player’s spirit or busted his jaw. Or both.

‘A lot of people didn’t understand the concept of the Jazz Workshop,’ recalls drummer Dannie Richmond, one of its earliest members and a man who has performed with Mingus across three decades, from 1957 until the latter’s retirement from bass playing nearly one year ago. ‘Mingus always insisted on rehearsing, even on the gig. People thought he was “out” doing this: stopping the band, explaining something to a musician onstage, starting over again, maybe even stopping again.’

Perhaps it was the way Mingus did it: swearing at players, even putting his bass down to push the pianist aside and physically demonstrate the proper voicing of a chord. Musicians didn’t seem to mind, but the press had a field day.

‘There wasn’t any bullshit in Mingus’ bands,’ recalls Richmond. ‘Musicians would always be on their very best. I saw a lot of musicians get opened up through him. They’d come into the band afraid to venture out and try new things, and over a period they’d stretch out.’

Even an abbreviated list of just the horn players who were schooled in Mingus’ bands is staggering: Booker Ervin, John Handy, Eric Dolphy, Roland Kirk, Jackie McLean, Benny Golson, Jimmy Knepper, Clifford Jordan, Charles Mariano, Jerome Richardson, Ted Curson and George Adams.

Mingus developed an organic approach to leading these musicians through the labyrinths of what he called his ‘extended form’ compositions. He preferred to sing parts to players rather than write out even a basic chord chart: he made musicians rely on their ears and musical memories rather than on their eyes and intellectual capabilities. The result was an emotional brew that was often thematic in structure. One early composition, a 1956 piece called ‘Pithecanthropus Erectus’, was a half-hour excursion that retold the story of proto-man in music rather than words.

During the ’50s, the accepted jazz formula was either straight-ahead bop or west coast cool jazz. Mingus’ accelerating and decelerating tempos and his multiple horn players’ bending notes and shouting responses to Mingus’ chants (what Richmond calls ‘moanful-type ingredients’) brought a whole new dynamic and emotional range to the music.

Equally important in Mingus’ music was the sound of protest. ‘In the beginning, the race thing was daily, every day,’ says Dannie Richmond. ‘Going to a gig, we would stop at a restaurant and couldn’t go in to eat. We would go around to the back and get some food. And we had to eat, man. But it got to Charles so badly that he said, “Okay, you all eat, but I can’t.” And so when Mingus had the excuse to get back at the people he thought had done all of these injustices to him and other black people, he took full advantage of it, each and every time it presented itself. When he wasn’t doing battle with them in person, then the music was the vehicle. That was the protest part.’

While Art Blakey and Horace Silver and their Jazz Messengers made hit records riding the wave of what was then called soul jazz, Mingus remained known only to a relatively elite audience. He continued to lead various permutations of the Jazz Workshop in the first half of the ’60s, but the audience for jazz, especially ‘protest’ jazz, was dwindling. And in retrospect, it appears that Mingus’ refusal to be fashionable and ingratiate himself with ‘important people’ on the music scene – the A&R men, the press, the agents – only furthered his deepening obscurity. As time went on, he developed a more and more negative reputation and became an oddity, an eccentric, and was less and less marketable.

Mingus entered a period of semi-retirement in 1966. He didn’t record again until 1970; instead, he worked on his autobiography. He was treated briefly at Bellevue hospital in New York for depression and exhaustion. He wasn’t sleeping, and he told friends that he had perfected the art of ‘just looking at himself in the mirror and just wishing he would die and doing it long enough so that he got to the point where he could see himself leaving his body’. He even boarded up the windows to his apartment because he found it was ‘easier to leave himself’ that way.

Mingus’ records continued to circulate the marketplace, but mostly as cut-outs. His two landmark CBS records, Mingus Ah Um and Dynasty, and his best work on Atlantic, such as The Clown and Mingus/Oh Yeah, as well as the bulk of his work on Impulse, which included some of his best recordings with Eric Dolphy, all disappeared from the shelves. And his LPs on Candid, which had distributed Mingus’ own Debut label, seemed to evaporate from the stores so fast that they were more like rumours than recordings.

In 1972, he went to Europe for some brief engagements a year after his long-awaited autobiography, Beneath The Underdog, was published. The, book, which Mingus had been writing for almost twenty years, contained very little information about his musical career, focusing instead on his sexual excesses and his on-and-off associations with pimps and whores. It, too, failed to make much commercial headway.

But at least Mingus was back and performing again in the early ’70s, if not with his old fire. In 1974 Dannie Richmond told me, ‘Mingus is sad, man. He’s drug [sic] about the things he’s been the innovator of – other people are getting the credit. Mingus is saying that he’s seen it all, done it all. I’ll ask about certain records we’ll hear on the radio and he’ll just say, “Oh, I did that,” and name a date, a time and the sidemen.’

In the mid-’70s, Mingus and Richmond put together a critically-acclaimed band that recorded several albums for Atlantic (Mingus Moves and Changes 1 and Changes 2). Each album barely sold 15,000 copies.

‘Even people at Atlantic weren’t listening to it,’ admits Raymond Silver, currently Atlantic’s East Coast head of A&R. ‘People here felt he wasn’t giving them the product they needed, and little by little his albums started getting lost.’

It was Silver’s involvement with Mingus, starting in 1976, that began to turn the situation around. ‘I did it slowly,’ Silver says. ‘People said, “If you can get him to listen to you, you have accomplished a great deal.” So I went to see him at a club one night about two years ago. He was eating an apple, cutting it with a knife. Dannie Richmond was there. He was offering Dannie slices. Mingus’ wife said, “Charles, this is Raymond Silver from Atlantic. He wants to help.” He ignored me. I was standing there for half an hour and he didn’t acknowledge me. Later, somebody was talking about music and I came out with an intelligent remark. Mingus looked straight at me and offered me a slice of the apple.

‘So I talked to him. I said, “Listen, I’m a young man. I listen to your music, I have some ideas, so if you want some help, here I am.”’ One of those ideas was for Mingus to record with a large group of contemporary big-name players, including sessionmen like Randy and Michael Brecker, as well as Larry Coryell, Sonny Fortune and George Colman. Further, suggested Silver, why not use three guitars? He added Phillip Catherine and John Scofield to the list. ‘Just before the album came out,’ Silver says, ‘he sent me a telex from Brazil, saying he didn’t like the album, but I could put it out anyway if I thought it would sell.’

The LP, released in 1977 as Three or Four Shades of Blues, sold well over 50,000 copies, Mingus’ best-selling record ever. It received five stars in DownBeat and, more important, it received airplay. ‘For the first time,’ says Silver, ‘Mingus crossed over. They were playing Mingus music on the radio again! It surprised us. Even Mingus.’

And then, suddenly, tours were cancelled and Mingus became reclusive again. News trickled out that he was not well. In fact, it was serious – very serious.

‘My mind couldn’t accept it,’ recalls Richmond. ‘Always, through the years, when we got together, we would give each other a big hug. This time he was sitting and when I extended my hand, ready for our embrace, I noticed that he could hardly bring his hand to mine. Still, I refused to believe it.’

Biding time, Atlantic released Cumbia and Jazz Fusion in early 1978. ‘Cumbia’ was a long piece left over from the previous album and the flip side was a soundtrack to an Italian movie that Mingus had recorded earlier with his working band. Album sales were disappointing, given the success of Three or Four Shades of Blues. So when Silver got news around then that Mingus was feeling somewhat better and was actively composing again, he jumped at the chance to record a follow-up to the original session.

Mingus said he had an idea for an extended suite called ‘Three Worlds of Drums’ which would incorporate the entire history of drumming, from the backbeat through swing and into free jazz. Mingus and Silver settled on a format, which included a forty-piece orchestra and employed most of the players from Three or Four Shades of Blues, plus such jazz luminaries as Lee Konitz and Pepper Adams, and using drummers Joe Chambers and Steve Gadd along with Richmond. At times, both Eddie Gomez and George Mraz played bass.

‘Mingus didn’t play,’ admits Silver, ‘but he was there through the whole recording. He was sitting in a wheelchair, conducting, yelling, “No!”, “Yes!” I mean, his spirit was right there.’ Recorded last April and tentatively titled Me, Myself an Eye, the LP is scheduled for release in January 1979.

* * *

After those sessions, Mingus first contacted Joni Mitchell and the two agreed on a plan of action.

‘Initially, he just gave me the melodies,’ Mitchell says, ‘and it was my job to set words to them. I asked what each of the moods suggested to him. The first one, he said, was, “the things I’m going to miss”. There’s some hope that he will live, though it’s a long shot – but at that point, I don’t think there was any hope. He was preparing to die and he was in a very reflective state. His wife turned to him and said, “Oh Charlie, you know you’ve done everything.” He looked at me and in that look I knew that no matter how much you’ve done in a life, when you’re confronted with the possible finality of it, there are a million things you’ve left undone. So I simply became him in my imagination and wrote what he would miss.’

But how could she know these things?

‘I cut myself off from everything and meditated on it,’ Mitchell says. ‘And I have a very powerful imagination. It’s not too hard for me to imagine myself in his position. We all have some things in common, experientially. And there are things in common musically. We both have a broad range of feeling. And there’s a literariness to his writing. And within his idiom he’s an eccentric: some of the eccentricities are parallel to mine.’

Does she feel the collaboration is primarily a nostalgic effort or is it part of her own current direction?

‘It seems to me that art forms are passed over and disposed of too quickly,’ she replies. ‘Music like this [Mingus’ music and bebop in general] has more power than a decade in it. I think there’s still a lot more to be done. I mean, there weren’t a lot of great lyrics in that idiom, that’s for sure – the singer was kind of the low man on the totem pole. And in some ways, rightfully so, because the horn is imitating the human voice and the singer is then imitating the horn and doesn’t have the technical advantages of the horn.’

How does she write lyrics for that kind of music, then?

‘I’m like a jeweller. I have a piece of metal and I’m setting stones into it. And yet when the things are finished, the result is a very liquid kind of lyric, where word for word it suits the inflections of the notes and seems completely natural.’

Has it been difficult to adapt her singing to the style of Mingus’ melody lines?

‘It’s melody with a lot of movement to it,’ Mitchell concedes. ‘It’s a different kind of breathing. And, ironically, it’s a more natural form of music for me as a singer than my own music because you have such creative liberty within the bar. In rock’n’roll you’re hitting tight to the downbeat and you don’t have a lot of space for musical freedom. And a rock’n’roll singer is wide-throated, with a lot of scratch to the voice, a lot of volume and really strong, simple rhythm. My instrument is better at a moderate volume, using the dynamics of range, phrasing and slurring and holding straight lines. Like Miles [Davis].’

What was it like to work out Mingus’ compositions with Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Jaco Pastorius and Peter Erskine?

‘Our sessions for this project have been very free,’ Mitchell says. ‘It’s almost like an Our Gang movie. There’ve been thrills of different kinds along the way, but nothing like this. Coming together with these players over this music, it’s like a handicap has been removed.’

Add one more musician liberated by the music of Mingus. Permanently?

‘I think so. Definitely. After this, rock’n’roll is like a metronome.’

* * *

And what of Mingus?

Most probably, he will never play again. Perhaps, through his enormous inner strength and the ministrations of the various holistic approaches he’s enlisting, he will survive his ordeal. The odds, however, are not all that good.

The final irony, of course, is that his recorded work is about to flourish. Even now, his old labels are preparing reissues and when Joni Mitchell’s album hits the streets we can expect a flood of Mingus’ music to surface.

‘I’ll tell you this,’ says Raymond Silver. ‘There’s a new interest in him over here at Atlantic. They are interested in pushing him with ads. Everybody’s concerned now about when the new album’s coming out and how great the cover looks, things like that. Even if he, God forbid, passes away, Mingus will still be here.’ [Note: Charles Mingus died on 5 January 1979 in Cuernavaca, Mexico.]