Liner Notes

It seems to me that ten or fifteen year cycles in jazz are camouflages for insecure musicians who hide behind the current style. I remember too well the era when critics raved about a new creative dissonance in jazz and its unheard of harmonies - or disparaged what they later named "beboppers" and their long lines of unrelated notes. I went around listening to find these boppers and came up with a handful of musicians who adopted this idiom to their instruments and became famous through their invention in this style. But I wonder about the wealth of individuality and creativity we might have had and what they could have added to the evolution of jazz had they not been caught up in the Charlie Parker trend.

Who were the other boppers that critics spoke about, as though a myriad of bop disciples were taking over the earth of jazz? Anyone who attempted to play a familiar rhythmic pattern from the beginnings or endings of Bird's phrases or wore a goatee and bop glasses like Dizzy was called a bebopper. I disliked stylish "new looks" then and still think that such fashions generate sterile rehashings of one man's achievement. I studied Bird's creative vein with the same passion and understanding with which I'd studied the scores of my favorite classical composers, because I found a purity in his music that until then I had found only in classical music. Bird was the cause of my realization that jazz improvisation, as well as jazz composition, is the equal of classical music if the performer is a creative person. Bird brought melodic development to a new point in jazz, as far as Bartok or Schoenberg or Hindemith had taken it in the classics. But he also brought to music a primitive, mystic, supra-mind communication that I'd only heard in the late Beethoven quartets and, even more, in Stravinsky. Looking backward, I realized that this kind of communication has been there in other jazz creators' improvisation, for instance in Rex Stewart's trumpet. Bartok and most other composers knew about life up to death and wrote music as though it and they only existed here. But Bird had an unafraid soreness of self and of the relation of self to life, and death, and creation. His music exists here and beyond - as though he had been playing before he got here.

The followers who supposed Bird's greatness lay in his melodic patterns copied them without realizing that if Bird played something as diatonic as a scale on his horn (do, re, me, fa, so, la, ti, do), he could play it millions of different ways with millions of different meanings.

These sham copies have distorted Bird's beauty and greatness. I wonder how he felt hearing copies of himself all over America? How would a great, original painter feel if he saw in every gallery copies of his paintings, copies that were being hailed as good along with his own. I think it would be difficult, if not impossible, to retain his sense of himself, and that such a situation can destroy a man's capacity to continue to create.

Recently a young man came to New York with a plastic horn who critics are saying will cause a new era in jazz. He's doing atonal things that I've heard other musicians do, but he talks with his horn in the profound and primitive way Bird did. Shortly after hearing this young man, Ornette Coleman, I spoke to George Russell. George said, "I hope the critics won't do to him what they did to Bird," I said, "I know what you mean. They can brainwash the public into forgetting that what preceded Coleman is still valid and that Coleman is simply one more addition to the mainstream of great jazz creators. They have the power and perhaps the irresponsibility to inflate him and his style to such importance that it wouldn't take long to erase in most musicians' minds the awareness of anything other than the need to join the "new look." It would become an economic pressure on many who will think they have to play that way to make a living and the new camouflage for the people who have no faith in their individuality."

When the musicians who used to hide behind Charlie Parker buy plastic saxophones, trumpets, trombones and basses, hanging on to a few of the rhythmic phrases Coleman has been able to create - when they realize they have a new camouflage of atonality, no time bars, no key signature - when they all simultaneously begin to jabber in this borrowed style in all the night clubs all over America - then the walls of all the jazz clubs will probably crumble at this pretentious era of so-called good music, jazz.

But it won't happen again if every musician will play himself.

If you agree with me that in addition to borrowing another man's solutions a composer can also repeat himself, then perhaps you'll understand what I mean when I say I'd be bored with rooms full of Picasso's early cubist paintings and that I'd prefer selections from his entire oeuvre. It has taken me many years of being misunderstood - (critics wanted to pigeonhole and stylize me, saying "Mingus uses whistles and effects" when I used them on only one piece out of thirty or forty different recorded compositions) - to finally find acceptance for my point that a composer writing twenty pieces should write twenty pieces that are different... as much as you'd want twenty paintings to look different from one another. When I went to a Gauguin retrospective I saw a great painter: no painting looked like the other, each was done by a new genius, unimpressed by himself and his previous creation.

My last record for Columbia, Mingus Ah Um, on which each piece was different, sold many thousands of records, and I'm sure it's due to the fact that people are tired of hearing vibes, piano, bass and drum groups, or any other concocted "group sound," playing at the same low level of dynamics, with the same compositional form, the same color and embellishment. Or the same big bands with four or five trumpets, four or five trombones, five or six saxophones, and a rhythm section pounding away, 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4, as though the audience has no sense of rhythm or beat in its mind. And still playing arrangements as though there were only three instruments in the band: a trumpet, a trombone and a saxophone, with the other three or four trumpets, three or four trombones and four or five saxophones there just to make the arrangement sound louder by playing harmonic support to the leading trumpet, trombone and saxophone. What would you call this? A big band? A loud band? A jazz band? A creative band?

I'd write for a big sound (and with fewer musicians) by thinking out the form that each instrument as an individual is going to play in relation to all the others in the composition. This would replace the old hat system of passing the melody from section to section, for example from trumpet to reed section while the trombones run through their routine of French horn chordal sounds. Even this cliche would be listenable if it were not made to stand alone but were used as background for ad lib solos. I think it's time to discard these tired arrangements and save only the big Hollywood production introduction and ending which uses a ten or more note chord. If these ten notes were used as a starting point for several melodies and finished as a linear composition - with parallel or simultaneous and juxtaposed melodic thoughts - we might come up with some creative big band jazz.

"Far Wells, Mill Valley" is scored for piano, vibes, flute, alto, two tenors, baritone, trumpet, trombone, bass and drums. Section A opens (1A) with four lines: flute and vibes in a 12/8 line against alto and trumpet in a 16/16 line (that is, three notes against four), an inner counter-melody played by two tenors, and a slow melodic line on bass, baritone and trombone. The trombone leaves the bass line during pedal points and his weaving in and out blends the whole into a harmonic or organ sound. The opening is recapitulated, A, in a swinging 4/4 which repeats, in keeping with the traditional jazz structure AABA. Section B opens with a trumpet trill written in sound more primitive than it sounds here. All solos in this section are ad libbed from a voiced thirteen tone row scale against a pedal point rhythmic pattern. The scale replaces the traditional chord patterns from which musicians usually improvise. It may be broken up in any manner by the soloist. When Roland Hanna takes the first solo with the piano right hand (the left hand continues the percussive pattern), the written flute line takes up the melodic mood. When the flute line dissolves from written part to solo, the written alto part continues the melodic line. This technique assures compositional continuity even if a soloist plays something unrelated. The soloist can't play a "wrong" note, but he can make a bad choice of notes not related to the composer's melodic conception. Jerome Richardson's flute solo is played within the context and the point at which the written part ends and the solo begins is indecipherable. The alto (John Handy) joins the flute in double improvisation and the continuity is then carried by written lines for trumpet tenors and trombone.

Section C has the combined emotional coloring of the opening, 1A, and A proper. The background behind the bass solo is written in high register as a compliment to the bass solo and to be out of its range. The solos in this section were written to be ad libbed from open fifths. That means there is no major or minor third or tone center. All the chromatics are at the soloist's disposal which would allow a pivot point type of atonal solo. The solos by Handy on alto and Richard Williams on trumpet are fine solos, but they are executed in a diatonic Charlie Parker chordal manner that doesn't utilize the possibilities given by the open fifths. Booker Ervin's tenor joins the alto in double improvisation that does achieve the compositional continuity that I'd wanted in the preceding individual solos.

The final section recapitulates section B, with improvisations by Williams on trumpet and Dannie Richmond on timpani, and, foregoing the Hollywood production ending, ends with a single note.

The full title of "Gunslinging Bird" is "If Charlie Parker Were A Gunslinger There'd Be A Whole Lot Of Dead Copycats." A poet who heard this one night at the Showplace improvised a poem called "If Bird Were A Gunslinger There'd Be A Lot Less Robbins." Incidentally, many of my titles are given arbitrarily to the music without being related to it. This composition features solos by Knepper on trombone, Handy in alto chorus and Richmond on drums. Ellington's "Things Ain't What They Used To Be" features Ervin on tenor, Knepper, Hanna on piano, and bass. The melody's rhythmic patter differs from the original in the second chorus.

"Song With Orange" is the title composition from a CBS television play, A Song With Orange In It, for which I wrote the score. It features Knepper in a plunger solo and Williams on trumpet. "Mood Indigo" is played in the beautiful mood in which Duke originally wrote it and with a new inner counter-melody on the tenor. The lead is played by the alto and the solos are by Knepper, Hanna and myself. "New Now Know How" opens with the introduction followed directly by the bridge (to break the AABA routine) and ends with A. Solos are played by Nico Bunink on the piano, John Handy on alto and Knepper.

"Diane" is a melodic, atonal composition. The melodies for flute, trumpet, alto, tenor, piano and bass are all equally important. I suggest listening to it as a whole rather than trying to follow one particular line. After the ensemble glissando there is a piano solo by Roland Hanna on the second theme. In the out chorus the vibes reinforce the piano line, and a trombone line is added. "Put Me In That Dungeon" is the opening music from my score for the CBS television ballet, Frankie And Johnny, starring Melissa Hayden. It features Handy on alto. "Slop" was written for a barroom scene for Frankie And Johnny. If you notice a similarity to a 3/4 composition on my last Columbia album, it is not coincidental. The choreographer had rehearsed his dancers to "Better Git It In Your Soul," and asked for something like it when I composed the score. "Slop" has the same church influence, but with a looser, sloppier approach - they've left church meeting and gone to the picnic grounds where they sing the same meeting songs but the Rev or the Deacon has just sneaked a few nips to a few of the leading voices. In the beginning you hear Ervin on tenor and Hanna solos on piano. Both "Slop" and "Put Me In That Dungeon" feature cellos.

- Charles Mingus 1959

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