Mingus and the Permanent Avant Garde

There is a fascinating and well written essay by Salim Washington called “All the Things You Could Be by Now…”: Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus and the Limits of Avant-Garde Jazz. It's well worth reading all the way through if you have the time or inclination, but there are a few areas of discussion I wanted to isolate and talk about.

In June of 1973, Charles Mingus wrote and published an article in Changes magazine entitled "An Open Letter to the Avant Garde."

In it, he gives an anecdote of talking to Duke Ellington about the avant garde:

I had to go to Yale recently for some kind of award they were giving away to different musicians for the Ellington Scholarship Fund, and I talked to Duke.

I said: "Duke, why don't you, me and Dizzy and Clark Terry and Thad Jones get together and make an avant-garde record?"

Duke's reply was very quick. He said: "Why should we go back that far? Let's not take music back that far, Mingus. Why not just make a modern record?"

And this to me appeared to be very funny, because he was saying just what I was thinking -- which I didn't have enough nerve to say. To hear musicians on the bandstand say: "Well they're playing in the avant-garde because they do anything they want to do" -- and most of the ones who do play avant-garde can't play a straight melody and solo on it with the approximate changes, with any approximate changes.

This is not a new critique of the avant-garde, but it's interesting to hear it coming from Mingus because he wasn't a traditionalist who entirely wrote off the contributions of free music, or the "new thing." It was just one tool in his musical language, which makes sense considering his dictum recounted in Sue Mingus' Tonight At Noon that "You don't do anything all the time" (p105, Sue Mingus).

He goes on to say:

"Music has to have some form, to come from some historical music created by a people. You can't just have guys making up different lines. If you study music you're able to do anything, to have variety in what you do. When every piece sounds just like the last one, that's no fun. I enjoy playing something where everybody's creating together and where there is some ensemble. I want to have different meters, different chord changes, or different music with no chord changes at all. But to just play free, to have no sense of where you're going or where you came from...I mean, if I'm going to have my appendix taken out, I want to be sure the doctor can retrace his steps" (ibid).

Going back to his Open Letter to the Avant Garde:

"I'm not trying to knock avant-garde. I'm just trying to say that it would be beautiful to hear -- if there were such a thing as avant-garde -- the best musicians play it. Because don't let anyone tell me that Clark Terry or Duke Ellington can't play avant-garde music, or incoherent music if they wanted to. It would be the most incoherent. It would be the most noisy. They would cut everybody playing bad. Because Duke could sit down at the piano and play a composition and it would sound like a symphony of Wrong, it would sound like he wrote it out with an introduction, interludes and recapitulations. The whole thing would be decided, if Duke was in the avant-garde. We'd all be crazy listening. If he should suddenly go avant-garde, I wouldn't know what to do except go crazy with him. I'm sure he's not, though. Mainly because he already is avant-garde in another way."

Salim Washington notes that the history of jazz is a history of avant-garde movements, from swing to the bebop revolution to the new thing of the 1960s. He also writes that the music that is identified as the avant-garde that blossomed during the 1960s has become a permanent avant-garde that is still practiced in similar ways today by many musicians. Mr. Washington also notes that what is conventionally referred to as the avant-garde is not only a reaction to the past but also a continued broadening of musical influence and perspective:

Some musicians tried to free themselves symbolically from the hegemony of Euro-America through such means as subverting the expectations of functional tonality, abandoning tempered intonation, improvising with free meter and free tonal structures, new instrumental techniques, etc. The non-Western emphasis was underscored by incorporating musical influences from various African, Latin American, and Asian cultures.

I don't have any broad sweeping conclusions or points to make right now, but I will continue this thread and line of thought in a couple more posts coming soon, with some musical examples I have in mind.