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I'm finally finishing a multimedia project consisting of interviews and music I recorded with Mingus before he died. Please stay tuned.
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9/14/99 John Goodman was there, hanging with Mingus in the small hours, when jazz leapt down from the blues pulpit and ran through the streets reeling. He knows the arcane language of the brushed snare and the tenor horn because he learned it while it was being forged--wrought in the Village sweatkilns. He speaks from the source. Rob Dalton, President jie23.com Seattle, WA |
Writing
about music has been a lifelong passion
since the 1960s when I wrote a column for a national magazine through the ’80s when I reviewed
rock and classical for
Playboy and others. More recently I’ve written pieces on Miles
Davis and Charles Mingus for 
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Reckoning
with Miles Davis The DJs and some of his fans used to call him "The Prince of Darkness," and I think he cultivated this moniker. Miles was a man obsessed with the racial divide all his life. He hated the Uncle Tom Negroes of the 1930s and '40s, even put photos of them—including Louis Armstrong, who was no Uncle Tom—into his autobiography, Miles. And yet his music and manner brought him extravagant fame and probably more money than any jazzman ever made. Imagine: After Bitches' Brew (1969) and for the remainder of his life, the rock-and-fusion Miles consciously created a pop music and willingly promoted it through the white musical establishment which he abominated. Learn in the later pages of Miles how miserable a human being this made him and how miserable he made others. But remembering Beethoven, who was certainly no charmer, we conclude that it finally doesn’t matter. If he believed in and defended his fusion music, much of which was and still is unlistenable, so what? While he explored black crossover with Jimi Hendrix, Prince and Sly Stone, his undeniable legacy is in the magnificent jazz recordings he left . . . music for the rest of us. |