Charles Mingus is among jazz’s greatest composers and perhaps its most talented bass player. He was blunt and outspoken about the place of jazz in music history and American culture, about which performers were the real thing (or not), and much more. These in-depth interviews, conducted several years before Mingus died, capture the composer’s spirit and voice, revealing how he saw himself as composer and performer, how he viewed his peers and predecessors, how he created his extraordinary music, and how he looked at race. Augmented with interviews and commentary by ten close associates—including Mingus’s wife Sue, Teo Macero, George Wein, and Sy Johnson—Mingus Speaks provides a wealth of new perspectives on the musician’s life and career.
As a writer for Playboy, John F. Goodman reviewed Mingus’s comeback concert in 1972 and went on to achieve an intimacy with the composer that brings a relaxed and candid tone to the ensuing interviews. Much of what Mingus shares shows him in a new light: his personality, his passions and sense of humor, and his thoughts on music. The conversations are wide-ranging, shedding fresh light on important milestones in Mingus’s life such as the publication of his memoir, Beneath the Underdog, the famous Tijuana episodes, his relationships, and the jazz business.
John F. Goodman is a writer, former music critic, professor, and media consultant based in Oaxaca, Mexico
Sy Johnson is a jazz photographer, writer, pianist, singer, educator, and former Mingus arranger
"I was privileged to be a close friend of the magnetically original composer, bassist, and leader CharlesMingus, whose deeply energizing music has never left me and many, many others around the world. Mingus was singularly absorbing off the stand and now in this historic book Mingus Speaks, primarily a series of interviews by John Goodman, who as we see is a listener to the music burning to be a soul mate of Charles Mingus as this book proceeds.
The multidimensional inner Mingus who created what he called, not jazz—jazz he said to me once was too limited a description—he created what he called ‘Mingus music.’ And much of the material here, in the book, has never been available before. For it so reveals and multi-dimensionally explains much of the music, and as long as there is jazz, Mingus speaks for the enthralling listeners around the world and—and I mean this—as they become his music. A book unlike any I’ve seen on the history of jazz.” —Nat Hentoff, author of At the Jazz Band Ball: Sixty Years on the Jazz Scene
“In words as in music, Mingus could erupt like a geyser speaking in tongues. These interviews let you experience his volatile, high-pressure flow of acute insights and outrageous conjectures.” —Gene Santoro, author of Myself When I Am Real: The Life and Music of Charles Mingus
"There are many Mingus voices in these interviews: poet, prophet, prolix raconteur, anguished, sometimes angry artist. The early '70s was a dark period in Charles' life and career, a time when he had stopped composing and was trying to find his way—here through the torrents and thickets of language." —Sue Mingus
350 pp.6 x 9Illus: 10 b/w photographs
9780520275232$29.95|£25.00Hardcover
May 2013