CHARLES MINGUS DOESN'T LIKE IT WHEN YOU JIBBER JABBER IN THE VENUE
“You, my audience, are all a bunch of poppaloppers. A bunch of tumbling weeds, tumbling ’round, running from your subconscious unconscious minds…. Minds? Minds that won’t let you stop to listen to a word of artistic meaningful truth…. So you come to me, you sit in the front row, as noisy as can be. I listen to your millions of conversations, sometimes pulling them all up together and writing a symphony. But you never hear that symphony… You haven’t been told before that you’re phonies. You’re here because jazz is popular, jazz has publicity and you like to associate yourself with this sort of thing. But it doesn’t make you a connoisseur of the art because you follow it around. You’re dilettantes of style. A blind man can go to an exhibition of Picasso and Kline and not even see what works. And comment behind dark glasses. Wow! They’re the swingingest painters ever, crazy! Well, so can you. You’ve got your dark glasses and clogged-up ears…. You become the object you came to see, and you think you’re important and digging jazz when all the time all you’re doing is digging a blind, deaf scene that has nothing to do with any kind of music at all.”
Charles Mingus addressing the audience at the Five Spot in NYC.
Wednesday, July 15, 2015
SHUT UP AND LISTEN!
CHARLES MINGUS DOESN'T LIKE IT WHEN YOU JIBBER JABBER IN THE VENUE
“You, my audience, are all a bunch of poppaloppers. A bunch of tumbling weeds, tumbling ’round, running from your subconscious unconscious minds…. Minds? Minds that won’t let you stop to listen to a word of artistic meaningful truth…. So you come to me, you sit in the front row, as noisy as can be. I listen to your millions of conversations, sometimes pulling them all up together and writing a symphony. But you never hear that symphony… You haven’t been told before that you’re phonies. You’re here because jazz is popular, jazz has publicity and you like to associate yourself with this sort of thing. But it doesn’t make you a connoisseur of the art because you follow it around. You’re dilettantes of style. A blind man can go to an exhibition of Picasso and Kline and not even see what works. And comment behind dark glasses. Wow! They’re the swingingest painters ever, crazy! Well, so can you. You’ve got your dark glasses and clogged-up ears…. You become the object you came to see, and you think you’re important and digging jazz when all the time all you’re doing is digging a blind, deaf scene that has nothing to do with any kind of music at all.”
Charles Mingus addressing the audience at the Five Spot in NYC.
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2 comments:
After having read Mingus' BENEATH THE UNDERDOG, I am now finishing MYSELF WHEN I AM REAL by Gene Santoro. Renewing my love of Mingus: “Most people,” Charles continued, “are forced to do things they don’t want to for most of the time, and so they get to the point where they feel they no longer have any choices about anything important, including who they are. We create our own slavery. But I’m going to keep on getting through, and finding out the kind of man I am, through my music. That’s the one place I can be free.”
"Like I do with almost everything else, I blame the internet. People just sit on the computer and their phones all day, having isolated entertainment, and they've totally lost social skills from it. They don't know how to act in a crowd anymore. They don't know what live music is for, other than bein' somethin' cool to film with your phone and post on their Facebook pages. They're so proud of themselves for getting out of the house, and supporting live music, like all the memes on Facebook tell 'em they should, they gotta blab to each other how great it is. Soon as the show's over, they go home, and silently watch what they filmed earlier, and didn't really pay attention to, 'cause they were too busy talking. On their wild night out of exotic human interaction...", Brian Henneman...lead singer, BOTTLE ROCKETS
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