Loosely connected to the topic, here's a little guessing game for everybody: Who said this? (Hint: The connection is in the bass player. But no, it wasn't him.)
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"I'm not quite sure what the relevance of this quote to the topic is (but I can guess), but I would agree with Greg.
It's rather stupid and offensive.
It's hard to believe that any of of the artists named in the original post would say it. Since Tony Scott was a clarinet player, maybe him, but it seems out of character with what I've read about him.
DG, I honestly apologize for hi-jacking your thread just for the sake of making a point. It was your mention of Bill Evans, Teddy Kotick, and Jimmy Knepper that made me return to “A Swinging Introduction to Jimmy Knepper“ and, inevitably, to that Down Beat interview which at the time even made me wonder about the "importance" of jazz.
In fact, I am not trying to make any point at all, other than “A grain of truth is nothing more than, and will always remain, just a grain of truth“.
Jimmy Knepper interview (Down Beat, August 1981)
Jimmy Knepper
A Rare BirdBy Lee Jeske
"Some people might think jazz is a high art form and worthy of the utmost consideration, but, in my years, very little of it is. And it shouldn't be taken very seriously. Some people get very deep about jazz. It has the possibilities, but it's a cyclical music and, in a lot of ways, it's just shallow, superficial and pyrotechnical - crowd-pleasing - and the musicians aren't really aces. Even the ones who are considered aces aren't. 'Cause a lot of players I see, I think: 'He's just got a sloppy technique, he plays out of tune, he's got a bad sound.
I don't have the respect - people say, 'Oh, this is our American art form' - and all that shit, or 'Oh, the kids can play just as good as the symphony guys or the serious musicians.' I don't know more than one or two that could actually work up a clarinet concerto - or any serious piece - and play it without making a mistake.
You can understand why the serious musicians don't think much of jazz. Oh, they listen to it and they like it and they enjoy it and all that, but they don't take it very seriously, because most of the time it's not very serious music."
Dem's fighting words.
But Jimmy Knepper is a rare bird: a Musician, with a capital M. He is self-critical to an absurd degree; one can reel off a list of renowned trombonists all day before getting a flicker of some respect to flash behind his inch-thick eyeglasses, and he would sooner spend a spare hour in his bedroom practicing horn exercises than do almost anything.
Jimmy Knepper's career has been a most peculiar one. Perhaps his greatest work was done with another perfectionist: Charles Mingus. Knepper's role on some of the seminal Mingus Sessions - *Tijuana Moods*, *Mingus Ah Um*, *The Clown* - led to the praise-stingy Mingus calling him "probably the greatest trombone player who ever lived." Yet Mingus is also known to have committed his share of violence to Knepper's scrawny frame: punching him in the stomach onstage at the Village Vanguard and smacking a tooth out of his head in Mingus' apartment.
Knepper has a cynical, wry attitude toward the world, and as he talks about Mingus, he scratches his scraggly beard and looks into space. "Everybody thinks Mingus was a genius. I don't. A lot of his stuff is music by accident, almost. He had a kind of genius for taking snatches of this and snatches of that and gluing them, forcing them together somehow and making it come off. He never wrote anything, anyway. He'd sing it to us. He'd play it over and over again, and I'd just sketch it down. Nothing about accuracy or notation or anything.
"One particular day I happened to have two record dates, or something like that, the only thing I'd done for six months. And I came in for the job that night, at the Vanguard, kind of tired. I said, 'Mingus, can you take it easy on me tonight, I'm not very strong.' And he got a little mad and wanted me to cut out the solos. The solos were the easy thing, you could play whatever you could play on those, but it was hard playing somnething that was hot and heavy in the 'head'. And after the night was over he came up and hit me. He didn't hit me hard, he just hit me in the stomach. It didn't hurt or anything, and he just said goodnight and walked out. It was the end of the night.
"Right after that, he fired the whole band - me, Dannie Richmond, John Handy. I've still got the letter at home, a typewritten thing which gives his reasons for firing all of us. The real reason he fired us was he wanted a younger band, because he thought we were too old. And he was worried Mingus' popularity was nil. Ornette Coleman had just come out and was at the Five Spot. So Mingus got Eric Dolphy and Ted Curson, because he wanted them to play like Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry. Of course they said OK and just played themselves. That was a remarkable band he had. I didn't work with him for quite a while after that. Then he got his concert at Town Hall, and there was about a month or two notice, so he started writing.
"The Town Hall date was Mingus' first big concert in a place like that, and he just wasn't prepared for it. He came out with a great big band, and he didn't have any music for it. I'm a copyist, too, and Mingus knew that, so I'd go up to his place on 130th Street and copy a few bars, what he'd have scored. And I'd say, 'Mingus, this is too low a note for the tenor saxophone.' He'd say, 'Put it up higher.'
So, I'd go there night after night, and he'd only have a few bars done, which, for a copyist, is a drag, 'cause you want to work and work fast - otherwise, you're just spending time at it. Finally, days were rolling around. Two days later there was the only rehearsal, at midnight, and then the next night was the concert. So, he had his cousin, Fess Something-or-other who had a band in the '20s, give him an arrangement - and he said, 'Who can I get to arrange?' So I mentioned all the arrangers in town, and he called them up and the only one who showed was Gene Roland. And Mingus give him some score paper with a few notes here and a few notes there and he said, 'Expand this into a piece.' Well, it was straight composition. Then he pulled out a few old scores fromhis Lionel Hampton days and managed to get enough music so they could have a concert.
"By this time, I copied what I could, and at the very last day all these scores came in, and I couldn't do it. That afternoon, Mingus calls up and says, 'Jim, Jim, come here, you've got to help me.' So I go up to his apartment. He says, 'I want you to write some backgrounds for the solos.' And I said, 'No, Mingus, this is your music, you should write the thing.' And he blew up at that. He said, 'You're not going to help me, you white motherf*c#er.' And he just kind of slapped me in the mouth. And it just happened to break off my incisor - which was capped at the time - it kind of broke off the enamel and the stub itself. And i felt all this gravel in my mouth and all this blood. Then I breathed in and felt the air, 'OOOOH'. I just walked out of his apartment, went back to the copying service, kept my mouth shut the rest of the day to keep the air from it, got the work done, brought a pile of music over to rehearsal and dumped it on the floor.
"The next day I went to the dentist and the dentist said, 'Your nerve is exposed, the thing has been broken off.' Then he had to make what they call an apparatus. I asked people, 'What'll I do?' The musicians all said, 'Kill him.' A few of them said, 'It costs a hundred dollars and you can get him killed.' And I said, 'What?!?' Another guy said, 'You want a piece, here's an address in New Jersey, you can get a gun and do it yourself.'
"A few other people said to sue him. So I got a lawyer who said, 'Well, we'll file a criminal action against him.' So we did, and made about five appearances up at the court in his neighborhood. And Mingus told a different story every time - he perjured himself. He said to this black judge, 'He called me a nigger.' He was trying to get sympathy. And the judge said, 'That has nothing to do with it.' Anyway, he convicted himself and was found guilty and given probation or something like that. And then the lawyer says, 'Now we file a civil suit.'
"So we got the papers. I served the papers on Mingus myself, with a policeman. The policeman said, 'Don't go in, just hand it to him.' So I did, and all that. I was working then with Peggy Lee at Basin Street and there was some party or something so I got home about six in the morning. At eight o'clock my wife says, 'There's a mailman here and he's got a registered letter for you.' I said, 'Well, sign for it.' 'He wants you to sign for it.' So I staggered downstairs and I signed and these two guys appear out of the bushes and, flashing badges, say, 'Treasury Department.' And I thought, 'Oh Christ, Mingus is bringing some sort of action against me.' So I said, 'C'mon in.'
"They came in and said, 'Well, aren't you going to open the letter?' And I said, 'Oh, yeah' and opened it and first thing that falls out is a glassine envelope of horse. And there was some dumb note saying, 'I'll meet you at the same place,' or something like that. And I said, 'Well, you know what this is about, don't you?' And they said, 'No, we don't, we got an anonymous phone call.' 'Well this guy I'm filing a suit against is trying to set me up.'
"They took me down to the station, photographed me, and then turned me loose. While this suit was going on, I used to get phone calls from Mingus threatening my life, my wife's life, my children's lives. I answered one time and there was a recorded message from Dial-A-Prayer. Man, he was a dirty guy."
This, needless to say, ended the relationship between Mingus and Knepper for quite a while. Yet, remarkably, when Charles called Jimmy in the mid-70s to perform on a concert at Carnegie Hall which woulkd include the pieces from *Tijuana Moods*, Knepper accepted. He was also to play on Mingus' two final record dates before his death. They never discussed the incident of the tooth and the heroin, and Mingus had only the highest praise for Jimmy Knepper in the years before he died.
"When I was with Mingus, I'd get very depressed and say, 'Jesus, I'm stuck with this guy. I want to play jazz and I'm stuck with him the rest of my life.' Then I escaped and started working with Tony Scott, and I'd come back to Mingus. And I wasn't a big name anything, even now, it was very depressing to think that I'm linked with this guy for the rest of my life. And now I feel the same way. When they have 'I Remember Mingus' retrospectives in 1999, I'll be there as the last surviving member."