Ich bring das mal hier und nicht im Piano-Thread… aus Ira Gitlers neuen Liner Notes für die RVG Remaster CD von Roy Haynes/Phineas Newborn/Paul Chambers – „We Three“ (Januar 2007):
In the original notes to Miles Davis Collectors‘ Items (Prestige LP 7044) – half the album was done in 1953 and the other half in ’56 (the year in which it was first released) – I cited pianist Tommy Flanagan, newly arrived from Detroit, as well as Ray Bryant, Barry Harris, and Mal Waldron as proof that „simplicity, taste and direct emotion are much preferred to filigrees, extraneous matter and the keyboard extravagances of technique displays. If the latter group of characteristics comes with the ‚two-handed‘ pianists then I’ll take the one-handed pianists and may Phineas Newborn take the hindermost.“
I think I meant „hindmost“ but, in any case, it prompted an angry phone call from Charlie Mingus. If he wasn’t yet universally recognizes as Charles Mingus, he was well-known for his temper and impulsive „Open Letters“ to Downbeat. At the time I was living with my parents and had just sat down to dinner when the phone in the foyer, next to the dining room, rang. When I answered, it was Mingus’s voice I heard. „Don’t write my name no more, baby,“ he rapid-fired, making the words one continuous, seamless sound. „Are you from the West Coast? No, you’re from the East Coast. I’m from the West Coast.“
None of this was designed to elicit an answer from me but to establish that he knew the music of Phineas Newborn (he had probably played with him when both were in California) a lot more intimately than I did and that I was off-base.
I didn’t enjoy my dinner that night but, eventually, in the course of writing notes to a Teddy Charles LP, I praised Mingus’s solo on „I Can’t Get Started.“ Soon after the album’s release, I walked into the Half Note were Mingus, playing on the elevated bandstand, pinned me and shouted down, „Love ya baby, now that you’re callin‘ my name.“
Natürlich fährt Gitler dann fort, wie er später seine Meinung zu Newborn geänder habe und es ihn 1958 gefreut habe, über das vorliegende Album positiv zu schreiben…
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"Don't play what the public want. You play what you want and let the public pick up on what you doin' -- even if it take them fifteen, twenty years." (Thelonious Monk) | Meine Sendungen auf Radio StoneFM: gypsy goes jazz, #151: Neuheiten aus dem Archiv – 09.04., 22:00 | Slow Drive to South Africa, #8: tba | No Problem Saloon, #30: tba