Sue Mingus Interview

[jazzbo]

There's an All About Jazz interview piece with Sue Mingus that is quite interesting:

http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/review_print.php?id=27120

I found this passage revealing, hadn't realized she'd changed her mind so completely:

She has also changed her opinion on the bootlegging of music. For years, Sue Mingus was known for her stance against pirating music, adamant that musicians need to get their royalties. She was known to go into record stores in the city and grab Mingus albums she knew were unauthorized and walk out. But she’s done a 180-degree turn. The reason: technological advances that make it impossible to monitor.

“You can’t fight Sidney Hall, as Charles used to say,” says Mingus. “You can’t fight something that’s a fact of life. Everybody can copy. There are musicians who’ve told me they haven’t bought a CD in eight years. Everybody burns copies for one another. If that possibility is there, you have to embrace it. The government is going to have to find a way to subsidize artists. Artists have to have some way of making money. If they’re not going to be able to make money selling their music when everybody can copy it, I don’t know. You have to have rewards for creativity. If the minute you create something it’s absorbed by everyone else and it no longer is yours and you can’t make money off it and pay the rent, then what’s going to happen to out creative imaginations? Who knows? I’m sure we’ll work our way through, but I have no idea how we’re going to do that.”

“If you’re able to copy everything, you won’t go back. So the first question is: What kind of copyright protection can anybody have when everything belongs to everybody? There’s another wonderful (DVD) compilation that Jazz Icons is releasing which includes some Mingus concerts--one in a television studio in Belgium and two live concerts, one in Sweden and one in Oslo. A lot of this material has already appeared on YouTube. My attorney called me up and said--as did Jazz Icons--did they want me to force them to take it off. I said absolutely not. It’s wonderful publicity. It’s reaching people who otherwise wouldn’t hear Mingus music, probably. I don’t see it at all as competitive to their release. Their release is not muddy and unclear. These [on YouTube] aren’t great renditions of the music, nor are they visual masterpieces. But it’s information. I think it’s wonderful.

“I’ve come full circle. I had a record company called Revenge Records and I went after pirates. I used to walk into music stores and just take all the pirated material that I saw of Mingus. People come to the club. We used to ask them not to film, not to take photographs. But now I say: be my guest. Everybody on the face of the earth can take pictures or record.”

[MartyJazz]

There's an All About Jazz interview piece with Sue Mingus that is quite interesting:

http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/review_print.php?id=27120

I found this passage revealing, hadn't realized she'd changed her mind so completely:

She has also changed her opinion on the bootlegging of music. For years, Sue Mingus was known for her stance against pirating music, adamant that musicians need to get their royalties. She was known to go into record stores in the city and grab Mingus albums she knew were unauthorized and walk out. But she’s done a 180-degree turn. The reason: technological advances that make it impossible to monitor.

“You can’t fight Sidney Hall, as Charles used to say,” says Mingus. “You can’t fight something that’s a fact of life. Everybody can copy. There are musicians who’ve told me they haven’t bought a CD in eight years. Everybody burns copies for one another. If that possibility is there, you have to embrace it. The government is going to have to find a way to subsidize artists. Artists have to have some way of making money. If they’re not going to be able to make money selling their music when everybody can copy it, I don’t know. You have to have rewards for creativity. If the minute you create something it’s absorbed by everyone else and it no longer is yours and you can’t make money off it and pay the rent, then what’s going to happen to out creative imaginations? Who knows? I’m sure we’ll work our way through, but I have no idea how we’re going to do that.”

“If you’re able to copy everything, you won’t go back. So the first question is: What kind of copyright protection can anybody have when everything belongs to everybody? There’s another wonderful (DVD) compilation that Jazz Icons is releasing which includes some Mingus concerts--one in a television studio in Belgium and two live concerts, one in Sweden and one in Oslo. A lot of this material has already appeared on YouTube. My attorney called me up and said--as did Jazz Icons--did they want me to force them to take it off. I said absolutely not. It’s wonderful publicity. It’s reaching people who otherwise wouldn’t hear Mingus music, probably. I don’t see it at all as competitive to their release. Their release is not muddy and unclear. These [on YouTube] aren’t great renditions of the music, nor are they visual masterpieces. But it’s information. I think it’s wonderful.

“I’ve come full circle. I had a record company called Revenge Records and I went after pirates. I used to walk into music stores and just take all the pirated material that I saw of Mingus. People come to the club. We used to ask them not to film, not to take photographs. But now I say: be my guest. Everybody on the face of the earth can take pictures or record.”

Back around 1990 or thereabouts, I had the good fortune to meet Sue Mingus at Fat Tuesday's where the Mingus Dynasty band was performing. To make a long story short, I had the temerity to reveal to her that I had collected various bootleg performances of Mingus on audio and video tape. She was very gracious about it and even invited me to her apartment one evening where I enjoyed a wonderful dinner with the musicologist Andrew Homzy also present. I gave her copies of material she was interested in and she in turn gave me an unopened Japanese videotape edition of the Mingus Orchestra performance of "Epitaph" as well as various Mingus memorabilia that I treasure. I tell you, it was quite a trip to step into that apartment and see Mingus's bass standing against the wall. So, she's always had a certain ambivalence about this subject, her ire mostly directed at those who would illegally profit, rather than simply collect as I do.

Edited February 16, 2008 by MartyJazz