Part 1 - The Return of Red Mitchell - Gene Lees

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“My father who was at Stevens, a tough engineering school in Hoboken, NJ,  was able to explain to me that Mother Nature never promised us a rose garden, that the scale, as we call it, is a matter of wishful hearing. It

doesn't exist anywhere except within the human race. It doesn't happen anywhere else in nature. It's an acceptance of a series of compromises between the scale you would get if you tuned an instrument in fourths and the scale you would get if you tuned it in fifths. If you tune an instrument in fourths, you get a scale that is shorter physically. The top notes arc lower, the bottom notes are higher in pitch. If you tune an instrument in fifths, you get a bigger scale. The top notes are higher, the low notes are lower.

"One day I'm going to write a book about this.”

- Red Mitchell

The following essay by Gene Lees was published in the August and September 1992 editions of his Jazzletter as The Fire This Time: The Return of Red Mitchell Parts 1 & 2 and they were collected and included in his anthology Cats of Any Color Jazz, Black and White [1995].

Of the latter, the New York Times wrote: “Vividly rendered interviews and vignettes illustrating that jazz in practice has long been plagued by the very racism some people think it could (and should) obliterate.”

Not surprisingly, racism in Jazz is a common theme in all ten of the essays in Gene’s Cats of Any Color Jazz, Black and White and the subject usually occupies the beginning portion of each before moving on to more specific aspects of the particular artist’s place in Jazz and his or her approach to the music. 

Fast forward thirty years from the early 1990s when these ten interviews occurred to the current state of affairs in the United States in 2022 and sadly, racism continues to be a topic of virulent discussion with heightened emphasis on the pros and cons of social justice, racial diversity and inclusion.

As previously noted, the second part of Gene’s piece on Red will focus more specifically on the musical aspects of Mitchell’s career in Jazz.

“In January, 1954, Red Mitchell was on tour in Sweden with, among other performers, Billie Holiday. 

‘We were all very impressed with the honesty and fairness in Sweden,‘ he said. ‘I to this day wish that Billie had thought to move over there. I think she would have lived a lot longer. As Ben Webster did, as Dexter Gordon did, as a lot of American expatriates did. Dexter moved to Copenhagen. Ben moved first to Amsterdam, and then Copenhagen. 

‘‘We were being driven around Stockholm the first day in a stretch limo. Billie thought they were just showing us the nicer parts of town. She said, ‘Take us to the slums, I want to see the slums.’ Somebody said, ‘There are no slums.’ And she said, ‘What?’  

‘And somebody else said, ‘There’s no Beverly Hills, either.’ ‘

And then I reacted to that. I said, ‘No slums, no Beverly Hills? Is this just Stockholm you’re talking about?’ 

‘They said, ‘No, it’s like that all around Sweden, every city.’ 

‘I thought, ‘Jesus! Dis mus’ be de place.’ 

And eventually Red did what Holiday did not: he moved there. One of the greatest bassists in jazz became part of that colony of jazz expatriates living and working in Scandinavia, a group that included Edmund Thigpen, Ernie Wilkins, Kenny Drew, the late Sahib Shihab, and the late -Thad Jones. 

Now, after 24 years there, Red Mitchell and his fourth wife, Diane, have returned to America, taking residence in what is rapidly becoming a new colony of semi-exiles, the Pacific Northwest, jazz musicians living in the states of Oregon and Washington, among them Red Kelly, Bud Shank, Leroy Vinnegar, and Dave Frishberg. Red Mitchell lives now in Salem, Oregon, Frishberg in Portland. ‘Dave says,‘ Red remarked, ‘that it reminds him of San Francisco in the ’50s. And Leroy loves it.‘ 

Back in the 1950s, two names loomed very large on the bass: Ray Brown and Red Mitchell, idols of other bass players. Mitchell has to be accounted one of the most influential jazz bassists, in a line with Walter Page, Jimmy Blanton, and Charles Mingus, if only because one of his protegees, Scott LaFaro, influenced just about every younger bass player since his death at 24 -- ironically, almost the same age Blanton died. But more bassists have obvious audible debts to LaFaro than to Mitchell, who remains, as Mingus did, a phenomenon of one. 

No one sounds like Mingus. No one sounds like Red Mitchell. What makes his playing so really odd is that he approaches the instrument as if it were a saxophone, extracting from it melismatic vocal effects, glissandi that bespeak enormous strength in the left hand. At times he will play bottom notes on the first and third beats of the bar and then strum the rest of the chord on two and four on the top three strings, using the backs of his fingers a little like one of the techniques used in flamenco guitar. He has a huge sound, producingtones that last forever. He does things on the instrument that no one else does, and possibly no one else can do. 

He has long been looked on as something of a curiosity because he tunes his bass in fifths, not the conventional fourths. One of the things one would not figure out for oneself is that the tuning could actually affect the sound of his instrument by altering the nature of its resonance. 

‘With his scientific mind,‘ Roger Kellaway said recently, ‘that tuning would make perfect sense.‘ I did not at first understand what Roger meant. Kellaway played bass professionally before he played piano. Red played piano before he took up the bass. (Another formidable musician who plays both bass and piano -- and several other instruments as well -- is Don Thompson.) 

Kellaway and Mitchell have lately been doing a great deal of duo work, in Scandinavia, New York City, and, most recently, San Francisco, where they recorded an album for the Concord label’s distinguished Maybeck Hall series. Prior to that, they played two evenings at the Jazz Bakery, the excellent recital series that singer Ruth Price has developed in Los Angeles. I drove into town to hear them, and listened to two sets in a state of mind that can only be described as awe. It was some of the most brilliant jazz I have ever heard, a wildly imaginative dialogue between two master musicians at the peak of their inventive powers.

Keith Moore Mitchell was born September 20, 1927, in New York City and raised in New Jersey. He worked with Jackie Paris and Mundell Lowe in 1948. He played both piano and bass with Chubby Jackson’s big band in 1949, bass with Charlie Ventura, toured and recorded with Woody Herman from 1949 to January of 1951, worked with the Red Norvo trio from 1952 to 1954, recorded with Billie Holiday and Jimmy Raney, and then went with the Gerry Mulligan quartet. He played with Hampton Hawes from 1955 through 1957, then had his own quartet. He played with Ornette Coleman in 1959. For a number of years he was principal bassist in the studio orchestra at MGM, and was, along with drummer Frank Capp, a member of the Andre Previn trio. 

Red and I have been friends by mail and telephone for years, yet we had never met. He is a bearded, red-haired man of mixed Scottish and Irish background who, he says, has always had an affinity for Scandinavia, perhaps because of some dim and distant ethnic memory: the Vikings circumnavigated Europe, leaving a blond strain behind them in Italy, Sicily, and Ireland. They founded Dublin. I walked up to him as he was setting up before the performance, introduced myself, and drifted into conversation as if we had grown up together. I asked about his brother, Gordon, long known to jazz fans as Whitey Mitchell, himself a fine bassist. But such was Red’s luster in the profession that Whitey hardly ever got a review that didn’t mention that he was Red’s brother.

Whitey, or Gordon, Mitchell, was and is an extremely funny man. He had a card printed that read:

Whitey Mitchell bassist 

Yes, I'm Red Mitchell’s brother. 

No, I haven’t seen him lately. 

Some years ago I ran into him and said, ‘Have you still got that card?‘ ‘No,‘ he said, ‘I’ve got a new one.‘ And he handed it to me. It read: 

Whitey Mitchell bassist 

Formerly Red Mitchell’s brother. 

I effectively destroyed Whitey’s career as a bassist.‘ It happened this way. Once while I was editor of Down Beat, I ran into him in New York. Whitey had worked with Gene Krupa, Gene Quill, Herbie Mann, and in Oscar Pettiford’s big band. Like many jazz musicians, he occasionally worked for Lester Lanin. The music was ghastly but the money was good. He told me some hilarious stories about his experiences with that band. I suggested that he write an article about it. I said I’d print it. He did, and I printed it in 1961 under the title My First 50 Years with Society Bands. Lenny Bruce read it and wrote Whitey a fan letter. Whitey was so astounded and thrilled by the letter (which to this day he has in a frame on a wall) that he became a comedy writer, enormously successful in Hollywood, and a movie producer. 

‘Whenever he gives a seminar for young writers,‘ Red told me, ‘he tells that story and gives you eternal thanks for starting his career.‘ I told Red a story 

I did not print. In those days it would not have been possible. Gary Cooper’s wife hired Lester Lanin for her husband’s birthday party. Lanin brought a few key men to California with him, among them Whitey Mitchell. A contractor put the rest of the band together, no doubt some of those people of the caliber of Mel Lewis and Bud Shank, probably in blue jeans and bright shirts and loafers without socks, and of course the first thing they tried to do was make some of those cornball charts swing. After the rehearsal, Lanin’s road manager found the maestro lying on his back on the bed in his hotel room, hands folded on his chest, mumbling and muttering incoherently. Thinking Lanin was having a fit, the manager said, ‘Lester, Lester, what’s the matter?‘ 

‘I’m praying,‘ Lanin said, ‘to almighty God to save me from these sons of bitches!‘ 

The expression he used was harsher than that, but even now I would be reluctant to print it. 

When I’d finished telling the story, Red laughed, and said, ‘Do you know how my brother finally left Lester Lanin? Lanin said to him, ‘Do you know what the trouble with you is? You’re not playing in the middle of the beat.’ And Gordon said, ‘Do you know what the trouble with you is? You’re full of shit.’ 

And that ended the relationship.‘ Gordon, formerly Red Mitchell’s brother and formerly Whitey Mitchell, took to his typewriter and has never looked back. After the gig with Roger at the Jazz Bakery, Red and his wife spent two days with him, then got into the car and drove up to Ojai and spent two more days here, during which time his marathon eloquence kept me enthralled.

‘I was told,‘ I said, ‘that you left the United States after the Sharon Tate murders.‘ I remembered the period vividly. I was visiting Los Angeles from New York, and everyone in the showbusiness world was frightened, afraid that the murders had been committed by somebody on the inside. Steve McQueen had taken to carrying a gun. The mood in Los Angeles was eerie. 

‘It wasn’t just the Sharon Tate murders,‘ Red said. ‘My second wife and I were living in a neighborhood where the Manson Family was working. I think they robbed our garage. They killed an older couple, the Biancas, right across Los Feliz from where we lived. It was just part of the overall violence that was going on. 

‘It was really the institutionalization of the violence and racism, from the White House down to the subway, that bothered me. I had about six good reasons. About six things happened to me all within a short time. One was the breakup of my second marriage. One of them was the decision not to any longer participate in what I considered to be this vicious cycle, in which the real violence on the street, the violence perpetrated by the government in Viet Nam, and all of it, was being reflected in the media. And we were playing this violent music for shoot-’em-ups. Some of us were saying, Oh we’re just reflecting reality as it is, all artists have to do that, and others were saying we’re contributing to it. 

‘The truth is, it’s a two-way street. It reflects and it causes. And it resonates. That’s when it really hurts, when it gets into a - resonant circuit -- when the capacitance is right and the induction is right for a particular frequency, and it builds up to a peak.‘ 'Ah. Here was the first hint of the scientific thinking Roger Kellaway had mentioned. 

‘And I just did not want to be a part of that cycle any more,‘ Red said. ‘I had given up on democracy in the United States of America. I had reached the point where I didn’t think democracy would ever work here -- I didn’t think it had ever seriously been tried. It’s a republic, after all.‘ 

I said, ‘Ed Thigpen was here for a couple of days recently. He quoted you as saying you didn’t think the American public was qualified to vote.‘

 ‘Yeah,’ Red said, ‘I said that. I say the same thing that the white racists say in South Africa about the black majority, that they’re not qualified to vote. I think they’re wrong; I think I’m right.

‘I don’t know about now. We just came back. We’ll see. But when something happens like the moving of the venue of the Rodney King case to Simi Valley?‘ Red, having lived in Los Angeles, is well aware of the character of the Simi Valley. It's a redneck city, and it is also the bedroom community where several thousand Los Angeles cops, present and retired, live, influence the community, and vote. To those of us who live in the orbit of Los Angeles, the change of venue itself, before the trial ever occurred, was shocking. To begin with, did anyone seriously suggest that we in Ventura County didn’t see that videotape of the beating, when we get all the L.A. TV stations and read the Los Angeles newspapers? The population of Ventura County is only 2 percent black, well below the national average and still further below Los Angeles. There were no blacks on the jury, and only one Hispanic. Two of the jurors, both women, were from Ojai, and one of them is a member of the National Rifle Association. I was completely unsurprised by the verdict. 

‘And when you see on television,‘ Red said, ‘that it was Rodney King who was actually on trial, and those people were not his peers, I start to lose faith again. I start to think, ‘Well, wait a minute! Even if the government prosecuted all four of these cops on civil rights violations, took it all the way, appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, I’m afraid the Supreme Court might hand down the same decision." 

"Sure," I agreed. ‘You have an extremely reactionary Reagan-Bush Supreme Court. The minorities could always resort to the appeal to the Supreme Court and they no longer can, because it is a racist Supreme Court, even with a black man on it.‘ 

Red said, ‘I was going to say, especially with Uncle Thomas sitting there. 

“There was another reason I left. I was terrorized by the police, living in Los Angeles. You didn’t have to be black to be literally terrorized by the cops in Los Angeles. I was stopped and harassed four times for no reason. 

‘There were other reasons for moving to Stockholm. I noticed the quality of the jazz players in Sweden immediately. Later on I found it isn’t only the jazz players, it’s the opera singers, and the choirs, and the symphony orchestras too. The musical standards there are extremely high. As phenomenal as their tennis standards.‘ 

‘And also visual design,‘ I said. ‘Why is this?‘ 

‘I have no idea. I have really tried to figure that out for 24 years now. And I have no idea.‘ 

‘Equality of opportunity won’t do it?‘ 

‘I don’t think that’s enough. ‘ 

‘You have obviously retained your respect for the country.‘ 

‘Oh yes! And I must say, the last few weeks before we left, they showed a lot of respect for me and us. The last week we were there, we were doing a recording at the radio, and we got interrupted just before we were to go into a real heavy blues, somebody called out from the booth and said, ‘Hey, Red, there’s a phone call for you.’ I said, ‘We’re just ready for the take!’ We’d just drawn in our breath. They said, ‘No, it’s important, you better take it now.’ So I went into the booth, and it was the secretary of the minister of culture saying that the government had voted me a Royal Medal. Illis quorum in the eighth degree. I said, ‘What is that?’ I still don’t know. I still don’t know how and when it’s gonna be presented. Usually the king presents it. I found out I was the first jazz musician to get it. What it means roughly translated is, for one who has earned it. 

‘And then a few days later, a classical composer, Jan Carlstedt, called me and he said he was nominating me for honorary membership in the Royal Swedish Academy of Music. I said, more or less, ‘What’s that?’ He said, ‘It’s an old society, and we’re voting in May. And you shouldn’t be disappointed if you’re not voted in on your first nomination. Beethoven wasn’t voted in till his third nomination.’ I said, ‘Thank you.’ ‘I still love the country, and I think they love me there. The last couple of months -- I don’t know whether it had to do with the announcement that I was leaving -- we broke attendance records everywhere we went, with all kinds of different groups. The last month was the busiest I’d ever had in Sweden. Among other things, Joe Pass and I did a live album as a duo in the main jazz club in Stockholm. In September, we opened a new really first-class jazz club in Copenhagen, called Copenhagen Jazz House, in English. 

‘We had family reasons for coming back, too. My main reasons is that we both sensed -- and I checked it out with some of my more successful colleagues, like Clark Terry and Dizzy -- that there’s an increased interest in the music, and love for it, here in this country, and that’s gone up from whatever it was in percentage. In 1968 it had to be point zero something, and it’s gone up to even three, four, five percent of the population that hears and loves jau. That’s plenty! Out of 250 million people? ‘And, finally, I had begun to see racism in Sweden too. The very thing they deplore about America -- that Gunnar Myrdal condescension toward our society -- was turning up there. They have a word in Swedish for the darker peoples from the Mediterranean. It means ‘black heads.’ They’re having problems with‘ minorities all over Europe, and I don’t think they should point the finger at us the way some of them do.‘ 

Red and his wife said they had attended a seminar by the black American writer Toni Morrison at the American Center in Stockholm. 

Red said, ‘Someone at this meeting asked her if, being a black woman in America, she really felt American, and she said, ‘Never more than right now." I said, ‘Benny Golson told me recently that in Italy, an Italian journalist asked him, ‘How come you have a white bassist?’ And his answer was, ``This interview is terminated."

‘That’s lovely,‘ Red said. ‘I may have to use that one day.‘ 

‘I am perpetually astonished by European condescension toward us,‘ I said. ‘Their assumption they know us because they’ve been to the movies.‘ Diane, Red’s very attractive wife, who has a master’s equivalent in sociology, said, ‘I realized that within a year after I lived in Sweden. I was a real activist in the ’60s. I was upset over the Cambodian invasion especially. I worked 18-hour‘ days on committees and all that stuff. And then you get to Europe and you’re sitting there, and you’re being personally blamed for this Viet Nam war. I said, ‘Wait a minute, you’re just sitting here on you asses, I’ve been working my butt off, taking risks by running up and down the California campuses. I could have gotten picked up by the FBI or whatever. You sit here, self-righteously accusing me of being responsible in this war.’ And if you put the United States down, you win points, you win friends. And I got really tired of that. I must say, I very much love Sweden, their respect for education, for culture, and decency.‘ 

Red said, ‘I was prepared for that when I went over to Sweden, but I didn’t get draft number one.‘ 

‘You were putting the U.S. down,‘ Diane said. ‘More than I was, I think.‘ 

Red drew a thoughtful breath. ‘I wasn’t putting the whole country down. I certainly wasn’t putting my friends down.‘

 You were saying the American people aren’t qualified to vote,‘ Diane said. If you say that, they’ll love you over there.‘ 

‘I said that the majority of American people were not qualified to vote.‘ 

‘It isn’t as good an aphorism,‘ I said, laughing. ‘But certainly they’re less informed than peoples in other countries. First of all, theyve been taught such erroneous history. My baritone player friend Les Rout, who became a historian, put it simply. He said history was not taught in this country to acquaint people with reality, it was taught to instil patriotism.‘ 

‘That’s right,‘ Diane said. 

‘But that’s reasonably true of all countries,‘ I said. ‘The Russians are just beginning to learn the truth of some of their history, the Germans don’t want to know their recent history, and what is taught in Japan is false. But in few countries is this as obvious as in the United States. This country is the only country I know, except Japan, that is its own religion.‘ 

Red said, ‘I think the cause of all racism and all war is simply a misperception of what I call Instinct Number I —- the deepest seated instinct we have, survival of the species. Of course, survival of the individual is linked directly to that. But first things first. I think Instinct Number 1 is the survival of the species

‘And I think individuals will sacrifice themselves willingly if they really think they’re doing it for the survival of the species. Unfortunately, it’s very easy to misperceive who’s in the species and who’s not. For example, was Hitler in the species? Was Hitler a human being, or not? Was he outside the realm of humanity or not? You have to accept the fact that Hitler was a human being. 

‘Unfortunately, we all come from the same gene pool, Gene, sorry about that. 

‘I hope this doesn’t sound like an oversimplification. It is in fact simpler than any answer I’ve heard from anybody else, and I haven’t heard anybody shoot it down yet. If you want the bottom note, ask a bass player. I think the root cause of all racism and all wars is a misperception of Instinct Number 1. I accept the definition of instinct that I read in a book by a Swedish dog researcher. He said that instincts are a priority list reflexively built into a species with preservation of that species in the number one spot. I accept that. 

‘However, mother nature gave us this urge that the species should survive, but she never gave us the information about who’s in it, how big it is, who’s out of it. That’s a matter of our individual perceptions. And it’s very easy for us to perceive another group of people whose behavior is not within our ethical code as outside the species. Another species. To be killed at all costs. 

‘I don’t think America could have done what it did in VietNam if they hadn’t been capable of depersonalizing the VietNamese people and thinking of them as short tan members of another species.‘ 

‘Gooks, slopes,‘ I said. ‘And earlier there were krauts, nips, japs.‘ 

‘Don’t forget Commie. We have all those names. Lenny Bruce used to say, ‘Let’s get together, Jews, Catholics, Protew tants, black, white, everybody, let’s get together and beat up the Puerto Ricans.‘ 

‘And if the cops can call them niggers and Mandingos and gorillas in the mist, they can beat, choke, and kill them without a quiver of conscience.‘ 

‘I think it starts with the home,‘ Red said. ‘The neighbors aren’t bringing up the kids right. And it gets to the extreme example, was Hitler a member of the human race? And unfortunately he was. We have to take that into consideration. We all have those possibilities.‘ 

‘There was no racism in our house,‘ I said. ‘My father spoke fluent German, although he was English. We weren’t taught quote tolerance. It was just in the air. I was lucky.‘ 

‘I was lucky too,‘ Red said. ‘My father was one of the world’s leading opera nuts. He actually studied singing; he had a season ticket to the Met from 1921 to ’65 in the best seat in the house, right in the middle of the family circle. He learned some five or six languages in order to sing the roles right.‘“ 

To be continued.

This video is mislabeled Duff. It is the Mitchell original Jam for Your Bread featuring Red on bass with Conte Candoli, trumpet, Joe Maini, alto sax, Hampton Hawes, piano and Chuck Thompson on drums.