Gunther Schuller On Mingus and Ornette Coleman, Audio Interview With Me

(PLEASE go back to the post about Rollins and Jim Hall. I have added instructions about how you can hear those recordings in person at the New York Public Library in Manhattan.)

I’m posting this on November 22, 2025, the 100th anniversary of the birth of Gunther Schuller. He accomplished an amazing amount during his lifetime, and in a tremendous variety of musical areas—playing French horn in major orchestras and with Miles Davis, composing modern classical pieces, writing two long and essential jazz history books, transforming the New England Conservatory into the innovative conservatory that it is today, and so much more. I was such a fan that I collected all kinds of “Schulleriana” over the years, such as radio broadcasts of his new works. And it was my pleasure to interact with him in a number of professional situations, from the late 1970s onward. I’ll tell those stories at another time. I’ve also gotten to know his two sons, both excellent jazz players—bassist Ed Schuller and drummer George, who is also the family’s archivist.

For this interview, I spoke with Gunther by phone on November 21, 2008. That semester I was teaching a seminar whose first half was devoted to Charles Mingus and the second half to Ornette Coleman. Gunther knew both musicians personally so I asked him to talk about each one, Mingus first. The audio quality is pretty clear, but Gunther was on the speakerphone and he had some trouble hearing my questions. He starts by recalling that he saw Mingus with the Lionel Hampton band in 1947, when there was a second bassist (likely Joe Comfort). In the mid-1950s (at 2:00 in the interview) he and Mingus became friends, and they regularly got together for lunch with pianist-composer John Lewis. Gunther was at Mingus’s infamous Town Hall concert in 1962 (7:10 in the interview), and years later, that music became the basis of Mingus’s evening-length program, Epitaph. Jazz historian (and our subscriber) Andrew Homzy is the person who discovered this music, and it was not exactly as Gunther was told: It was actually in a trunk, on top of which Mingus’s widow Sue had placed her birdcage, with her two doves inside. And it was not in one pile, but scattered throughout other manuscripts in the trunk. Andrew edited quite a bit of the music, and he recommended bringing in Gunther, who talks here at length about how he edited and completed the piece. He also conducted the world premiere at Alice Tully Hall in Lincoln Center in 1989—which, by the way, I attended.

At 17:50, I ask Gunther to talk about Coleman. Gunther met him in N.Y.C. through John Lewis. He recalls how much Ornette enjoyed Gunther’s jazz history classes at the Lenox School of Jazz in 1959. Back in N.Y.C., Gunther talks at length (starting at 22:00) about giving Ornette private lessons in music theory, but finding that he had a kind of mental block. (The odd sound at 25:47 is on the original recording.) Finally, Ornette became visibly upset and he ended the lessons. Gunther tells a similar version of this story in John Litweiler’s book about Coleman. He mentions that bassist Eugene Wright studied with him, that Eric Dolphy showed him his classical pieces, and that Charlie Parker had inquired about studying with him, but never did. He closes by saying that Ornette never did work with him on composition, only on music notation and theory.

There is so much more to say about Gunther Schuller. Please consider this a beginning.

All the best,

Lewis