Pianist, composer, journalist, photographer, frequent arranger, orchestrator, and right-hand man to acclaimed bassist Charles Mingus, Cy Johnson died July 26 in Manhattan. he was 92 years old.
His wife, Lois Marvis, said the death at the hospital was caused by complications from Covid-19.
Jazz critic Gary Giddins called Mr. Johnson “one of the essentials you don’t hear very often.” He began playing piano in his late 1950s, first in Los Angeles and then in New York. He soon branched out into arranging, collaborating not only with Mingus but also with many other notable musicians, including saxophonist Lee Konitz and arranger and bandleader Quincy Jones.
In the 1970s, he gave an influential interview with Miles Davis and contributed record reviews to the short-lived quarterly Jazz Magazine. He worked on Broadway, composed his own musicals based on the works of J.R.R. I created a spontaneous, intimate portrait of the scene. Many of his photographs can be found in his 2014 bookJazz: personal encounters“
Still, Mr. Johnson remained just outside the spotlight and in a dark corner on stage.
Giddins said in an email, “The gifted Cy is very happy to serve as the invisible figure that makes so many great musicians sound better than they would have been without him.” It looked like it was,” he said.
Johnson and Mingus’ work covered the bassist’s final decade until his death from Lou Gehrig’s disease in 1979. Push them into the standard big band sound, or lose the rich texture of Mingus’ work.
Equally important, Mr. Johnson knew how to get around Mingus’s famously stern and often explosive personality. Mingus trusted Mr. Johnson to write melodies and organize his sometimes chaotic stream of musical insights into workable music.
Roberto Ungaro, director of the Charles Mingus Institute and son of Mingus’ widow Sue, said Johnson “often accompanied our family to homes and retreats, documenting Mingus’ private moments. They provided me with a photo,” he said in an email. “In a world populated with conflicts and adversaries, Sy he was one of the people Mingus really trusted.”
Their relationship didn’t end with Mingus’ death. Sue Mingus formed a series of bands (Mingus Big Band, Mingus Orchestra, Mingus Dynasty) to perform his music, with Mr. Johnson often providing arrangements.
“He knew how to put down on paper exactly what Mingus wanted,” Giddins said.
Sivert Bertil Johnson Jr. was born on April 15, 1930 in New Haven, Connecticut. Both his parents were immigrants. His father is a home builder and his mother is from Lithuania.
Along with his wife, he is survived by his sister, Elizabeth Keppel.
Young Sy admired jazz long before he mastered it. He later recalled the first time he heard Charlie Parker play on a recording one of his teenage friends had taken home.
“At that age, I didn’t have the ability to analyze it.” he said in a 2018 interview“All I knew was that suddenly the wind had changed.”
After high school, he enlisted in the Air Force, and his friends included John Williams, who had made a name for himself as a film score composer. After his discharge, he settled in Los Angeles, where he studied at the University of California, Los Angeles, with plans to become a lawyer. He studied English and graduated in 1958, but by then had fallen in love with the city’s jazz scene and put aside plans for his legal career.
Our first meeting with Mingus was promising. Shortly after he arrived in New York in 1960, the bassist invited him to play with his band at the Showplace, a club in his Village of Greenwich.
Things quickly turned sour. At one point during the performance, Mingus commanded Mr. Johnson to sustain “the pedal sound, just the pedal sound”—low notes, but Mr. Johnson struggled to find the right pattern.
Mingus got angry. He threw down the bass, ran to the piano, and turned his face to Mr. Johnson.
“I see these maniacal eyes an inch away,” recalls Johnson. “And he’s just glaring and making these funny breathing noises.”
Mingus struck the lower end of the piano four times, then returned to the instrument and resumed playing furiously.
But Mingus also seemed to appreciate Mr. Johnson. He once said to an audience, “This white boy can play!”
Then one evening, Mr. Johnson arrived to get ready for the show, only to find the piano closed and standing next to it was the famous saxophonist and flutist Yusef Lateef.
“If you were me and had the opportunity to hire Yusef Lateef or you,” Mingus apologized, “Who would you hire?”
Mr. Johnson continued to perform in other groups and eventually found a career as an arranger with jazz musician Emile Charlap, who ran an arrangement and copying company.
One day in 1971, Mingus came into his office looking for someone to arrange the music for his next album. He had someone specific in mind, but that person wasn’t there, so he pressed the sheet music into Mr. Johnson’s hand.
His first arrangements for Mingus were two songs from the album “Let My Children Hear Music” released on Columbia in early 1972. that too. In the liner notes, Mingus called it “the best album I’ve ever made”.
Mr. Johnson also contributed to a successful concert at New York’s Philharmonic Hall (now David Geffen Hall). The concert was recorded and released the same year as “Mingus and Friends Live in Concert”. Taken together, the two recordings show that, thanks in part to Mr. Johnson’s arrangements, Mingus had mastered the big band sound he had long sought.
Mingus later also recorded two of Johnson’s productions, “Wee” and “For Harry Carney”.
Johnson’s work went beyond working with Mingus. Before and after the bassist’s death, he worked with many leading musicians as accompanist, arranger and composer. He was responsible for his two arrangements of his Broadway musicals “Blues in the Night” (1982) and “Black and Blue” (1989). He also wrote the little-seen musical Hobbit, Hobbit, based on the work of JRR Tolkien.
“He was just a master,” Tom Staitz, Johnson’s editor at Jazz magazine, said in a telephone interview. “He was a master jazz writer. A master photographer. He was a master of everything he touched.”