Charles Mingus Quotes

Jazz is the language of the emotions.

Just because I'm playing Jazz I don't forget about me. I play or write me the way I feel through Jazz.

Most of the soloists at Birdland had to wait for Parker's next record in order to find out what to play next. What will they do now?

I was always doing revolutionary things, things that would alert people, so they would stop being so subservient.

Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple.

I'm going to keep on finding out the kind of man I am through my music. That's the one place I can be free. But the reason it's difficult is because I'm changing all the time.

Jazz music is a language of the emotions.

So he must use what time he has creating now for the future and utilize the past only to help the future, not as a razor strop for guilts and fears that inhibit his very being. Or like it said at the end of a labor song I liked a lot when I was a kid: what I mean is, take it easy, but take it.

It (jazz) isn't like it used to be. The guys aren't together. They're all separated. Individuals now. Bird was a symbol. It was a clique, a clique of people. Who all believed in one thing: gettin' high. And playin'.

In my music, I'm trying to play the truth of what I am.

I admire anyone who can come up with something original. But not originality alone, because there can be originality in stupidity, with no musical description of any emotion or any beauty the man has seen, or any kind of life he has lived.

I think I have an extremely aggravated case of paranoia

I've got a feeling that, if it's so easy for you, the struggle and the initiative are not as strong as they are for a person who has to struggle and therefore has more to say.

I always thought that no matter what kind of work people did, they should involve themselves totally with all the discrimination they ran into.

Bach is how buildings got taller. It's how we got to the moon.

I, myself, came to enjoy the players who didn't only just swing but who invented new rhythmic patterns, along with new melodic concepts. And those people are: Art Tatum, Bud Powell, Max Roach, Sonny Rollins, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Parker, who is the greatest genius of all to me because he changed the whole era around.

I am Charles Mingus, half black man, not even white enough to pass for nothing but black. I am Charles Mingus, a famed jazzman, but not famed enough to make a living in this society.

Whatever coast he's on, a man should be himself. I don't write in any particular idiom, I write Charles Mingus.

I am Charles Mingus. Half-black man. Yellow man. Half-yellow. Not even yellow, nor white enough to pass for nothing but black and not too light enough to be called white.

If someone has been escaping reality, I don't expect him to dig my music.

My son's a painter. All through school his teachers tell him he's a genius. I tell him to paint me an apple that looks like an apple before he paints me one that doesn't. Go where you can go, but start from someplace recognizable.

They're singing your praises while stealing your phrases.

Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creative.