Charles Mingus Quotations

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

Creativity is more than just being different. Anybody can plan weird; that's easy. What's hard is to be as simple as Bach. Making the simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity.

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.

My music is evidence of my souls will to live.

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.

In high school I was on the basketball team, but the coach did something I didn't dig and the next day he looked up and saw me practising with the football team.

Jazz is the language of the emotions.

That sound in tune to you? Sounds sharp to me. Sounds like I'm playing sharp all the time. My singing teacher told us you should do that. Maybe I got it from her. She said singers when they grow old have a tendency to go flat. So if you sing sharp as a young person, as you get older and go flat, you'll be in tune. In other words, it's never thought good to be flat. It means you can't get to the tone.

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?

What do you think happens to a composer who is sincere and loves to write and has to wait thirty years to have someone play a piece of his music?

I was born swinging and clapped my hands in church as a little boy, but I've grown up and I like to do things other than just swing. But blues can do more than just swing.

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

Tastes are created by the business interests. How else can you explain the popularity of Al Hirt?

Anybody can make the simple complecated. Creativity is making the complecated simple.

I always wanted to be a spontaneous composer.

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

Life has many changes. Tomorrow it may rain, and it's supposed to be sunshine, 'cause it's summertime. But God's got a funny soul, he plays like Charlie Parker.

Our nights didn't begin until after noon. Because in the old days, you'd start Birdland at 8:30 or 9 pm and play until 4 in the morning. Then you'd go out to the corner and talk to a couple of musicians - I used to talk to Oscar Pettiford a whole lot - you'd stand there till 7, 8 or 9, or else go down to the jam session at Minton's.

If you think this is weird, just look at yourselves.

Making the simple complicated is commonplace; ...

Let my children have music! Let them hear live music.

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'.

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

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

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

Thelonius Monk went over to Bird and Bud Powell and said, 'I told you guys to act crazy, but I didn't tell you to fall in love with the act. You're really crazy now.'

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

Since the white man says he came from the evolution of animals, well, maybe the black man didn't. The white man has made so many errors in the handling of people that maybe he did come from a gorilla or a fish and crawl up on the sand and then into the trees. Of course, evolution doesn't take God into consideration. I don't think people learned to do all the things they do through evolution.

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.

Most customers, by the time the musicians reach the second set, are to some extent inebriated. They don't care what you play anyway.

I'm too busy playing. When I'm playing I don't pay attention to who's listening. When I was listening I listened to symphony orchestras, Beethoven, Bach, Brahms, Stravinsky. You don't listen to one instrument; you listen to music.

They're singing your praises while stealing your phrases.

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

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.

Everything I do is Mingus.

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.

If Charlie Parker were a Gunslinger, There'd be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats

Jazz music is a language of the emotions.

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.

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.

Making the complicated simple is true creativity.

I'm trying to play the truth of what I am. The reason it's difficult is because I'm changing all the time.

I never heard my music played the way I heard it in my head.