Mingus Quotes & Sayings

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. — Charles Mingus

I played upright bass. I wanted to write great tunes, play the bass, be a band leader, and smoke a big funny pipe like Charlie Mingus. So I went out and bought the pipe when I was around 18 or 19 years old. You know even women smoke a pipe in Glasgow. I worked with Carla Bley and she smoked a pipe, which I find fascinating. — Jack Bruce

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. — Charles Mingus

I love opera. I love jazz, especially Mingus. This makes me sound highbrow. I'm not. — Phil Klay

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? — Charles Mingus

They're singing your praises while stealing your phrases. — 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. — Charles Mingus

I was miserable, of course, for I was seventeen, and so I swung into action and wrote a poem, and it was miserable, for that's how I thought poetry worked: you digested experience and shat literature. [from "Mingus at the Showplace"] — William Matthews

I never really sounded like Bird, but that was my mission. I didn't care if people said that I copied him; I loved Bird's playing so much. But Mingus was the one that really pushed me away from the idea and forced me into thinking about having an individual sound and concept. That's what I got from Mingus. — Jackie McLean

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

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

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

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

Making the complicated simple is true creativity. — Charles Mingus

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. — Charles Mingus

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. — Charles Mingus

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

Eighth grade's a distant rumor, a tabled issue, and Dylan knows from experience that the summer between might change anything, everything. He and Mingus Rude too and even Arthur Lomb for that matter are released from the paint-by-numbers page of their schooldays, from their preformatted roles as truant or victim, freed to an unspoiled summer, that inviting medium for doodling in self-transformation. — Jonathan Lethem

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

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

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. — Charles Mingus

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. — Charles Mingus

If. If Mingus Rude could be kept in this place, kept somehow in Dylan's pocket, in his stinging, smudgy hands, then summer wouldn't give way to whatever came after. If. If. Fat chance. Summer on Dean Street had lasted one day and that day was over, it was dark out, had been for hours. The Williamsburg Savings Bank tower clock read nine-thirty in red-and-blue neon. Final score, a million to nothing. The million-dollar kid.
Your school wasn't on fire, you were. — Jonathan Lethem

Anybody can make the simple complecated. Creativity is making the complecated simple. — Charles Mingus

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

Did he ever
try?'
Mingus shrugged. 'He was like you.'
What's that mean?'
Means he tried.'
Of course. The ring was not a neutral tool. It judged its wearer: Aaron Doily flew drunkenly, and Dylan flew like a coward, only when it didn't matter, at the Windles' pond. So if had attuned to Robert Woolfolk's chaos.
Don't tell me,' said Dylan. 'He flew sideways.'
Mingus left it vague. He'd always made it his habit to protect their honor against one another
Dylan, Arthur, Robert. To say nothing. — Jonathan Lethem

I always wanted to be a spontaneous composer. — Charles Mingus

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

Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple. — Charles Mingus

All moms are different. I was made to be the exact mom that my children need. I am glad to learn from other moms, but I have to be watchful that I don't try to become someone I am not. — Elaine Mingus

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

I wonder if the person he wants to marry is me or a black girl? And if it isn't me he wants, but any black girl who looks like me, talks and acts like me, what will happen when he finds out that I hate ear hoops, that I don't have to straighten my hair, that Mingus puts me to sleep, that sometimes I want to get out of my skin and be only the person inside
not American
not black
just me? — Toni Morrison

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? — Charles Mingus

Jazz is the language of the emotions. — Charles Mingus

I grew up with all these old jazz guys in the '70s in L.A., and they grew up idolizing Charlie Parker, Charles Mingus, Lester Young - all of these incredible musicians. — Flea

Listening to Ella furiously and endlessly unfurl the yarns of the Mingus tales, I understood that the need to tell stories is deeply embedded in our minds, and inseparably entangled with the mechanisms that generate and absorb language. Narrative imagination
and therefore fiction
is a basic evolutionary tool of survival. We process the world by telling stories and produce human knowledge through our engagement with imagined selves. — Aleksandar Hemon

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'. — Charles Mingus

My first lyric departed directly from Mingus's title "This Subdues My Passion." If you didn't think the song was already half written after that title, then you had no business dallying with the tune in the first place. I wrote about the way that music tempers the violence within a man. This subdues my passion And it may control my rage It may stem the poison that spills out onto the page — Elvis Costello

If you really dissect hip-hop you will find a whole lot of Charles Mingus, Ron Carter, Ahmad Jamal, a lot of classic jazz samples in there. — Robert Glasper

My music is evidence of my soul's will to live. — Charles Mingus

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

Mingus Rude, Arthur Lomb, Gabriel Stern and Tim Vandertooth, even Aaron K. Doily: Dylan never met anyone who wasn't about to change immediately into someone else. His was a special talent for encountering persons about to shed one identity or disguise for another. He took it in stride by now. — Jonathan Lethem

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.' — Charles Mingus

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

Everything I do is Mingus. — Charles Mingus

I listened to King Oliver and I listened to Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, John Coltrane, Archie Shepp ... I listened to everything I could that came from that place that they call the blues but, in formality, isn't necessarily the blues. — Eric Clapton

I'm trying to be expressive on my instrument and conduct as I'm improvising. So I'm conducting with the melodies and the rhythms that I play. And so it's a very organic way. It's a lot like Charles Mingus played, cuing people in from what you play and how you play it rather than standing in front of a band, conducting and pointing. — Joe Lovano

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. — Charles Mingus

Jazz music is a language of the emotions. — Charles Mingus

Let my children have music! Let them hear live music. — Charles 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. — Charles Mingus

I got a poster from Columbia Records, and there's Miles Davis, Charlie Mingus, Ellington, Count Basie - everybody in that poster has died, I'm the only one left. And great players like Paul Desmond and Gerry Mulligan, it's hard to believe they're gone because we were all so close. But I believe in the future and the tradition will go on. — Dave Brubeck

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. — Charles Mingus