Charles Mingus

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.

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.

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

Let my children have music.

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

The more vulnerable and the more confused the song is, the equal and opposite effect is how I feel after having written it.

Nothing else will ever capture the democratic process in sound as perfectly as Jazz.

There are four qualities essential to a great jazzman. They are taste, courage, individuality, and irreverence. These are the qualities I want to retain in my music.

As long as musicians have passion for spontaneity and creating something that’s never been before, Jazz will flourish.

Life is 10% what you make it and 90% how you take it.

Jazz can only enhance the Classical side and Classical can only enhance the Jazz side.

Inspiration grows into full-scale creation through persistence and imagination.

There’s so many ways you can hit one note.

I don’t care for the music when they’re talking bad about women because I think women are God’s greatest gift to the planet – I just like music.

Sound is the first thing that we tune into.

Change is always happening. That’s one of the wonderful things about Jazz music.

Jazz is something you have to feel, something you have to live.

To the person who uses music as a medium for the expression of ideas, feelings, images, or what have you; anything which facilitates this expression is properly his instrument.

I’m going to make music out of whatever style it is, being true to the artform itself.

Difference between sex and love? Well, you’re not always sure you’re in love. But when you’re having sex, there’s really no mistaking it.