Charles Mingus

Creativity is more than just being different. Anybody can plan weird; that’s easy. What’s hard is to be as simple as Bach. Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple.

In my music, 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’m trying to play the truth of what I am. The reason it’s difficult is ’cause I’m changing all the time.

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.

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?

The word “jazz” means to me no category, but when you get stuck into wanting to do something the way it was with the “jazz emblem” or logo chained around your neck, you play in a frozen moment in time and you keep fermenting the ‘fifties saying jazz should be this way or that. Well, if jazz to me means no category, then I’ve got the green light And if it sounds like.. sounds like.. sounds like, and keeps crossing over, it’s what I wanted to do in the first place. I like the way Stravinsky and those guys did things. They expressed something, if not themselves. In fact, some people talk about expression, but expression really doesn’t mean anything to me because there’s a lot of work which goes into building a drama and then it’s up to other people to offer “expression.” Expression is such a nebulous thing.

The whole concept for the Yeezus album is that we’re not going to be using CDs in the future and since this is the last time we’re going to see it, this is an open casket for the CD.

After the music is over it’s gone in the air. You can never capture it again.

I hope my recordings of my own works won’t inhibit other people’s performances. The brutal fact is that one doesn’t always get the exact tempo one wants, although one improves with experience.

Jazz isn’t a what, it’s a how.

You can’t rehearse a blues darlin’.

Jazz is like wine. When it is new it’s only for the experts, but when it gets older everybody wants it.

It’s easier to copy someone else than to find out how to avoid sounding like someone else.

For a long time I wasn’t listening to music, to the rock and roll stuff on the radio, because it would cause me to get sweaty–it would bring back memories I didn’t want to know about, or I would get that feeling that I’m not alive ’cause I’m not making it. And if it was good, I hated it ’cause I wasn’t doing it. And if it was bad, I was furious ’cause I could’ve done it better…

Critics get a little carried away with what someone should have done, rather than what he did.

I think we musicians are emissaries. Every time we go before the public, we’re there to make converts.

Music and song are, in my opinion, so fine and necessary a part of life that without them we cannot be said really to live at all.

I like what I hear other guys doing, but the thing that really attracts me is melodic playing.

You could still improvise but do it with lyrics.

No, working is what will keep you alive.