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.

They’re singing your praises while stealing your phrases.

Just because I’m playing jazz I don’t forget about me. I play or write me the way I feel through jazz, or whatever. Music is, or was, a language of the emotions.

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.

Let my children have music.

The sign of a mature musician is knowing what not to play.

I always liked the steel guitar. I also love the guys that play the bottleneck. But I could never do it; I never made it do what I want. So every time I would pick up the guitar, I ‘d shake my hand and trill it a bit. For some strange reason my ears would say to me that sounds similar to what those guys were doing. I can’t pick up the guitar now without doing it. So that’s how I got into making my sound. It was nothing pretty. Just trying to please myself. I heard that sound.

Let your life be your music and let your music be your life.

Find the best teachers, listen to the finest playing and try to emulate that. Be true to the music.

I don’t get jazz. It always sounds like a bunch of toddlers let loose in a music room.

She’s Dynamite’ was a 100 years ago, and I recorded that song because the company thought that it was a great song and it was hot. That was the beginning of rock n’ roll, and I guess they thought it would be a BB King version of rock n’ roll.

An entertainer pleases others while an artist only has to please himself.

He knows I rip him off every day. He’s the godfather for me. Nobody can say they aren’t influenced by what Stevie Wonder has done.

For years the Trio did nothing but play for musicians and other hip people. We practically starved to death.

I think I was supposed to play Jazz.

I’ve always tried to defend the idea that the blues doesn’t have to be sung by a person who comes from Mississippi, as I did.

Quiet is the absence of sound. Silence is the presence of silence.

Jazz has such great feeling and emotional content it really doesn’t require technical understanding.

I developed in my head that I’m never any better than my last concert or the last time I played, so it’s like an audition each time. You get nervous just before going onstage. I still have that, but I think it’s more like concern. You’re concerned about the people – like meeting your in-laws for the first time.

I’m not really on a mission to tell anybody anything. I’d rather be figured out.