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.

Let my children have music.

Good Jazz is when the leader jumps on the piano, waves his arms and yells. Fine Jazz is when a tenorman lifts his foot in the air. Great Jazz is when he heaves a piercing note for 32 bars and collapses on his hands and knees. A pure genius of Jazz is manifested when he and the rest of the orchestra runaround the room while the rhythm section grimaces and dances around their instruments.

I always wanted to be a spontaneous composer.

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.

Even if people don’t understand the language that you’re singing in, they still know good music when they hear it.

People love us when we play what we want to play but we’re starving.

The Blues is never old.

We in the Western world suffer from too many categories and classes; we’ve forgotten that we all still have diapers on. We’ve separated music from life.

I still insist that American performers are the best performers in the world.

Jazz standards are our contribution to music history.

If you want to know about the Sixties, play the music of The Beatles.

Once we’re inside a tune, we can do anything with it.

In Europe, they like everything you do. The mistakes and everything. That’s a little bit too much.

Just give a drum roll, announce my name and I come out and sing. I have a contract that says I’m a singer. So I sing.

Playing is my way of thinking, talking, communicating.

Let the music speak for itself.

Tomorrow you’ll wish you had practiced harder today.

Oh, my darling, it’s incredible, that someone so unforgettable should think I am unforgettable, too.

The qualities in music I consider most important are beauty, simplicity, originality, discrimination and sincerity.