Charles Mingus

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.

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

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’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.

Music should not have any mandates. Jazz is not supposed to be something that is required to sound like jazz.

Every symphony, for example, is a sonata for orchestra; every string quartet is a sonata for four strings; every concerto a sonata for a solo instrument and orchestra.

You can’t go to the store and buy a good ear and rhythm.

The fans dictate to you when you’re done!

You want the listener to find the song on their own, give too much away and it takes away from the imagination.

I like to know for whom I’m writing – it makes the composition easier to do.

You can’t seperate modern jazz from rock or from rhythm and blues – you can’t seperate it. Because that’s where it all started, and that’s where it all come from – that’s where I learned to keep rhythm – in church.

I’m using the insides of sounds to move around in a very subtle way which, I think, ends up being inevitable. I feel its the only solution to that particular problem that I presented myself.

In this trumpet I hear our icons and the sound of the future.

You explore beautiful songs and create your own interpretation of them.

The essentials of Jazz are: melodic improvisation, melodic invention, swing and instrumental personality.

I see my body as an instrument, rather than an ornament.

As far as music school goes, I walked through Berkelee one time.

Jazz is the assassination, the murdering, the slaying of syncopation. I would even go so far as to confess that we are musical anarchists.

There is something about music that keeps its distance even at the moment that it engulfs us. It is at the same time outside and away from us and inside and part of us. In one sense it dwarfs us, and in another we master it. We are led on and on, and yet in some strange way we never lose control.