Charles Mingus

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

Let my children have music.

Jazz music is a language of the emotions.

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, 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?

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

Only play what you hear. If you don’t hear anything, don’t play anything.

It’s not uncomfortable for me to be a sideman, but I feel more comfortable as a bandleader.

I’m very shy, and I shy away from people. But the moment I hit the stage, it’s a different feeling I get nerve from somewhere; maybe it’s because it’s something I love to do.

The louder they [the band] play the softer I sing.

Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.

If you’re going to make a mistake, make it loud so everybody else sounds wrong.

The way a band works is a metaphor for all sorts of collaborative and larger enterprises that people do.

There’s a lot of recreational Jazz going on, where cats learn a particular style and become sharks on somebody else’s language.

When you begin to teach Jazz, the most dangerous thing is to teach style.

I didn’t get my music together until I was 40.

I wanted something very dense, something that would sustain long and more pieces of wood that would be soft, sweet, for more of a mellow sound.

Will the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands? All the rest of you, if you

A Jazz man should be saying what he feels: humor, sadness, joy… all the things that humans have.

Music gives us a lot of things and it only wants one thing back… your attention.