Charles Mingus

Let my children have music.

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.

Jazz music is a language of the emotions.

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, 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.

I’m a fan first. I believed Duke Ellington when he said there’s no bad music, just some of it is presented badly. As a kid, hanging around Church Street, the presentation of music was so powerful, I couldn’t help but jump for joy. I had discovered art, or truth, or whatever you want to call it; I had seen a light I’d follow forever.

Miles Davis is one who writes songs when he plays.

One can be very happy without demanding that others agree with them.

I love it. When they stop imitating me then I’ll start wondering where I’m going wrong. Every day when I sit down to play, I learn something new.

Jazz has borrowed from other genres of music and also has lent itself to other genres of music.

[In 1969] I think lyrics have always been important to any serious writer of music.

He almost adds a Chet-like sound to it.

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 haven’t a great Jazz band and I don’t want one.

We’re here to have a ball.

The whole thing of being in music is not to control it but to be swept away by it.

I wasn’t interested in practicing Bach; I was too busy digging Horace Silver!

I’ve studied all my musical life, but learning is only good if you do something constructive with it.

I was unfashionable before anyone knew who I was.

In order to be honest with myself, I have to reveal more of who I am. This is a part of the improv process.