Top 41 Mingus Quotes
#1. My son's a painter. All through school his teachers tell him he's a genius. I tell him to paint me an apple that looks like an apple before he paints me one that doesn't. Go where you can go, but start from someplace recognizable.
Charles Mingus
#2. I always thought that no matter what kind of work people did, they should involve themselves totally with all the discrimination they ran into.
Charles Mingus
#3. In my music, I'm trying to play the truth of what I am.
Charles Mingus
#4. It (jazz) isn't like it used to be. The guys aren't together. They're all separated. Individuals now. Bird was a symbol. It was a clique, a clique of people. Who all believed in one thing: gettin' high. And playin'.
Charles Mingus
#5. I love opera. I love jazz, especially Mingus. This makes me sound highbrow. I'm not.
Phil Klay
#6. I am Charles Mingus, half black man, not even white enough to pass for nothing but black. I am Charles Mingus, a famed jazzman, but not famed enough to make a living in this society.
Charles Mingus
#7. I was always doing revolutionary things, things that would alert people, so they would stop being so subservient.
Charles Mingus
#9. If someone has been escaping reality, I don't expect him to dig my music.
Charles Mingus
#10. What do you think happens to a composer who is sincere and loves to write and has to wait thirty years to have someone play a piece of his music?
Charles Mingus
#11. Mingus Rude, Arthur Lomb, Gabriel Stern and Tim Vandertooth, even Aaron K. Doily: Dylan never met anyone who wasn't about to change immediately into someone else. His was a special talent for encountering persons about to shed one identity or disguise for another. He took it in stride by now.
Jonathan Lethem
#12. I was miserable, of course, for I was seventeen, and so I swung into action and wrote a poem, and it was miserable, for that's how I thought poetry worked: you digested experience and shat literature. [from "Mingus at the Showplace"]
William Matthews
#13. Bach is how buildings got taller. It's how we got to the moon.
Charles Mingus
#14. Whatever coast he's on, a man should be himself. I don't write in any particular idiom, I write Charles Mingus.
Charles Mingus
#15. I'm going to keep on finding out the kind of man I am through my music. That's the one place I can be free. But the reason it's difficult is because I'm changing all the time.
Charles Mingus
#16. Just because I'm playing Jazz I don't forget about me. I play or write me the way I feel through Jazz.
Charles Mingus
#18. If Charlie Parker were a Gunslinger, There'd be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats
Charles Mingus
#19. Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple.
Charles Mingus
#20. I listened to King Oliver and I listened to Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, John Coltrane, Archie Shepp ... I listened to everything I could that came from that place that they call the blues but, in formality, isn't necessarily the blues.
Eric Clapton
#21. Tastes are created by the business interests. How else can you explain the popularity of Al Hirt?
Charles Mingus
#22. Most customers, by the time the musicians reach the second set, are to some extent inebriated. They don't care what you play anyway.
Charles Mingus
#23. All moms are different. I was made to be the exact mom that my children need. I am glad to learn from other moms, but I have to be watchful that I don't try to become someone I am not.
Elaine Mingus
#24. They're singing your praises while stealing your phrases.
Charles Mingus
#25. If you really dissect hip-hop you will find a whole lot of Charles Mingus, Ron Carter, Ahmad Jamal, a lot of classic jazz samples in there.
Robert Glasper
#28. I've got a feeling that, if it's so easy for you, the struggle and the initiative are not as strong as they are for a person who has to struggle and therefore has more to say.
Charles Mingus
#29. 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?
Charles Mingus
#30. Creativity is more than just being different. Anybody can plan weird; that's easy. What's hard is to be as simple as Bach. Making the simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity.
Charles Mingus
#31.
Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creative.
Charles Mingus
#32. In high school I was on the basketball team, but the coach did something I didn't dig and the next day he looked up and saw me practising with the football team.
Charles Mingus
#33. I never heard my music played the way I heard it in my head.
Charles Mingus
#34. Thelonius Monk went over to Bird and Bud Powell and said, 'I told you guys to act crazy, but I didn't tell you to fall in love with the act. You're really crazy now.'
Charles Mingus
#36. I grew up with all these old jazz guys in the '70s in L.A., and they grew up idolizing Charlie Parker, Charles Mingus, Lester Young - all of these incredible musicians.
Flea
#37. I admire anyone who can come up with something original. But not originality alone, because there can be originality in stupidity, with no musical description of any emotion or any beauty the man has seen, or any kind of life he has lived.
Charles Mingus
#38. Anybody can make the simple complecated. Creativity is making the complecated simple.
Charles Mingus
#39. Let my children have music! Let them hear live music.
Charles Mingus
#40. I am Charles Mingus. Half-black man. Yellow man. Half-yellow. Not even yellow, nor white enough to pass for nothing but black and not too light enough to be called white.
Charles Mingus
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