Charles Mingus
Charles Mingus
Charles Mingus Jr.was an American jazz double bassist, composer and bandleader. His compositions retained the hot and soulful feel of hard bop, drawing heavily from black gospel music and blues, while sometimes containing elements of Third Stream, free jazz, and classical music. He once cited Duke Ellington and church as his main influences...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionBassist
Date of Birth22 April 1922
CityNogales, AZ
CountryUnited States of America
They're singing your praises while stealing your phrases.
Whatever coast he's on, a man should be himself. I don't write in any particular idiom, I write Charles Mingus.
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.
Everything I do is Mingus.
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.
If Charlie Parker were a Gunslinger, There'd be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats
Jazz music is a language of the emotions.
My music is evidence of my souls will to live.
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.
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.
Making the complicated simple is true creativity.
I'm trying to play the truth of what I am. The reason it's difficult is because I'm changing all the time.
Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity.
I never heard my music played the way I heard it in my head.