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
Charles Mingus quotes about
If someone has been escaping reality, I don't expect him to dig my music.
I always wanted to be a spontaneous composer.
Let my children have music! Let them hear live music.
Just because I'm playing Jazz I don't forget about me. I play or write me the way I feel through Jazz.
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.'
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.
They're singing your praises while stealing your phrases.
Jazz music is a language of the emotions.
My music is evidence of my souls will to live.
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 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.
That sound in tune to you? Sounds sharp to me. Sounds like I'm playing sharp all the time. My singing teacher told us you should do that. Maybe I got it from her. She said singers when they grow old have a tendency to go flat. So if you sing sharp as a young person, as you get older and go flat, you'll be in tune. In other words, it's never thought good to be flat. It means you can't get to the tone.
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?