13 quotes
Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity.
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?
Setting the Tempo : Fifty Years of Great Jazz Liner Notes (1996)
In my music, I'm trying to play the truth of what I am. The reason it's difficult is because I'm changing all the time.
Good jazz is when the leader jumps on the piano, waves his arms, and yells.
I always wanted to be a spontaneous composer.
What Is A Jazz Composer? (1971)
I, myself, came to enjoy the players who didn't only just swing but who invented new rhythmic patterns, along with new melodic concepts.
What Is A Jazz Composer? (1971)
A pure genius of jazz is manifested when he and the rest of the orchestra run around the room while the rhythm section grimaces and dances around their instruments.
Ladies and gentlemen, please don't associate me with any of this. This is not jazz. These are sick people.
My music is alive and it's about the living and the dead, about good and evil. It's angry, yet it's real because it knows it's angry.
An Open Letter To Miles Davis (1955)
I think my own way. I don't think like you and my music isn't meant just for the patting of feet and going down backs.
An Open Letter To Miles Davis (1955)
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.
What Is A Jazz Composer? (1971)
Let my children have music! Let them hear live music. Not noise. My children! You do what you want with your own!
What Is A Jazz Composer? (1971)
Since the white man says he came from the evolution of animals, well, maybe the black man didn't. The white man has made so many errors in the handling of people that maybe he did come from a gorilla or a fish and crawl up on the sand and then into the trees. Of course, evolution doesn't take God into consideration. I don't think people learned to do all the things they do through evolution.
More Than A Fakebook : The Music Of Charles Mingus (1991)