Charles Mingus Quotes

In jazz, there is a lot of European influence harmonically.

The individual - man as a man, man as a brain, if you like - interests me more than what he makes because I've noticed that most artists only repeat themselves.

My music is jazz.

Charlie Parker and Art Tatum to me were genius, and I'm right below that. I did, in my own way, do something different on the instrument, and that's the way I'd like to be remembered.

What I've learned is that it's okay to take from heroes, such as Debussy, but it has to be filtered through my own personality so that ultimately it's me.

If you are a creative person, you try to create things that are an extension of yourself.

Miles Davis is a major influence of mine in terms of the way that I am as a bandleader.

We don't need another Woody. Even Bob Dylan knew he couldn't be Woody Guthrie... I like Woody Guthrie fine, but I don't need the 50th generation version of it.

I agree totally with Metheny regarding the sound influencing the way you play.

Jazz is very important. It's not something I can put my finger on. When I'm writing at my favorite time, I like to have the gentle side of Coltrane or Brubeck on the CD player. It creates sort of a spiritual space in which I write best.

I knew Charlie Parker, and he gave us such a gift with his music. He put so much into so little space, and it was tragic that he died so young.

I don't know any jazz stuff. I don't know how to jam in that way. So jamming, for me, is writing a tune.

You don't show respect to Frank Sinatra and his great example by trying to sound exactly like him. You show it by sounding exactly like you, and that's the way jazz has always progressed as an art form.

Definitely in everything I do, the comic is a part of it.

I know I idolise someone like Billie Holiday, but I don't look at her and think I have to imitate her lifestyle, to try and sing like she did.

I always felt of myself as a composer, performer, improviser. I've never called myself a jazz man. I make art.

Jazz is a part of me.

Every artist is in everything he creates, and indeed if the truth is told, every person is in his life, in his work, whatever his work may be, and this is visible in his face, figure, stance, movement, and totality.

Growing up playing jazz and improvising has had a big impact on me, and it translates into my music.

I don't like heroin, unless you're a jazz musician and then you have to be on it because jazz is the sound of heroin.

I'm always doubting because I've been told so much that, you're not the right look or you're not the right sound, and, you know, whether I do jazz or R&B there are always complaints.

I used to sing like Nat King Cole. I mean he was the guy when I was comin' up, and you know, man, people used to say of me, "Damn, he sure do sound like Nat King Cole." But there was a day, and luckily for me it was early, when I woke up and asked myself, "Well, when are the ask me to sing because I sound like me?" So my advice is, never do anything that you don't like.

Each artist comes to the painting or sculpture because there he can be told that he, the individual, transcends all classes and flouts all predictions. In the work of art, he finds his uniqueness confirmed.

Through care taken over trends, the desire to be novel and affectation knowledge, we repudiate our art, our instinct, our own way of doing things; it is absurd and stupid

Jazz was home. It created a hunger within me.