Just because I'm playing jazz I don't forget about me. I play or write me, the way I feel, through jazz, or whatever.
Charles MingusRead
Anybody can make the simple complecated. Creativity is making the complecated simple.
Interpretation
Creativity involves simplifying complex ideas into easily understandable forms.
This quote by Charles Mingus encapsulates the essence of creativity, emphasizing that true artistic expression lies in the ability to distill complicated concepts into simple and relatable ideas. It suggests that while many can complicate matters, creativity shines through in the ability to clarify and make sense of the intricate complexities of life and art.
In practice
During a presentation on innovation, I could use this quote to emphasize the importance of clear communication.
Just because I'm playing jazz I don't forget about me. I play or write me, the way I feel, through jazz, or whatever.
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.
Jazz music is a language of the emotions.
Let my children have music! Let them hear live music.
My music is evidence of my soul's will to live.
I never heard my music played the way I heard it in my head.
You know you've achieved perfection in design, not when you have nothing more to add, but when you have nothing more to take away.
Not every song I write is ecstasy. And it can happen only one time. After that, when you sing the same melody and words, it's pleasure, but you don't get wiped out.
I'm not asking you to describe the rain falling the night the archangel arrived; I'm demanding that you get me wet. Make up your mind, Mr. Writer, and for once in your life be the flower that smells rather than the chronicler of the aroma. There's not much pleasure in writing what you live. The challenge is to live what you write.
It is to be remembered that all art is magical in origin - music, sculpture, writing, painting - and by magical I mean intended to produce very definite results. Paintings were originally formulae to make what is painted happen. Art is not an end in itself, any more than Einstein's matter-into-energy formulae is an end in itself. Like all formulae, art was originally FUNCTIONAL, intended to make things happen, the way an atom bomb happens from Einstein's formulae.
History has proven that art depicting black people cannot be disentangled from the political implications that such art has on their lives. As Africans were being stripped from the continent and sailed across the Atlantic to the Western world, depictions of black people in Western art changed in order to further render them racialized caricatures.
My father was an artist. When life was harder and he couldn't get jobs, he painted houses, but he was artistic. When I went to see his work, it was special. Somewhere along the line, I felt I was special. I didn't know why.
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