IN HIS OWN WORDS

In other words I am three. One man stands forever in the middle, unconcerned, unmoved, watching, waiting to be allowed to express what he sees to the other two.
The second man is like a frightened animal that attacks for fear of being attacked. Then there’s an over-loving gentle person who lets people into the uttermost sacred temple of his being and he’ll take insults and be trusting and sign contracts without reading them and get talked down to working cheap or for nothing, and when he realizes what’s been done to him he feels like killing and destroying everything around him including himself for being so stupid. But he can’t - he goes back inside himself.
Which one is real?
They’re all real.
— Charles Mingus, Beneath the Underdog
Anybody can play weird, that’s easy. What’s hard is to be as simple as Bach. Making the simple complicated is commonplace. Making the complicated simple—awesomely simple—that’s creativity.
— Charles Mingus, statement in Mainliner Magazine (United Airlines), July 1977