“He was a great bass player. But he was hard to get along with, especially about music, because he had his own definite ideas about what was good and what was bad, and he didn’t mind telling anybody what he had on his mind. In that way, we were a lot alike. Our musical ideas were different sometimes. But he was always an inventive, hard–driving, imaginative musician.” — Miles Davis on Charles Mingus, from Miles: The Autobiography by Miles Davis with Quincy Troupe (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1989)