“When [Mingus] is at his best…he lays his influences out for all to see, drawing elements from disparate and seemingly contradictory traditions, and from them makes music that manages to be both novel and idiosyncratic without being self–indulgent, deeply aware of what came before it without being deriva­tive.” – Christopher Carroll, “Mingus: The Chaos and the Magic,” The New York Review of Books (2.12.2013