“By using his band like an artist uses color in his palette, treating it like a complex instrument and using it to think with, Mingus resembled the man he admired the most, Duke Ellington. The bassist brought back to modern jazz the right texture and variety of sound that had been so eroded by the rather predictable formula of bebop…Despite his fierce emotions, or perhaps because of them, Mingus created a more com­plex structure as a way of controlling feeling.” – From Jazz Greatsby David Perry (1996, Phaidon Press Ltd.)