They're singing your praises while stealing your phrases.

Everything I do is Mingus.

I'm too busy playing. When I'm playing I don't pay attention to who's listening. When I was listening I listened to symphony orchestras, Beethoven, Bach, Brahms, Stravinsky. You don't listen to one instrument; you listen to music.

In high school I was on the basketball team, but the coach did something I didn't dig and the next day he looked up and saw me practising with the football team.

Since the white man says he came from the evolution of animals, well, maybe the black man didn't. The white man has made so many errors in the handling of people that maybe he did come from a gorilla or a fish and crawl up on the sand and then into the trees. Of course, evolution doesn't take God into consideration. I don't think people learned to do all the things they do through evolution.

Most of the soloists at Birdland had to wait for Parker's next record in order to find out what to play next. What will they do now?

I always wanted to be a spontaneous composer.