Mingus vision

I came across this passage in the notes section of a book I finished over the weekend, "Stagolee Shot Billy" by Cecil Brown, which is about the traditional blues song. It struck me as a great characterization of some reasons I like jazz in general and Charles Mingus in particular.

"Jazz values improvisations, personal vision and assault on the conventional modes of musical expression, but it will not allow the individual to forget what he owes to tradition, not the tradition of a great man but the legacy shaped by a whole people."

In the best of Mingus you hear field hollers, the blues, the church, Ragtime, New Orleans, big band swing, Ellingtonia, Latin rhythms and more, laced with scintillating improvisation, certainly with a strong, almost overwhelming sometimes, personal vision, and a big fist in the face of convention. You could say this about almost any of the great jazz musicians, it seems to me, from Sidney Bechet and Jelly Roll Morton to Branford Marsalis and James Carter, not to mention Monk, Miles, Sonny Rollins, Ornette Coleman, Duke, Pops...