Miles Davis Quotes

You have to be born with it. You can't even buy it. If you could buy it, they'd have it at the next Newport Festival.

I put all those synthesizer sounds behind "Decoy" and "Code M.D." A lot of things we write together. A lot of things are his, but they don't have that thing I want on the bottom. I often tell him, I say, "Bobby [Irving], if there's a melody, there's another one somewhere that goes with it."

I like Stan [Getz], because he has so much patience, the way he plays those melodies - other people can't get nothing out of a song, but he can, which takes a lot of imagination.

Certain drummers drop time, and I like to play on top of the beat.

Maybe you play a melody twice. You play it once like you like it, and some parts that you don't like you can just switch. An eight-bar motive - you can just take it and put it in the front or back or something like that. It can save you 50 or 60 or 70,000 dollars, a drum machine. That's why everybody uses it.

You know why I quit playing ballads? Cause I love playing ballads.

I don't care if a dude is purple with green breath as long as he can swing.

Don't be afraid of mistakes - There are none.

We don't play to be seen. I'm addicted to music, not audiences.

If somebody told me I only had an hour to live, I'd spend it choking a white man. I'd do it nice and slow.

As long as I've been playing, they never say I done anything. They always say that some white guy did it.

I ain't no entertainer, and ain't trying to be one. I am one thing, a musician.

In music, silence is more important than sound.

If you're not nervous then you're not paying attention.

We're not going to play the blues anymore. Let the white folks play the blues. They got 'em, so they can keep 'em.

My future starts when I wake up every morning.

Tom Jones is funny to me, man. I mean, he really tries to ape Ray Charles and Sammy Davis, you know. He's nice-looking; he looks good doing it. I mean, if I was him, I'd do the same thing. If I was only thinking about making money.

You can't eat a winner's plaque.

When I heard Coleman Hawkins, I learned to play ballads

I began to realize that some of the things Ornette Coleman had said about things being played three or fours ways, independently of each other, were true because Bach had also composed that way.

I really liked Wynton when I first met him. He's still a nice young man, only confused.

When you work with great musicians, they are always a part of you . . . their spirits are walking around in me, so they're still here and passing it on to others.

John Lee Hooker is the funkiest man alive

It's like swimmin' without warmin' up, yuo know what I mean? So [cackles] we use the drum machine, and we take it out.

Some of [drummers] drop time because they want to hear what you're doin'.

In respect for drummers, see, I love drummers.

[Jazz musicians] feel comfortable with their clichés, you know.

I never thought Jazz was meant to be a museum piece like other dead things once considered artistic.

I usually write from the rhythm section...If a drummer got a funky beat on some things - like a half-shuffle or a shuffle or a backbeat that's even - I can write something.

That's the way women do. The frown. They want to give you the attitude to approach them back, by giving you a negative vibe.

Music is the framework around the silence.

People will go for anything they don't understand if it's got enough hype.

If you love them in the morning with their eyes full of crust; if you love them at night with their hair full of rollers, chances are, you're in love.

I think every Negro over fifty should get a medal for putting up with all that crap.

I've always told the musicians in my band to play what they know and then play above that. Because then anything can happen, and that's where great art and music happens.

It took me twenty years study and practice to work up to what I wanted to play in this performance. How can she expect to listen five minutes and understand it?

Lionel [Richie] said, "Yeah, I learned chords and stuff playin' against your albums."

If you make a suggestion and [musicians] don't know what you mean, you have to be able to do it yourself. I often sit down on drums and show 'em just exactly what I want. And I do it and then say, "How do you do that?" It's because I know how it looks, I know what I want to hear, and I don't drop or rush any tempo. It ain't in my body, it ain't in my nephew's body.

I don't hold it against Dizzy [Gillespie], you know, but if a guy wants to play a certain way, you work towards that. If he stops - he's full of crap, you know. I mean, I wouldn't do it, for no money, or for no place in the white man's world. Not just to make money, because then you don't have anything. You don't have as much money as whoever you're trying to ape; that's making money by being commercial. Then you don't have anything to give the world; so you're not important. You might as well be dead.

The way you change and help music is by tryin' to invent new ways to play

I gave the album [You're Under Arrest] to Quincy Jones and he loved "D Train". We couldn't call it "D Train"; it's called "MDI/Something's On Your Mind/MD2". That's on the album.

If you're trying to be hip, be hip.

When I went in there, we used drum machine on "Time After Time" and "Human Nature".We don't use the drum machine to play a pattern. You play the pattern by being consistent.

That's the way you judge a car, man, [good or bad], when you start it up. It's just the same thing. I mean, I drive a Ferrari - not to be cute, but because I dig it. I'd rather drive a ten-year-old Ferrari than one of them new things-they don't go.

I'm out there doing the best that I can, My lip is cut and I'm still playing.

Jazz is an Uncle Tom word. They should stop using that word for selling. I told George Wein the other day that he should stop using it.

I can't write anything for myself. I can write when I hear like [John] Coltrane play something; I used to write chords and stuff for him to play in one bar. I can write for other people, but I don't never write for myself.

I don't wanna talk about Teo [Macero]. He's a helluva musician, a brilliant musician, but he's just not for me, that's all. I can elaborate on it, but I don't want to do that.