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I know what I've done for music, but don't call me a legend. Just call me Miles Davis.

Miles Davis

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Miles Davis
Age: 65 †
Born: 1926
Born: May 26
Died: 1991
Died: September 28
Actor
Autobiographer
Bandleader
Composer
Conductor
Film Score Composer
Jazz Musician
Musician
Recording Artist
Songwriter
Television Actor
Alton
Illinois
Miles Dewey Davis III
Miles Dewey Davis
III Davis
Music
Done
Davis
Legend
Legends
Miles
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More quotes by Miles Davis

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There are no wrong notes.
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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.
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You want to know how I started playing trumpet? My father bought me one, and I studied the trumpet. And everybody I heard that I liked, I picked up things from.
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You can tell whether a person plays well or not by the way he carries the instrument, whether it means something to him or not.
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Always listen for what you can leave out.
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To keep creating you have to be about change.
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Americans don't like any form of art, man. All they like to do is make money. They don't like me, Sammy Davis, or anybody else. They don't like nothing. They just like Sammy because he can make 'em a lot of money.
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People will go for anything they don't understand if it's got enough hype.
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If you don't know what to play, play nothing.
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Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.
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You have to know 400 notes that you can play, then pick the right four.
Miles Davis
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I can tell. I'm gifted with that, you know. When I hear that the tempo is slightly off, it's hard for me.
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I've come close to matching the feeling of that night in 1944 in music, when I first heard Diz and Bird, but I've never got there. . . . I'm always looking for it, listening and feeling for it, though, trying to always feel it in and through the music I play everyday.
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Catch Harry Belafonte. He's got a helluva rhythm section.And so have the Pointer Sisters. And that little guy with Sammy Clayton. He plays the whole show with 40 members.
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Everybody ought to listen to Benny [Carter]. He's a whole musical education.
Miles Davis
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If you got up on the bandstand at Minton's and couldn't play, you were not only going to be embarrassed by the people ignoring you or booing you, you might get your ass kicked.
Miles Davis
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If you understood everything I say, you'd be me!
Miles Davis
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Lionel [Richie] said, Yeah, I learned chords and stuff playin' against your albums.
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I've gotten hernias from drummers when they drop tempo.
Miles Davis
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When kids don't learn about their own heritage in school, they just don't care about school... But you won't see it in the history books unless we get the power to write our own history and tell our story ourselves.
Miles Davis