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You should never be comfortable, man. Being comfortable fouled up a lot of musicians.

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
Musician
Comfortable
Music
Never
Men
Fouled
Musicians
Jazz

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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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Music is a funny thing when you really come to think about it.
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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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The thing to judge in any jazz artist is, does the man project and does he have ideas.
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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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I can hear what I want [people] to play. If you don't hear what you want someone to play, then you can't tell 'em.
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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?
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Look, man, all I am is a trumpet player.
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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.
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If you hit a wrong note, it's the next note that you play that determines if it's good or bad.
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Japanese people they hear my warmin' up and they start screamin'. They can tell it's me.It's my tone on the trumpet, it sounds like I'm speakin'.
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I would never try and play like Harry James, because I don't like his tone - for me. It's just white. You know what I mean? He has what we black trumpet players call a white sound. But it's for white music ... I can tell a white trumpet player, just listening to a record. There'll be something he'll do that'll let me know that he's white.
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If I hear a song like Time After Time. I'm sittin' there lookin' at video and Cindy Lauper comes on singin' this song. I said, God damnnnnn!
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You have to know 400 notes that you can play, then pick the right four.
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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.
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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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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.
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Food makes my mind sluggish.
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You can't play anything on a horn that Louis Armstrong hasn't played
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If you have a tone like mine that is recognizable. No matter what I play, when you hear my tone you can tell it's me.
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