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I never thought Jazz was meant to be a museum piece like other dead things once considered artistic.
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
Thought
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Music
Artistic
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Museum
More quotes by Miles Davis
If you hit a wrong note, it's the next note that you play that determines if it's good or bad.
Miles Davis
Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.
Miles Davis
I keep telling Ron Lorman and them in the control room, It's my band! The reason I have a band is because I can't stand for somebody to tell me what to do.
Miles Davis
Bebop didn't have the humanity of Duke Ellington. It didn't even have that recognizable thing. Bird and Diz were great, fantastic, challenging — but they weren't sweet.
Miles Davis
If you don't know what to play, play nothing.
Miles Davis
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.
Miles Davis
Anybody can play. The note is only 20 percent. The attitude of the motherfucker who plays it is 80 percent.
Miles Davis
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.
Miles Davis
My father's rich, my momma's good looking. Right? And I can play the Blues. I've never suffered and don't intend to suffer.
Miles Davis
I know what I've done for music, but don't call me a legend. Just call me Miles Davis.
Miles Davis
The reason [drummers] call things unison, and they sound unison, is because you actually play two different tempos . . . like you're a little sharp, or a little flat it's so slight that they call it unison, but it's not unison.
Miles Davis
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.
Miles Davis
I used to enjoy all the white bands when I was a kid listening to the radio. But the record companies, they take music and label it - like, they say rock. Because the white singers can't sound like James Brown, they call him soul. They've been doing that for years. That's the prejudice crap.
Miles Davis
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.
Miles Davis
The only reason to write a new song is because you're tired of the old ones.
Miles Davis
If you understood everything I say, you'd be me!
Miles Davis
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.
Miles Davis
What's swinging in words? If a guy makes you pat your foot and if you feel it down your back, you don't have to ask anybody if that's good music or not. You can always feel it.
Miles Davis
Sometimes, if you ask people to go downstairs and get me this or that, they'll say, It's rainin or It might rain, or There's some bumpy roads on the road, or bla-bla-bla. They give you all those excuses, so when they do something which is easy, you're supposed to say, Damn, you did that?
Miles Davis
Music is the framework around the silence.
Miles Davis
