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In high school I was best in music class on the trumpet, but the prizes went to the boys with blue eyes. I made up my mind to outdo anybody white on my horn.

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
Made
Eyes
Horn
Mind
Class
Trumpets
High
Horns
Eye
Prize
White
Blue
School
Anybody
Outdo
Best
Boys
Prizes
Music
Went
Trumpet

More quotes by Miles Davis

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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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[Jazz musicians] feel comfortable with their clichés, you know.
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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?
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Don't worry about playing a lot of notes. Just find one pretty one.
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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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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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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 couldn't do What's Love Got To Do With It, Tina Turner because it wasn't the right tempo so I scratched it from the record. I wanted to do it about a year ago, but something happened.
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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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It's like swimmin' without warmin' up, yuo know what I mean? So [cackles] we use the drum machine, and we take it out.
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In improvisation, there are no mistakes.
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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 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.
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You should never be comfortable, man. Being comfortable fouled up a lot of musicians.
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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.
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You ever hear Buddy Miles play the drums? You know, he doesn't vary the tempo at all.
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I'm not messing around with nobody's woman. If I want a woman I go get her - you know what I mean?
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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.
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You can't play anything on a horn that Louis Armstrong hasn't played
Miles Davis
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I've gotten hernias from drummers when they drop tempo.
Miles Davis