Quote

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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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
Jazz
Couldn
Might
Bandstand
Play
Booing
Going
Ignoring
People
Kicked
Embarrassed
Ass

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Jazz is like blues with a shot of heroin!
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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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The thing to judge in any jazz artist is, does the man project and does he have ideas.
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Look, man, all I am is a trumpet player.
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My ego only needs a good rhythm section
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If you understood everything I say, you'd be me!
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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.
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Coltrane, you cant play everything at once!
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If you have to ask, you'll never know.
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Sometimes [playing free] doesn't happen, because maybe a guy's wife'll come in, you know, and his ego will catch him. If everybody's completely just straight-without any old ladies over here, a fourth of whisky over there if it's balanced right, it'll come off. It has to be. But when you get egos involved with playing free, you can't do it.
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Everybody ought to listen to Benny [Carter]. He's a whole musical education.
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The only way a drum machine will get out of beat is for you not to pay your electric bill.
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I really liked Wynton when I first met him. He's still a nice young man, only confused.
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He sounded to me like he's supposed to be the savior of jazz. Sometimes people speak as though someone asked them a question. Well, no one asked him a question.
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I said to [Lionel] Richie, Man, my wife says you must really respect women because you write such beautiful love songs.
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When the band plays fast, you play slow when the band plays slow, you play fast.
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Music is the framework around the silence.
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If you don't know what to play, play nothing.
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I never thought that the music called jazz was ever meant to reach just a small group of people, or become a museum thing locked under glass like all the other dead things that were once considered artistic.
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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.
Miles Davis