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When the band plays fast, you play slow when the band plays slow, you play fast.

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
Plays
Slow
Fast
Guitar
Band
Play

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I gave the album [You're Under Arrest] to Quincy Jones and he loved D Train. We couldn't call it D Train it's called MDI/Something's On Your Mind/MD2. That's on the album.
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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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When I heard Coleman Hawkins, I learned to play ballads
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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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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 we edit the music, I always remember, It's my band. Save me a place to play.
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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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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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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 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.
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If you understood everything I say, you'd be me!
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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'.
Miles Davis
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Knowledge is freedom and ignorance is slavery
Miles Davis
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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
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Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.
Miles Davis
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The only way a drum machine will get out of beat is for you not to pay your electric bill.
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 have to ask, you'll never know.
Miles Davis
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In respect for drummers, see, I love drummers.
Miles Davis
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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.
Miles Davis