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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.

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
Liked
Playing
Started
Heard
Trumpet
Everybody
Trumpets
Father
Studied
Things
Picked
Bought

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Jazz is like blues with a shot of heroin!
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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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Everybody ought to listen to Benny [Carter]. He's a whole musical education.
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You can't play anything on a horn that Louis Armstrong hasn't played
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[Jazz musicians] feel comfortable with their clichés, you know.
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Maybe you play a melody twice. You play it once like you like it, and some parts that you don't like you can just switch. An eight-bar motive - you can just take it and put it in the front or back or something like that. It can save you 50 or 60 or 70,000 dollars, a drum machine. That's why everybody uses it.
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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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If you have to ask, you'll never know.
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Somebody, my daughter or my wife, gave me a music box for Christmas. It plays My Funny Valentine on celeste, you know? So I had Bobby [Irving] just play Jean Pierre with the changes on celeste.
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In other words, an instrument should be an extension of you it's supposed to sound like you - the way you walk, the way you dress, you know.
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Jazz is the big brother of Revolution. Revolution follows it around.
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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.
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When I heard Coleman Hawkins, I learned to play ballads
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As long as I've been playing, they never say I done anything. They always say that some white guy did it.
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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.
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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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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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When we edit the music, I always remember, It's my band. Save me a place to play.
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Keith, how does it feel to be a genius?
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