Miles Davis Quotes

Anybody can play. The note is only 20 percent. The attitude of the motherfucker who plays it is 80 percent.

It's not the note you play that's the wrong note - it's the note you play afterwards that makes it right or wrong.

If somebody told me I only had an hour to live, I'd spend it choking a white man. I'd do it nice and slow.

It's not about standing still and becoming safe. If anybody wants to keep creating they have to be about change.

In music, silence is more important than sound.

See, if you put a musician in a place where he has to do something different from what he does all the time, then he can do that - but he's got to think differently in order to do it. He's got to play above what he knows - far above it. I've always told the musicians in my band to play what they know and then play above that. Because then anything can happen, and that's where great art and music happens.

I'm always thinking about creating. My future starts when I wake up every morning... Every day I find something creative to do with my life.

Knowledge is freedom and ignorance is slavery

Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.

Do not fear mistakes. There are none.

If you sacrifice your art because of some woman, or some man, or for some color, or for some wealth, you can't be trusted.

A painting is music you can see and music is a painting you can hear.

If you're not nervous then you're not paying attention.

We don't play to be seen. I'm addicted to music, not audiences.

You have to know 400 notes that you can play, then pick the right four.

Jazz is the big brother of Revolution. Revolution follows it around.

I don't hold it against Dizzy [Gillespie], you know, but if a guy wants to play a certain way, you work towards that. If he stops - he's full of crap, you know. I mean, I wouldn't do it, for no money, or for no place in the white man's world. Not just to make money, because then you don't have anything. You don't have as much money as whoever you're trying to ape; that's making money by being commercial. Then you don't have anything to give the world; so you're not important. You might as well be dead.

First you imitate, then you innovate.

Always listen for what you can leave out.

To keep creating you have to be about change.

Don't worry about playing a lot of notes. Just find one pretty one.

Some day I'm gonna call me up on the phone, so when I answer, I can tell myself to shut up.

Good music is good no matter what kind of music it is.

I'll play it first and figure out what it's called later.

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.

People will go for anything they don't understand if it's got enough hype.

My future starts when I wake up every morning.

For me, music and life are all about style.

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.

You should never be comfortable, man. Being comfortable fouled up a lot of musicians.

I can tell whether a person can play just by the way he stands.

...people will go for anything they don't understand if it's got enough hype. They want to be hip, want always to be in on the new thing so they don't look unhip. White people are especially like that, particularly when a black person is doing something they don't understand...That's what I thought was happening when Ornette hit town.

Music is the framework around the silence.

A lot of people ask me where music is going today. I think it's going in short phrases. If you listen, anybody with an ear can hear that. Music is always changing. It changes because of the times and the technology that's available, the material that things are made of, like plastic cars instead of steel. So when you hear an accident today it sounds different, not all the metal colliding like it was in the forties and fifties. Musicians pick up sounds and incorporate that into their playing, so the music that they make will be different.

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.

The thing to judge in any jazz artist is, does the man project and does he have ideas.

My ego only needs a good rhythm section

It takes a long time to sound like yourself.

White folks always think that you have to have a label on everything - you know what I mean?

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.

I like Stan [Getz], because he has so much patience, the way he plays those melodies - other people can't get nothing out of a song, but he can, which takes a lot of imagination.

I don't pay no attention to what critics say about me, the good or the bad. The toughest critic I got is myself...and I'm too vain to play anything I think is bad.

At least one day out of the year all musicans should just put their instruments down, and give thanks to Duke Ellington.

It took me twenty years study and practice to work up to what I wanted to play in this performance. How can she expect to listen five minutes and understand it?

I never thought Jazz was meant to be a museum piece like other dead things once considered artistic.

Don't play what's there, play what's not there.

You know why I quit playing ballads? Cause I love playing ballads.

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.

A legend is an old man with a cane known for what he used to do. I'm still doing it.

You have to practice for a long time before you can learn to sound like yourself