Miles Davis Quotes & Sayings

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

Miles Davis

#2. If you understood everything I said, you'd be me

Miles Davis

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

Miles Davis

#4. I was minding my own business when something says to me, "you ought to blow trumpet." I have just been trying ever since.

Miles Davis

#5. I always listen to what I can leave out.

Miles Davis

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

Miles Davis

#7. 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.

Miles Davis

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

Miles Davis

#9. To keep creating you have to be about change.

Miles Davis

#10. If you love them in the morning with their eyes full of crust; if you love them at night with their hair full of rollers, chances are, you're in love.

Miles Davis

#11. Everybody ought to listen to Benny [Carter]. He's a whole musical education.

Miles Davis

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

Miles Davis

#13. See, music is about style.

Miles Davis

#14. Bad music is what will ruin music, not the instruments musicians choose to play.

Miles Davis

#15. Jazz is an Uncle Tom word. They should stop using that word for selling. I told George Wein the other day that he should stop using it.

Miles Davis

#16. [Prince] could very well be the Duke Ellington of Rock 'n' Roll.

Miles Davis

#17. You can't compete with Sweets' sound and time feel. It's impossible.

Miles Davis

#18. Keith, how does it feel to be a genius?

Miles Davis

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

Miles Davis

#20. 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

#21. Music is the framework around the silence.

Miles Davis

#22. You can dominate a game if you dominate on the line ... We're just going to have to go out there and work hard and blow people off the ball, and let our runners do what they do best.

Miles Davis

#23. You can't play anything on a horn that Louis Armstrong hasn't played

Miles Davis

#24. Monk taught me more about music composition than anyone else on 52nd Street.

Miles Davis

#25. When you work with great musicians, they are always a part of you ... their spirits are walking around in me, so they're still here and passing it on to others.

Miles Davis

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

Miles Davis

#27. 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.

Miles Davis

#28. I'm not messing around with nobody's woman. If I want a woman I go get her - you know what I mean?

Miles Davis

#29. My father's rich, my momma's good looking. Right? And I can play the Blues. I've never suffered and don't intend to suffer.

Miles Davis

#30. When you're creating your own shit, man, even the sky ain't the limit.

Miles Davis

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

Miles Davis

#32. For me, music and life are all about style.

Miles Davis

#33. Jazz is like blues with a shot of heroin!

Miles Davis

#34. It takes a long time to sound like yourself.

Miles Davis

#35. WE WERE ALL UP IN THAT SHIT LIKE A MUTHAFUCKA. IT'S CLEANER THAN A BROKE DICK DOG.

Miles Davis

#36. I'm always thinking about creating. My future starts when I wake up in the morning and see the light.

Miles Davis

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

Miles Davis

#38. When the band plays fast, you play slow; when the band plays slow, you play fast.

Miles Davis

#39. 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.

Miles Davis

#40. Naw, I wasn't going to sell my principles for them. I wanted to be accepted as a good musician and that didn't call for no grinning, but just being able to play the horn good. And that's what I did then and now. Critics can take that or leave it.

Miles Davis

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

Miles Davis

#42. So What or Kind of Blue were done in that era, the right hour, the right day. It's over; it's on the record.

Miles Davis

#43. You have to be born with it. You can't even buy it. If you could buy it, they'd have it at the next Newport Festival.

Miles Davis

#44. Coltrane, you cant play everything at once!

Miles Davis

#45. All my inspiration comes from Ahmad Jamal.

Miles Davis

#46. 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.

Miles Davis

#47. 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.

Miles Davis

#48. My future starts when I wake up every morning. Every day I find something creative to do with my life.

Miles Davis

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

Miles Davis

#50. The way you change and help music is by tryin' to invent new ways to play

Miles Davis

#51. Don't be afraid of mistakes - There are none.

Miles Davis

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

Miles Davis

#53. It's always been a gift with me, hearing music the way I do. I don't know where it comes from, it's just there and I don't question it.

Miles Davis

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

Miles Davis

#55. If you're trying to be hip, be hip.

Miles Davis

#56. First you imitate, then you innovate.

Miles Davis

#57. I still got my Ferrari.

Miles Davis

#58. In improvisation, there are no mistakes.

Miles Davis

#59. Always listen for what you can leave out.

Miles Davis

#60. 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

#61. If you hit a wrong note, it's the next note that you play that determines if it's good or bad.

Miles Davis

#62. 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.

Miles Davis

#63. That was my gift ... having the ability to put certain guys together that would create a chemistry and then letting them go; letting them play what they knew, and above it.

Miles Davis

#64. Knowledge is freedom and ignorance is slavery

Miles Davis

#65. I'll play it first and tell you what it is later.

Miles Davis

#66. I hate how white people always try to take credit for something after they discover it. Like it wasn't happening before they found out about it
which most times is always late, and they didn't have nothing to do with it happening.

Miles Davis

#67. Play what you know and then play above that

Miles Davis

#68. The only reason to write a new song is because you're tired of the old ones.

Miles Davis

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

Miles Davis

#70. If you understood everything I say, you'd be me!

Miles Davis

#71. Do not be afraid of errors. There are no errors.

Miles Davis

#72. I ain't no entertainer, and ain't trying to be one. I am one thing, a musician.

Miles Davis

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

Miles Davis

#74. I don't care if a dude is purple with green breath as long as he can swing.

Miles Davis

#75. 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.

Miles Davis

#76. 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?

Miles Davis

#77. 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

#78. Food makes my mind sluggish.

Miles Davis

#79. 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.

Miles Davis

#80. As long as I've been playing, they never say I done anything. They always say that some white guy did it.

Miles Davis

#81. I think every Negro over fifty should get a medal for putting up with all that crap.

Miles Davis

#82. If you don't know what to play, play nothing.

Miles Davis

#83. I'm a fiend when it comes to good pastry, and the French make the best as far as I'm concerned.

Miles Davis

#84. There are no wrong notes in jazz: only notes in the wrong places.

Miles Davis

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

Miles Davis

#86. Man, sometimes it takes you a long time to sound like yourself.

Miles Davis

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

Miles Davis

#88. Music is an addiction.

Miles Davis

#89. When I got into music I went all the way into music; I didn't have no time after that for nothing else.

Miles Davis

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

Miles Davis

#91. It's like, how did Columbus discover America when the Indians were already here? What kind of shit is that, but white people's shit?

Miles Davis

#92. 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

#93. Joao Gilberto on guitar could read a newspaper and sound good.

Miles Davis

#94. I'll play it and tell you what it is later.

Miles Davis

#95. I don't like to hear someone put down dixieland. Those people who say there's no music but bop are just stupid; it shows how much they don't know.

Miles Davis