We’re not going to play the blues anymore. Let the white folks play the blues. They got ’em, so they can keep ’em.
MILES DAVISThere are no wrong notes in jazz: only notes in the wrong places.
More Miles Davis Quotes
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Always listen for what you can leave out.
MILES DAVIS -
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.
MILES DAVIS -
You can’t play anything on a horn that Louis Armstrong hasn’t played.
MILES DAVIS -
Music is a funny thing when you really come to think about it.
MILES DAVIS -
It takes a long time to sound like yourself.
MILES DAVIS -
Certain drummers drop time, and I like to play on top of the beat.
MILES DAVIS -
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 -
It takes you years to learn how to play like yourself.
MILES DAVIS -
Some musicians play with their heart, you know what I mean? I don’t know what to tell a person that can’t – if you can’t tell a person what you’re talkin’ about when they’re rushin’ or droppin’ the tempo, you get somebody else.
MILES DAVIS -
There are no wrong notes in jazz: only notes in the wrong places.
MILES DAVIS -
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 -
I think the greatest sound in the world is the human voice.
MILES DAVIS -
I’ll play it first and figure out what it’s called later.
MILES DAVIS -
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 -
We don’t play to be seen. I’m addicted to music, not audiences.
MILES DAVIS -
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 -
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 -
If you understood everything I say, you’d be me!
MILES DAVIS -
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.
MILES DAVIS -
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 -
Music is the framework around the silence.
MILES DAVIS -
Keith, how does it feel to be a genius?
MILES DAVIS -
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 -
I ain’t no entertainer, and ain’t trying to be one. I am one thing, a musician.
MILES DAVIS -
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.
MILES DAVIS -
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.
MILES DAVIS