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If you have to ask, you’ll never know.

Miles Davis

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.
MILES DAVIS

Children Heritage History Learning Ourselves Story
Jazz is like blues with a shot of heroin!
MILES DAVIS

Drugs Feeling Music
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

Imagination Myself Patience People Play
We don’t play to be seen. I’m addicted to music, not audiences.
MILES DAVIS

Addiction Audience Music Myself Play Seen
If you hit a wrong note, it’s the next note that you play that determines if it’s good or bad.
MILES DAVIS

Determination Note Play Wrong Yourself
I’ll play it first and figure out what it’s called later.
MILES DAVIS

Music Myself Name Play
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

Art Celebrity Form Man Money Musician
It’s not the notes you play, it’s the notes you don’t play.
MILES DAVIS

Musician Notes Play Yourself
The thing to judge in any jazz artist is, does the man project and does he have ideas.
MILES DAVIS

Ideas Judgement Man Project
Don’t worry about playing a lot of notes. Just find one pretty one.
MILES DAVIS

Finding Music Notes Oneself Play Worry
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

Enjoyment Listening White
Music is an addiction.
MILES DAVIS

Addiction Music One Liner
In improvisation, there are no mistakes.
MILES DAVIS

Improvisation Mistake Spontaneous
There are no wrong notes in jazz: only notes in the wrong places.
MILES DAVIS

Note Place Wrong
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

Artistic Music People Reach Thinking
I usually write from the rhythm section…If a drummer got a funky beat on some things – like a half-shuffle or a shuffle or a backbeat that’s even – I can write something.
MILES DAVIS

Myself Rhythm Writing

If you have to ask, you’ll never know.

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If you have to ask, you’ll never know.

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