"Don't worry about playing a lot of notes. Just find one pretty one."
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Quote collection
Miles Davis quotes (page 2 of 9)
175 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Some day I'm gonna call me up on the phone, so when I answer, I can tell myself to shut up."
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"Good music is good no matter what kind of music it is."
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"I'll play it first and figure out what it's called later."
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"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."
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"People will go for anything they don't understand if it's got enough hype."
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"My future starts when I wake up every morning."
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"For me, music and life are all about style."
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"You should never be comfortable, man. Being comfortable fouled up a lot of musicians."
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"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."
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"I can tell whether a person can play just by the way he stands."
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"...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."
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"Music is the framework around the silence."
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"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."
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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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"The thing to judge in any jazz artist is, does the man project and does he have ideas."
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"My ego only needs a good rhythm section"
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"It takes a long time to sound like yourself."
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"White folks always think that you have to have a label on everything - you know what I mean?"
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"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."
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