"If you're going to drop behind, you have to keep it there."
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Quote collection
Miles Davis quotes (page 8 of 9)
175 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Monk taught me more about music composition than anyone else on 52nd Street."
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"When I went in there, we used drum machine on "Time After Time" and "Human Nature".We don't use the drum machine to play a pattern. You play the pattern by being consistent."
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"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."
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"I've gotten hernias from drummers when they drop tempo."
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"When we edit the music, I always remember, "It's my band. Save me a place to play.""
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"They [police] do me like that all the time! "What you work for?"."
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"I did Bronislaw Kaper's tune. He wrote "On Green Dolphin Street." I mean, I did all those ballads, all them ballads from South America. All those tunes - the guitar concerto on Sketches Of Spain. All those are Spanish melodies. Some of them we made up ourselves."
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"I don't wanna talk about Teo [Macero]. He's a helluva musician, a brilliant musician, but he's just not for me, that's all. I can elaborate on it, but I don't want to do that."
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"As long as I've been playing, they never say I done anything. They always say that some white guy did it."
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"Jazz musicians are so comfortable. The reason they can't do what we do is because they're so comfortable doin' what they do."
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"[Jazz musicians] feel comfortable with their clichés, you know."
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"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."
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"It's like swimmin' without warmin' up, yuo know what I mean? So [cackles] we use the drum machine, and we take it out."
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"If you make a suggestion and [musicians] don't know what you mean, you have to be able to do it yourself. I often sit down on drums and show 'em just exactly what I want. And I do it and then say, "How do you do that?" It's because I know how it looks, I know what I want to hear, and I don't drop or rush any tempo. It ain't in my body, it ain't in my nephew's body."
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"Lionel [Richie] said, "Yeah, I learned chords and stuff playin' against your albums.""
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"If you have a tone like mine that is recognizable. No matter what I play, when you hear my tone you can tell it's me."
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"Japanese people they hear my warmin' up and they start screamin'. They can tell it's me.It's my tone on the trumpet, it sounds like I'm speakin'."
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"I was minding my own business when something says to me, "you ought to blow trumpet." I have just been trying ever since."
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"The only way a drum machine will get out of beat is for you not to pay your electric bill."
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