"Anybody can play. The note is only 20 percent. The attitude of the motherfucker who plays it is 80 percent."
"Birth of the Cool' became a collector's item, I think, out of a reaction to Bird and Dizzy's music. Bird and Diz played this hip, real fast thing, and if you weren't a fast listener, you couldn't catch the humor or the feeling in their music. Their musical sound wasn't sweet, and it didn't have harmonic lines that you could easily hum out on the street with your girlfriend trying to get over with a kiss."
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Source: Miles Davis, Quincy Troupe (1989). “Miles, the autobiography”, Simon & Schuster
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"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."
"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."
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