Miles Davis Quotes

Being rebellious and black, a nonconformist, being cool and hip and angry and sophisticated and ultra clean, whatever else you want to call it — I was all those things and more. But I was playing the fuck out of my horn and had a great group, so I didn't get recognition based only on a rebel image.

If you understood everything I said, you’d be me

See, music is about style.

When you are creating your own shit, man, even the sky ain't the limit.

No, no pensaré en Gil como alguien que murió, ni tampoco pienso así en Jimmy, porque mi mente no va por esos caminos. Le echaré de menos, pero Gil sigue estando vivo en mi recuerdo, como lo está Jimmy, como lo están Trane y Bud y Monk y Bird y Mingus y Red y Paul y Wynton y todo el resto de hijoputas geniales, como Philly Joe, que ya han desaparecido de este mundo.

Knowledge is freedom and ignorance is slavery.

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.

If you don't know what to play, play nothing.

When you’re creating your own shit, man, even the sky ain’t the limit.

He never wasted a melody. He never wasted a phrase. He and Duke Ellington changed the whole sound. There is no way to describe it because there's nobody on this earth that can do that anymore. What he did to the texture of an orchestration, what he did with a pop song is like writing an original piece. Students will discover him. They'll have to take his music apart layer by layer. That's how they'll know what kind of genius he was.

WE WERE ALL UP IN THAT SHIT LIKE A MUTHAFUCKA. IT'S CLEANER THAN A BROKE DICK DOG.

Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.

Bad music is what will ruin music, not the instruments musicians choose to play.

El conocimiento, el saber, es libertad, mientras que la ignorancia es esclavitud, y yo, simplemente, no podía creer que alguien estuviera tan cerca de la libertad y no se aprovechase de su buena suerte.

It’s like, how did Columbus discover America when the Indians were already here? What kind of shit is that, but white people’s shit?