Miles Davis Quotes

He could very well be the Duke Ellington of Rock 'n' Roll.

Why'd you put that white bitch on there?

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

It's not about standing still and becoming safe. If anybody wants to keep creating they have to be about change.

Good music is good no matter what kind of music it is.

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

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

But if I got my mind on something about my band or something else, well, hell, no, I don’t want to talk. When I’m working I’m concentrating. I bet you if I was a doctor sewing on some son of a bitch’s heart, they wouldn’t want me to talk.

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.

Davis: I didn’t grow up with any, not as friends, to speak of. But I went to school with some. In high school, I was the best in the music class on the trumpet. I knew it and all the rest knew it — but all the contest first prizes went to the boys with blue eyes. It made me so mad I made up my mind to outdo anybody white on my horn. If I hadn’t met that prejudice, I probably wouldn’t have had as much drive in my work. I have thought about that a lot. I have thought that prejudice and curiosity have been responsible for what I have done in music.

I can't tell... All those white tenor players sound alike to me.

I remember one time - it might have been a couple times - at the Fillmore East in 1970, I was opening for this sorry-ass cat named Steve Miller. Steve Miller didn't have his shit going for him, so I'm pissed because I got to open for this non-playing motherfucker just because he had one or two sorry-ass records out. So I would come late and he would have to go on first and then we got there we smoked the motherfucking place, everybody dug it.

I love Pops, I love the way he sings, the way he plays - everything he does, except when he says something against modern-jazz music.

I’m always thinking about creating. My future starts when I wake up in the morning and see the light.

If you hit a wrong note, it's the next note that you play that determines if it's good or bad.