I’ll play it first and tell you what it is afterwards.
Monk encouraged me to emancipate the drums from their subservient role as timekeepers.
There are four qualities essential to a great Jazzman: taste, courage, individuality and irreverence. These are the qualities I want to retain in my music.
I did all you can do with a clarinet. Any more would have been less.
I have younger friends who don’t work and they aren’t doing so well. My secret is to keep going, keep working.
The hippest thing you can do is not play at all. Just listen.
You’ve got to learn your instrument. Then, you practice, practice, practice. And then, when you finally get up there on the bandstand, forget all that and just wail.
What we do as artists is a combination of experience and imagination. How that creeps into your work is not so linear.
Jazz is a sideways glance at music. It’s like being an architect, knowing the basis of design but understanding that the façade can be whatever you dream. I’m a free person. I don’t want to be tied down.
Play what you know and then play above that.
Jazz? has no boundaries.
I always had a deep feeling to be one with the very minute I’m in.
I know what I’ve done for music, but don’t call me a legend. Just call me Miles Davis.
One way or the other, if you want to find reasons why you shouldn’t keep on, you’ll find ’em. The obstacles are all there; there are a million of ’em.
Music comes from the moment, it is spontaneous, it exists at the time it is created.
The prospect of having to sit through one of Rachmaninov’s extended symphonies or piano concertos tends, quite frankly, to depress me. All those notes, and to what end?
When I write songs that touch on social relevance, all you have to do is pick up a newspaper.
My style is to just play. The more live you capture your music-the more unthought-out-the more magical it is.
Indian music is very soulful and the only other school that develops improv to the high degree you find in Jazz.
The deeper you get into the music allows the ability to appreciate art and all other forms of expression.
I never thought Jazz was meant to be a museum piece like other dead things once considered artistic.
