Marcus Miller

I’m on some singer’s record date for a demo and I get a note to call Miles Davis. Of course, I didn’t believe it, but I wasn’t going to take a chance by not calling, and it was Miles. He said, ‘I’ve got a session in an hour over at Columbia, can you make it’

If you listen to Donny Hathaway, he had a lot of jazz elements in the way he sang, … For me, the two styles borrow from each other so much that sometimes it’s hard for me to make a distinction. When you hear Lalah sing the combination, that’s when she really shines – when she’s allowed to dip into her jazz when she wants to and then get soulful and do the R ‘n’ B thing.

That’s a great thing about jazz. We leave it a little space so that we have the opportunity to go where the moment takes us

A great thing about being a musician is you don’t stop until the day you die.

There is two kinds of music, the good, and the bad. I play the good kind.

Being so inescapably a part of it, I’ll never know what the listener gets, what the listener feels and that’s too bad.

Creativity is more than just being different. Anybody can plan weird; that’s easy. What’s hard is to be as simple as Bach. Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple.

The music field was the first to break down racial barriers, because in order to play together, you have to love the people you are playing with, and if you have any racial inhibitions, you wouldn’t be able to do that.

It’s true I’ve always been attracted to the jazz band in an orchestral way, rather than a band way.

The thing I always default to is that I’ll always be here to write songs.

Jazz is like wine. When it is new it’s only for the experts, but when it gets older everybody wants it.

I’m famous… ain’t that a bitch?

I learned my songs from the birds of the Brazilian forest.

Practicing is like getting your vocabulary together to use on the gig.

Once you start collecting records you learn more and more about Jazz and Blues.

Kinship doesn’t come from skin color. It’s in your soul and your mind.

Listening is more important than anything because that’s what music is. Somebody is playing something and you’re receiving it.

If a song’s about something I’ve experienced or that could’ve happened to me it’s good. But if it’s alien to me, I couldn’t lend anything to it. Because that’s what soul is all about.

How can I turn emotion into knowledge? That’s what I try to do with my horn.