Miles Davis

For me, music and life are all about style

If you got up on the bandstand at Minton’s and couldn’t play, you might get your ass kicked.

I don’t like to hear someone put down Dixieland. Those people who say there’s no music but bop are just stupid; it shows how much they don’t know.

Monk taught me more about music composition than anyone else on 52nd Street.

I’ll play it first and tell you what it is later.

Do not fear mistakes, there are none.

I love it. When they stop imitating me then I’ll start wondering where I’m going wrong. Every day when I sit down to play, I learn something new.

Jazz improvisation is the art of collective negotiated expression.

The inspired moment may sometimes be described as a kind of hallucinatory state of mind: one half of the personality emotes and dictates while the other half listens and notates. The half that listens has better look the other way, had better simulate a half attention only, for the half that dictates is easily disgruntled and avenges itself for too close inspection by fading entirely away.

I’m gonna live till I die.

Have you ever wondered why young people take to music like fish to water? Maybe it’s because music is fun, plain and simple.

I like people who have worked long and hard, developing through introspection and dedication.

90%, 100% are going there to hear the singing. The story is another thing. Nobody’s interested in the story. Happiness is happiness.

I used to play pianos in bars. You know in hotels, you’d see guys playing piano with a snifter? That was me, with a painted-on mustache. I was about 15.

Well, if you find a note tonight that sounds good, play the same damn note every night!

Everybody has somebody that they patterned themselves after.

I sought some kind of freedom in music, in the promise of transcendence and the idea that the purity and the innocence of a mythical god could somehow deliver me from darkness.

[moving to Las Vegas] It was sort of like a man getting married – you don’t have to go out looking for girls, you’ve got your girl with you. I could go to casinos any time I had money and wanted to, so I actually went less.

Jazz musicians have some outlaw in them somewhere.

There’s so many ways you can hit one note.

The blues fitted in with the early 60s, the social way of life at the time.