Miles Davis

Jazz is the big brother of Revolution. Revolution follows it around.

Always look ahead, but never look back.

I never thought Jazz was meant to be a museum piece like other dead things once considered artistic.

To keep creating you have to be about change.

If you’re trying to be hip, be hip!

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

We’re here to have a ball.

The Jazz Age became less and less an affair of youth. The sequel was like a children’s party taken over by the elders.

A Jazz performance centers upon the process of creation. The final objective is not only the finished product, but the path and process taken towards it.

The reason I write music is that I feel it’s a vehicle or channel which leads to your true self, your essence.

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

If I could sell 500 million records every time, it would be great. But I’ve also had the luxury experience of having it when I was a teenager, in a very kind of model version of it.

I’m going to be on the road for the rest of my life.

The human being receives the pleasure from music, not from the argument over what it is.

Music making is the most joyful activity possible, the most perfect expression of any emotion.

I wanted to sustain a note like a singer. I wanted to phrase a note like a saxist. By bending the strings, by trilling my hand – and I have big fat hands – I could achieve something that approximated a vocal vibrato. I could sustain a note. I wanted to connect my guitar to human emotions. By fooling with the feedback between my amplifier and instrument, I started experimenting with sounds that expressed my feelings, whether happy or sad, bouncy or bluesy. I was looking for ways to let my guitar sing.

I adore extravagance but I abhor waste.

To the person who uses music as a medium for the expression of ideas, feelings, images, or what have you; anything which facilitates this expression is properly his instrument.

I felt a responsibility to present a viable alternative to the popular electric sound.

Whenever I’m in Kansas City, I think back to all the jazz-blues greats who played the blues here – like Count Basie, Charlie Parker and Jay McShann. I watched those guys jam in different places and heard a lot of things – but I couldn’t do what they did. They were too good.

There’s always this sound out there that’s just a little beyond my reach and that just sort of keeps me going.