Miles Davis

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

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

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

[On Louis Armstrong] You can’t play nothing on modern trumpet that doesn’t come from him, not even modern shit. I can’t even remember a time when he sounded bad playing the trumpet. Never. Not even one time. He had great feeling up in his playing and he always played on the beat. I just loved the way he played and sang.

Stop before you’re done.

The thing to judge in any jazz artist is, does the man project and does he have ideas.

By and large Jazz has always been like the kind of a man you wouldn’t want your daughter to associate with.

Jazz music today is from the head and not the heart.

When you begin to teach Jazz, the most dangerous thing is to teach style.

I have no one style.

Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.

I’m not really on a mission to tell anybody anything. I’d rather be figured out.

The drummer; he inspired me to play like no one else I have ever met.

There has always been a tension between Jazz as a commercial music and as an art form.

By and large, jazz has always been like the kind of a man you wouldn’t want your daughter to associate with.

Jazz isn’t the kind of music you’re going to learn in 3 or 4 years or get because you have talent for music.

An artist should write for himself and not for an audience. If the audience likes it, great. If not, they can keep away.

I’ve never thought the blues was a matter of copying other people. The blues singer should sing songs about his own life. And once the ball got rolling, I felt confident enough to do that as well as cover other people’s songs, and the tributes. You’ve got to think about representing your own life in the music, and for me that meant bringing in an element of jazz; I was brought up on jazz, it was my father’s work, it was in the house.

There are no natural barriers. It’s all music.

I don’t have to lay on the couch and see a therapist because my therapy is in art.

She’s Dynamite’ was a 100 years ago, and I recorded that song because the company thought that it was a great song and it was hot. That was the beginning of rock n’ roll, and I guess they thought it would be a BB King version of rock n’ roll.