Miles Davis

It’s not the notes you play, it’s the notes you don’t play.

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

Jazz music has got to have that thing. You have to be born with it. You can’t even buy it. If you could buy it, they’d have it at the next Newport festival.

I really liked Wynton when I first met him. He’s still a nice young man, only confused.

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

To keep creating you have to be about change.

Anyone who doesn’t give [his debut album, The College Dropout] a perfect score is lowering the integrity of the magazine

I was a singing disc jockey who heard every type of music there was – and loved it all.

One can be very happy without demanding that others agree with them.

So until we see you again, bright moments and keep searchin’ for your mystery note on the universal piano of life.

[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.

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

A good player can make any instrument sound good.

You can read all the textbooks and listen to all the records, but you have to play with musicians that are better than you.

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

Life is not about finding our limitations, it’s about finding our infinity.

I listen to everything, I listen to all artists that come along.

I don’t consider myself a musician who has achieved perfection and can’t develop any further.

There’s a lot of recreational Jazz going on, where cats learn a particular style and become sharks on somebody else’s language.

Now I need to take a piece of wood and make it sound like the railroad track, but I also had to make it beautiful and lovable so that a person playing it would think of it in terms of his mistress, a bartender, his wife, a good psychiatrist – whatever.

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