Miles Davis

For me, music and life are all about style

Don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there.

I’m always thinking about creating. My future starts when I wake up in the morning and see the light. Then I’m grateful.

You know why I quit playing ballads? Cause I love playing ballads.

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.

Nothing is out of the question for me. I’m always thinking about creating. My future starts when I wake up in the morning and see the light…Then I’m grateful.

It’s not jazz as we know jazz here in America.

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.

My Strat is another arm, it’s part of me. It doesn’t feel like a guitar at all. It’s an implement which is my voice.

They’re not particular about whether you’re playing a flatted fifth or a ruptured 129th as long as they can dance to it.

I did all you can do with a clarinet. Any more would have been less.

The most important thing I look for in a musician is whether he knows how to listen.

You don’t want to play like B. B. King. You want to be you. So what you do is listen to players you like, and try to “borrow” a little bit from each guy. You don’t try to sound exactly like the other guy, you just add the bits to your vocabulary. It’s like learning to read or write.

It’s part of what the blues does, to write about these things. JB Lenoir was the main one in this regard – he wrote about Korea, too, in fact. Songs that reflect these current situations – in his case, racial issues for the most part: in my case, what has happened to me, and I was in Korea.

Jazz is the type of music that can absorb so many things and still be Jazz.

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

My dream is to do whatever I want without any interference from the record company.

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

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

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’

I always had a deep feeling to be one with the very minute I’m in.