Miles Davis

Bebop was about change, about evolution. It wasn’t about standing still and being safe.

Stop before you’re done.

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

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.

In Europe, they like everything you do. The mistakes and everything. That’s a little bit too much.

So What or Kind of Blue were done in that era, the right hour, the right day. It’s over; it’s on the record.

I’m still searching even today for a sound, like the guy that’s searching for a home. I haven’t been able to find that completely. I’m satisfied at times with the sound of my guitar… but it is a little sound that I hear but I can’t tell anybody about it. I don’t know how. But if I ever get it, I’ll know.

Deep, unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state.

Is there a meaning to music? Yes. Can you state in so many words what the meaning is? No.

I’ll always remember when I first heard Lester [Young]. I’d never heard anyone like him before. He was a stylist with a different sound. A sound I’d never heard before or since. To be honest with you, I didn’t much like it at first.

Well if I could play like Wynton, I wouldn’t play like Wynton.

It’s all music.

Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans.

Musicians have a really big part to play in spreading messages because they’re able to reach a large portion of people on an emotional level. Artists reach people at their heart; it’s the only time we meet in one place and put our differences aside. When you’re in a forum listening to music, all you feel in that moment is love and the understanding.

I hope my recordings of my own works won’t inhibit other people’s performances. The brutal fact is that one doesn’t always get the exact tempo one wants, although one improves with experience.

Jazz is an art that makes a person completely naked.

Jazz music just resonates with the frequency of me.

I think I’ve tried to stay true to my music since the beginning. It’s kind of hard because of the access and technology but I just do what I do.

People like the idea of the trio and so I did mostly trio.

Jazz is so incestuous that it’s starting to kill itself.

Jazz is not to be sliced into bites by mass marketing geniuses who assume we are mindless cattle.