Miles Davis

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.

Music is an addiction.

Music and life are all about style.

Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.

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

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

It doesn’t have to be happy music to be inspiring.

[on B. B. King] Very seldom does he talks about the way he play, man. He always wanna talk about young women. And I fuss at him sometimes, I say, ‘Man I wanna know what did you do here!’

The real innovators did their innovating by just being themselves.

Most jazz players work out their solos, at least to the extent that they have a very specific vocabulary.

Bird said he worked as dishwasher at Onyx Club on 52nd St. in the early 1940s just to hear Art Tatum play.

The true artform is being a human being.

I started playing piano when I was 6. And I knew that wanted to be involved in that form of expression, whether it was through music, or acting, or dancing, or painting, or writing.

If I’m not a jazz player all the time, I’ve at least been cued in to what I do by jazz.

Change is always happening. That’s one of the wonderful things about Jazz music.

There’s a way of playing safe, there’s a way of using tricks and there’s the way I like to play which is dangerously where you’re going to take a chance on making mistakes in order to create something you haven’t created before.

A name doesn’t make the music. It’s just called that to differentiate it from other types of music.

I am an American citizen and feel I am entitled to the same rights as any other citizen.

Jazz has an aesthetic intimacy, a romantic transference.

Just to keep it interesting I’ll tune the guitar randomly, so I don’t know what’s going to come out.

Music and song are, in my opinion, so fine and necessary a part of life that without them we cannot be said really to live at all.