Stop before you’re done.
Play what you know and then play above that.
I know what I’ve done for music, but don’t call me a legend. Just call me Miles Davis.
The thing to judge in any jazz artist is, does the man project and does he have ideas.
It’s always been a gift with me, hearing music the way I do. I don’t know where it comes from, it’s just there and I don’t question it.
Monk taught me more about music composition than anyone else on 52nd Street.
I never thought Jazz was meant to be a museum piece like other dead things once considered artistic.
Jazz is a very accurate, curiously accurate accompaniment to 20th century America.
It was in tune when I bought it.
Learning to read music in Braille and play by ear helped me develop a damn good memory.
The thing I always default to is that I’ll always be here to write songs.
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.
Mary Lou Williams used to tell me: If you’re not feeling right, play a minor tune and it falls into place.
I see my body as an instrument, rather than an ornament.
Jazz music has always made powerful statements about freedom, creativity and personal identity.
When you make a sound, it carries on to infinity. Sound is a vibration. Vibration is energy. All of that survives in space long after were dead. When I walk on stage at the Wiener Staatsoper, I can feel the footsteps of Chopin and Rachmaninov.
The day of the great jazz improviser who doesn’t know how to read music is over.
You can read all the textbooks and listen to all the records, but you have to play with musicians that are better than you.
In olden days a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking, now heaven knows, anything goes.
I started out to become a jazz pianist; in the meantime I started singing and I sang the way I felt and that’s just the way it came out.
Jazz music will continue to thrive, possibly in unexpected ways.
In the 1990s, with Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston, those really big female artists were very glamorous, it was all about the glamour at that time. And so there was a big switch, the desire to be more who you were, not so beholden to this whole standard of beauty. It was a liberation. You see Mary J Blige – she did the same, wearing the combat boots.
