Miles Davis

If you’re trying to be hip, be hip!

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

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

If you got up on the bandstand at Minton’s and couldn’t play, you might get your ass kicked.

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

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

Too many jazz pianists limit themselves to a personal style, a trademark, so to speak. They confine themselves to one type of playing. I believe in using the entire piano as a single instrument capable of expressing every possible musical idea. I have no one style. I play as I feel.

I heard someone say ‘What’s that kid doing here? Call your piano player and let’s get started.’

To the person who uses music as a medium for the expression of ideas, feelings, images, or what have you; anything which facilitates this expression is properly his instrument.

I can count on one hand the number of instrumental hits there have been over the last 10 years.

Trying to play the new concept with a outward bound feeling.

If T-Bone Walker had been a woman, I would have asked him to marry me. I’d never heard anything like that before: single-string blues played on an electric guitar.

I can tell whether a person can play just by the way he stands.

I never wanted to be famous. I only wanted to be great.

Even now, at 82 years old, if I don’t learn something every day, you know what I think? It’s a day lost. Now, I don’t practice every day. I just take the guitar, swear at it. But I should be swearing at myself. But I fool with music. I’m doing something musically all the time. And my ears are wide open for anything I can hear.

A good quartet is like a good conversation among friends interacting to each other’s ideas.

I’m fortunate that I’m making a living at it now because I’m not equipped to do anything else.

For years the trio did nothing but play for musicians and other hip people. We starved.

I’m now a legend, whether I want to be or not.

[on B.B. King] He is without a doubt the most important artist the blues has ever produced, and the most humble and genuine man you would ever wish to meet. In terms of scale or stature, I believe that if Robert Johnson was reincarnated, he is probably B.B. King.

Music used to be essential and meaningful, but now it’s disposable.