Miles Davis Quotes
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Keith, how does it feel to be a genius?
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Catch Harry Belafonte. He's got a helluva rhythm section.And so have the Pointer Sisters. And that little guy with Sammy Clayton. He plays the whole show with 40 members.
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All my inspiration comes from Ahmad Jamal.
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Good music is good no matter what kind of music it is.
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I began to realize that some of the things Ornette Coleman had said about things being played three or fours ways, independently of each other, were true because Bach had also composed that way.
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The thing to judge in any jazz artist is, does the man project and does he have ideas.
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When kids don't learn about their own heritage in school, they just don't care about school... But you won't see it in the history books unless we get the power to write our own history and tell our story ourselves.
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Jazz is an Uncle Tom word. They should stop using that word for selling. I told George Wein the other day that he should stop using it.
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The way you change and help music is by tryin' to invent new ways to play
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You can't compete with Sweets' sound and time feel. It's impossible.
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You can tell whether a person plays well or not by the way he carries the instrument, whether it means something to him or not.
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When I went in there, we used drum machine on "Time After Time" and "Human Nature".We don't use the drum machine to play a pattern. You play the pattern by being consistent.
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When I heard Coleman Hawkins, I learned to play ballads
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Dave [Holland] plays the way he wants to play. And it's usually what's needed. You know, Dave is such a deep thinker. You can't tell him too much, else it might spoil his spirit, you know.
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Trane was the perfect saxophonist for Monk's music because of the space that Monk always used. Trane could fill up all that space with all them chords and sounds he was playing then.
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Food makes my mind sluggish.
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I said to [Lionel] Richie, "Man, my wife says you must really respect women because you write such beautiful love songs."
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See, if you put a musician in a place where he has to do something different from what he does all the time, then he can do that - but he's got to think differently in order to do it. He's got to play above what he knows - far above it. I've always told the musicians in my band to play what they know and then play above that. Because then anything can happen, and that's where great art and music happens.
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Sometimes [playing free] doesn't happen, because maybe a guy's wife'll come in, you know, and his ego will catch him. If everybody's completely just straight-without any old ladies over here, a fourth of whisky over there; if it's balanced right, it'll come off. It has to be. But when you get egos involved with playing free, you can't do it.
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It's not the note you play that's the wrong note - it's the note you play afterwards that makes it right or wrong.
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A lot of people ask me where music is going today. I think it's going in short phrases. If you listen, anybody with an ear can hear that. Music is always changing. It changes because of the times and the technology that's available, the material that things are made of, like plastic cars instead of steel. So when you hear an accident today it sounds different, not all the metal colliding like it was in the forties and fifties. Musicians pick up sounds and incorporate that into their playing, so the music that they make will be different.
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I can tell whether a person can play just by the way he stands.
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If you make a suggestion and [musicians] don't know what you mean, you have to be able to do it yourself. I often sit down on drums and show 'em just exactly what I want. And I do it and then say, "How do you do that?" It's because I know how it looks, I know what I want to hear, and I don't drop or rush any tempo. It ain't in my body, it ain't in my nephew's body.
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If you had to call it "unison", it ain't unison. It ain't the same as somebody else. If you can hear that it's unison, and you have to name it something other than "unison", it ain't unison, you know what I mean? It's two guys playin', but one guy is playin' slightly out of tune, one is playin' slightly off meter.
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I think every Negro over fifty should get a medal for putting up with all that crap.
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In respect for drummers, see, I love drummers.
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If you got up on the bandstand at Minton's and couldn't play, you were not only going to be embarrassed by the people ignoring you or booing you, you might get your ass kicked.
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[Jazz musicians] feel comfortable with their clichés, you know.
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Certain drummers drop time, and I like to play on top of the beat.
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I did Bronislaw Kaper's tune. He wrote "On Green Dolphin Street." I mean, I did all those ballads, all them ballads from South America. All those tunes - the guitar concerto on Sketches Of Spain. All those are Spanish melodies. Some of them we made up ourselves.
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