Top 188 Quotes & Sayings by Miles Davis - Page 3

You can't eat a winner's plaque.

Tom Jones is funny to me, man. I mean, he really tries to ape Ray Charles and Sammy Davis, you know. He's nice-looking; he looks good doing it. I mean, if I was him, I'd do the same thing. If I was only thinking about making money.

Coltrane, you cant play everything at once!

John Lee Hooker is the funkiest man alive

That's the way women do. The frown. They want to give you the attitude to approach them back, by giving you a negative vibe.

He sounded to me like he's supposed to be the savior of jazz. Sometimes people speak as though someone asked them a question. Well, no one asked him a question.

You can't compete with Sweets' sound and time feel. It's impossible.

I gave the album [You're Under Arrest] to Quincy Jones and he loved "D Train". We couldn't call it "D Train"; it's called "MDI/Something's On Your Mind/MD2". That's on the album.

[Prince] could very well be the Duke Ellington of Rock 'n' Roll.

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.

Certain drummers drop time, and I like to play on top of the beat.

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.

I said to [Lionel] Richie, "Man, my wife says you must really respect women because you write such beautiful love songs."

Monk was a gentle person, gentle and beautiful, but he was strong as an ox. And if I had ever said something about punching Monk out in front of his face - and I never did - then somebody should have just come and got me and taken me to the madhouse, because Monk could have just picked my little ass up and thrown me through a wall.

I'm out there doing the best that I can, My lip is cut and I'm still playing.

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.

Drummers - sometimes they play and they listen. And that little listen takes a speck away from the right tempo.

There are no wrong notes.

If you're trying to be hip, be hip.

I can't write anything for myself. I can write when I hear like [John] Coltrane play something; I used to write chords and stuff for him to play in one bar. I can write for other people, but I don't never write for myself.

I never thought that the music called "jazz" was ever meant to reach just a small group of people, or become a museum thing locked under glass like all the other dead things that were once considered artistic.

I would never try and play like Harry James, because I don't like his tone - for me. It's just white. You know what I mean? He has what we black trumpet players call a white sound. But it's for white music ... I can tell a white trumpet player, just listening to a record. There'll be something he'll do that'll let me know that he's white.

[Jazz musicians] feel comfortable with their clichés, you know.

We're not going to play the blues anymore. Let the white folks play the blues. They got 'em, so they can keep 'em.

When I heard Coleman Hawkins, I learned to play ballads

I don't wanna talk about Teo [Macero]. He's a helluva musician, a brilliant musician, but he's just not for me, that's all. I can elaborate on it, but I don't want to do that.

Monk taught me more about music composition than anyone else on 52nd Street.

I was minding my own business when something says to me, "you ought to blow trumpet." I have just been trying ever since.

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.

Joao Gilberto on guitar could read a newspaper and sound good.

I've used [drum machine] because I have to have the perfect tempo.

I couldn't do "What's Love Got To Do With It", Tina Turner because it wasn't the right tempo; so I scratched it from the record. I wanted to do it about a year ago, but something happened.

As long as I've been playing, they never say I done anything. They always say that some white guy did it.

If you have a tone like mine that is recognizable. No matter what I play, when you hear my tone you can tell it's me.

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.

It's a different ballgame now, so that lets [teo] Macero out. He's always complainin', always sick.

I really liked Wynton when I first met him. He's still a nice young man, only confused.

It's like swimmin' without warmin' up, yuo know what I mean? So [cackles] we use the drum machine, and we take it out.

They [police] do me like that all the time! "What you work for?".

In respect for drummers, see, I love drummers.

When we edit the music, I always remember, "It's my band. Save me a place to play."

The only way a drum machine will get out of beat is for you not to pay your electric bill.

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.

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.

Like Ron Lorman's always sayin', "Na-na-na-na-na," you know what I mean? I don't need that in the studio.

Some of [drummers] drop time because they want to hear what you're doin'.

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.

Birth of the Cool' became a collector's item, I think, out of a reaction to Bird and Dizzy's music. Bird and Diz played this hip, real fast thing, and if you weren't a fast listener, you couldn't catch the humor or the feeling in their music. Their musical sound wasn't sweet, and it didn't have harmonic lines that you could easily hum out on the street with your girlfriend trying to get over with a kiss.

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.

You have to be born with it. You can't even buy it. If you could buy it, they'd have it at the next Newport Festival.

The music speaks for itself!

Japanese people they hear my warmin' up and they start screamin'. They can tell it's me.It's my tone on the trumpet, it sounds like I'm speakin'.

Lionel [Richie] said, "Yeah, I learned chords and stuff playin' against your albums."

I keep telling Ron Lorman and them in the control room, "It's my band! The reason I have a band is because I can't stand for somebody to tell me what to do."

The reason [drummers] call things "unison", and they sound unison, is because you actually play two different tempos . . . like you're a little sharp, or a little flat; it's so slight that they call it "unison", but it's not unison.

That's the way you judge a car, man, [good or bad], when you start it up. It's just the same thing. I mean, I drive a Ferrari - not to be cute, but because I dig it. I'd rather drive a ten-year-old Ferrari than one of them new things-they don't go.

You want to know how I started playing trumpet? My father bought me one, and I studied the trumpet. And everybody I heard that I liked, I picked up things from.

I can tell. I'm gifted with that, you know. When I hear that the tempo is slightly off, it's hard for me.

Maybe you play a melody twice. You play it once like you like it, and some parts that you don't like you can just switch. An eight-bar motive - you can just take it and put it in the front or back or something like that. It can save you 50 or 60 or 70,000 dollars, a drum machine. That's why everybody uses it.

You ever hear Buddy Miles play the drums? You know, he doesn't vary the tempo at all.