Miles Davis Quotes

29 Sourced Quotes

I'm always thinking about creating. My future starts when I wake up every morning... Every day I find something creative to do with my life.

Miles Davis
Listen. The greatest feeling I ever had in my life—with my clothes on—was when I first heard Diz and Bird together in St. Louis, Missouri, back in 1944.

Miles Davis
Look, man, all I am is a trumpet player. I can only do one thing—play my horn.... I ain't no entertainer and I ain't trying to be one. I am one thing, a musician.

Miles Davis
When you work with great musicians, they are always a part of you... their spirits are walking around in me, so they're still here and passing it on to others.

Miles Davis
In high school I was the best in the music class on the trumpet, but the prizes went to the boys with blue eyes. I made up my mind to outdo anybody white on my horn.

Miles Davis
It's like, how did Columbus discover America when the Indians were already here? What kind of s-- is that, but white people's s--?

Miles Davis
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.

Miles Davis
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.

Miles Davis
I just say what I think, and that bugs people, especially a lot of white people. When they look in my eyes and don't see no fear, they know it's a draw.

Miles Davis
The toughest critic I got and the only one I worry about is myself. My music has got to get past me and I'm too vain to play anything I think is bad.

Miles Davis
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.

Miles Davis
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.

Miles Davis
I've come close to matching the feeling of that night in 1944 in music, when I first heard Diz and Bird, but I've never got there... I'm always looking for it, listening and feeling for it, though, trying to always feel it in and through the music I play everyday.

Miles Davis
The music has gotten thick. Guys give me tunes and they're full of chords. I can't play them... I think a movement in jazz is beginning away from the conventional string of chords, and a return to emphasis on melodic rather than harmonic variation. There will be fewer chords but infinite possibilities as to what to do with them.

Miles Davis
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.

Miles Davis
Music is a funny thing when you really come to think about it.

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

Miles Davis
If somebody told me I only had an hour to live, I'd spend it choking a white man. I'd do it nice and slow.

Miles Davis
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.

Miles Davis
People will go for anything they don't understand if it's got enough hype. They want to be hip, want always to be in on the new thing so they don't look unhip. White people are especially like that, particularly when a black person is doing something they don't understand...That's what I thought was happening when Ornette hit town.

Miles Davis
When you are creating your own shit, man, even the sky ain't the limit.

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

Miles Davis
Bebop didn't have the humanity of Duke Ellington. It didn't have that recognizable thing. Bird and Diz were great, fantastic, challenging — but that weren't sweet.

Miles Davis
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.

Miles Davis
If you're not nervous, you're not paying attention.

Miles Davis
I've changed music four or five times. What have you done of any importance other than be white?

Miles Davis
A legend is an old man with a cane known for what he used to do. I'm still doing it.

Miles Davis
That was my gift... having the ability to put certain guys together that would create a chemistry and then letting them go; letting them play what they knew, and above it.

Miles Davis
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.

Miles Davis