Miles Davis - Music Quotes

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

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

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

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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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