Miles Davis

"I’ll play it and tell you what it is later."

"I can't tell... All those white tenor players sound alike to me."

"Is that what you wanted, Alfred?"

"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."

""You can't play anything on a horn that Louis hasn't played." and "I love Pops" (Louis' nickname) … Louis has been through all kinds of styles. That's good tuba, by the way. You know you can't play anything on a horn that Louis hasn't played — I mean even modern. I love his approach to the trumpet; he never sounds bad. He plays on the beat — with feeling. That's another phrase for swing. I also love the way he sings."

"When they make records with all the mistakes in, as well as the rest, then they'll really make jazz records. If the mistakes aren't there too, it ain't none of you."

"I love Pops, I love the way he sings, the way he plays - everything he does, except when he says something against modern-jazz music."

"What am I supposed to say to that? That's ridiculous. You see the way they can ____ up music? It's a mismatch. They don't complement each other. Max and Mingus can play together, by themselves. Mingus is a hell of a bass player, and Max is a hell of a drummer. But Duke can't play with them, and they can't play with Duke. Now, how are you going to give a thing like that some stars? Record companies should be kicked in the ___. Somebody should take a picket sign and picket the record company."

"Take it off! That's some sad ____, man. In the first place, I hear some Charlie Parker cliches. . . . They don't even fit. Is that what the critics are digging? Them critics better stop having coffee. If there ain't nothing to listen to, they might as well admit it. Just to take something like that and say it's great, because there ain't nothing to listen to, that's like going out and getting a prostitute. [Leonard Feather: This man said he was influenced by Duke Ellington.] I don't give a ____! It must be . Right? I don't care who he's inspired by. That ____ ain't nothing. In the first place he don't have the - you know, the way you touch a piano. He doesn't have the touch that would make the sound of whatever he thinks of come off. I can tell he's influenced by Duke, but to put the loud pedal on the piano and make a run is very old-fashioned to me. And when the alto player sits up there and plays without no tone . . . That's the reason I don't buy any records."

"My ego only needs a good rhythm section."

"Coleman Hawkins told me never to play with someone older than me, and I never have. With older players, there's no force, no drive. With younger players, it's not that you know it all, or I know it all—it's I'm trying to learn it all."

"I know what the power of silence is. When I used to play in clubs, everybody was loud; there was a lot of noise. So I would take my mute off the microphone, and I would play something so soft that you could hardly hear it... and you talk about listening. Roy Eldridge did that. He's one of my favorites."

"The only thing I'm interested in is the music and the musicians. I don't acknowledge applause 'cause I'm giving them something. They're not giving me anything with their applause. Can I write that down?"

"Billie Holiday—she was the nicest woman in the world, you know. All she wanted to do was sing. They picked on her and picked on her to get money out of her. You do drugs 'cause you like to, not 'cause it's a life-style.... They picked on Billie so much. She said, "Miles, come and see me in Long Island." She was in love with one of my kids and his curly hair—he used to ride my bicycle and watch the horse at Aqueduct. She said, "Miles, if they'd just leave me alone; they could have the house—everything." You know the way singers shake their asses now. Billie didn't have to do that. Her mouth was so sensuous; she was pretty and she would say certain words and her mouth would quiver, and she always had this white gardenia and long gloves."

"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."

"He never wasted a melody. He never wasted a phrase. He and Duke Ellington changed the whole sound. There is no way to describe it because there's nobody on this earth that can do that anymore. What he did to the texture of an orchestration, what he did with a pop song is like writing an original piece. Students will discover him. They'll have to take his music apart layer by layer. That's how they'll know what kind of genius he was."

"For me, music and life are all about style."

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

"Why'd you put that white bitch on there?"

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

"Don't play what's there, play what's not there."

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

"Try taking the fucking horn out of your mouth."

"It's that goddamned motherfucking 'Machine Gun.'"

"He could very well be the Duke Ellington of Rock 'n' Roll."

"A lot of Negro style-the style of a man like Miles Davis or Ray Charles or the style of a man like myself is based on a knowledge of what people are really saying and on our refusal to hear it. You pick up on the beat, which is much more truthful than words."

"Another place I worked a lot was the Open Door, where we used to go to hear Miles. I didn't go to hear Miles; I went to see his wardrobe, because he had gorgeous clothes. He always played into the drapes and showed complete contempt for the audience."

"I would like to hear more of the consummate melodic master, but I feel that big business and his record company have had a corrupting influence on his material. The rock and pop thing certainly draws a wider audience. It happens more and more these days, that unqualified people with executive positions try to tell musicians what is good and what is bad music. It’s tempting for the musician to prejudice his own views when recording opportunities are so infrequent but I for one am determined to resist the temptation."

"Miles said he looked on his need for constant change as a curse. However, Miles, along with Duke Ellington, in terms of looking for models of how you strategize with a band, have been there constantly in the background for me. Not the Beatles as a construct for a group, not Led Zeppelin, not the Floyd. My guides have always been Miles and Duke."

"And on one particularly weighty draft he turned in, I told him to go home that night, pour a drink, and listen to some Miles Davis. I told him the thing about Miles Davis is the silences. The notes he doesn’t play. So with that in mind, go take another swing at your draft, find me some silences, and then I’ll get to work."

"When the world speaks of Miles, the legend, they have no idea who the man really was. The Miles I knew was sensitive and ailing, bruised by the hurts this life metes out. With trembling lips, he told me of the years during his childhood in East St. Louis when he'd been called Blackie by his friends and even some of his family, gazed down upon as a nobody, rendered invisible by his dark hue. He told me of the time, at age thirteen, when he'd been seduced by a grown woman, forced into his first sexual encounter with a friend of a relative. He spoke of the time when his father, a well-to-do dentist, had wanted him to follow in his career path, until a teacher who'd recognized Miles' gift intervened. "Forget it. Little Davis is not going to be any dentist," that teacher told Miles' father. "He's going to be a musician." The first time Miles blew that horn, he'd found his consolation. In playing that trumpet, he did the only thing he knew how, the one thing that made him feel worthy. That is the Miles I knew and, in time, grew to cherish."

"I don't excuse Miles' conduct any more than I dismiss my willingness, consciously or unknowingly, to indulge it. We mortals breathe incongruity. That I chose to stay with Miles is still, in many ways, confounding to me. And yet I've come to realize that Miles' behavior felt sorely familiar, a song, blaring and dissonant, that I'd learned in my early years. [...] My father had taught me the music. And my mother, in her own way, had emphasized each measure, hummed along with the clamor even as she railed against it. "Men will be men," she'd sometimes mutter, following a feud with my father, her way of rationalizing his adultery. [...] And in my Upper East Side high-rise, a world away from the slum of my girlhood and yet overlapping with it, Miles would be Miles."

"Most jazz musicians are happy just to achieve some popularity, but Miles Davis was a genuine icon. Famously fashionable even in his early days – a Davis biography was subtitled ‘The Man in the Green Shirt’ after a particularly stylish album cover – his adoption of jazz-rock in the 1970s and ’80s made him a superstar, bewitching audiences with not just his spare, declamatory trumpet-playing, but also his brooding persona. Dubbed the ‘Prince of Darkness’, he prowled about the stage in extravagantly hip garb, mercurially cueing his heavily amplified ensemble, creating a delicious aura of mystery and occasional menace. Musically, Davis’s foray into fusion divided his fans. Older listeners preferred the Davis of the ’50s and ’60s, whose brilliant bands reinvented and extended the bebop tradition as well as launching such seminal talents as John Coltrane and Herbie Hancock. But change seemed the driving principle of Davis’s artistic and personal life, and embracing rock seemed a necessary progression."