Miles Davis

Nothing is out of the question for me. I’m always thinking about creating. My future starts when I wake up in the morning and see the light…Then I’m grateful.

For me, music and life are all about style

If you’re trying to be hip, be hip!

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

Jazz music has got to have that thing. 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 thing to judge in any jazz artist is, does the man project and does he have ideas.

Jazz is the type of music that can absorb so many things and still be Jazz.

I’m not going to change the way I look or the way I feel to conform to anything. I’ve always been a freak. So I’ve been a freak all my life and I have to live with that, you know. I’m one of those people.

And ultimately the people who produce my records, they know that they’re here to serve the purpose of me expressing who I am at this period of time and augmenting that or pulling it forward and I love that process.

Perhaps it is a peculiarity of mine that despite the fact that I am a professional performer, it is true that I have always preferred playing without an audience.

There’s millions and millions of people who think Les Paul is a guitar!

There has always been a tension between Jazz as a commercial music and as an art form.

Of course there are a lot of ways you can treat the blues, but it will still be the blues.

He knows I rip him off every day. He’s the godfather for me. Nobody can say they aren’t influenced by what Stevie Wonder has done.

Music is the most interesting thing in the world.

On my album Here, that’s the first time that I’ve really understood how I could put all the things that were happening in the world and in my life and in our lives as just human beings into one body that was just so powerful and really had a perspective. That was an opening for me and I think that naturally, there is just so much to talk about. I don’t see me getting quiet anytime soon.

If everyone liked what I did, I probably wouldn’t be playing anything of depth.

So long as the human spirit thrives on this planet, music in some living form will accompany and sustain it and give it expressive meaning.

The wise musicians are those who play what they can master.

Monk encouraged me to emancipate the drums from their subservient role as timekeepers.

I’m not much on gimmicks. I never have been because they don’t last.