Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Miles Davis, fully Miles Dewey Davis III

American Jazz Musician, Trumpeter, Bandleader and Composer

"Do not fear mistakes. There are none."

"If you understood everything I said, you’d be me."

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

"Some day I'm gonna call me up on the phone, so when I answer, I can tell myself to shut up."

"My future starts when I wake up every morning. Every day I find something creative to do with my life."

"Knowledge is freedom and ignorance is slavery."

"It’s like, how did Columbus discover America when the Indians were already here? What kind of shit is that, but white people’s shit?"

"You have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself."

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

"You should never be comfortable, man. Being comfortable fouled up a lot of musicians."

"Sometimes [playing free] doesn't happen, because maybe a guy's wife'll come in, you know, and his ego will catch him. If everybody's completely just straight—without any old ladies over here, a fourth of whisky over there; if it's balanced right, it'll come off. It has to be. But when you get egos involved with playing free, you can't do it."

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

"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."

"The thing to judge in any jazz artist is, does the man project and does he have ideas."

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

"Jazz is the big brother of Revolution. Revolution follows it around."

"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 other dead things that were once considered artistic."

"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."

"Keith [Jarrett] played so nice I had to give him two pianos. I’d say “Keith, how does it feel to be a genius?"

"Bebop was about change, about evolution. It wasn't about standing still and being safe."

"I never thought Jazz was meant to be a museum piece like other dead things once considered artistic. "

"Always look ahead, but never look back."

"I think I had it in the back of my mind that I wanted to sound like a dry martini."

"When you hit a wrong note, it's the next note that makes it good or bad."

"In improvisation, there are no mistakes."

"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."

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

"A lot of people ask me where music is going today. I think it's going in short phrases. If you listen, anybody with an ear can hear that. Music is always changing. It changes because of the times and the technology that's available, the material that things are made of, like plastic cars instead of steel. So when you hear an accident today it sounds different, not all the metal colliding like it was in the forties and fifties. Musicians pick up sounds and incorporate that into their playing, so the music that they make will be different."

"After you've learned how to play your instrument the right way, you can turn around and play it the way you want to, anyway you hear the music and sound and want to play it."

"All you've got to do in this country today is just be on television and you're more known and respected than anyone who paints a great painting or creates great music or writes a great book or is a great dancer. . . . A bad, untalented person who is on television or in the movies can be more recognized and respected than a genius who doesn't appear on the screen."

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

"Anybody can play. The note is only 20 percent. The attitude of the motherfucker who plays it is 80 percent."

"At least one day out of the year all musicians should just put their instruments down, and give thanks too Duke Ellington."

"Coltrane, you can?t play everything at once!"

"Good music is good no matter what kind of music it is."

"Creativity and genius don't know nothing about age; either you got it or you don't, and being old is not going to help you get it."

"I always listen to what I can leave out."

"I can tell whether a person can play just by the way he stands."

"I don?t care if a dude is purple with green breath as long as he can swing."

"I don't like to hear someone put down Dixieland. Those people who say there?s no music but bop are just stupid; it shows how much they don't know."

"I don?t like to hear someone put down Dixieland. Those people who say there?s no music but bop are just stupid; it shows how much they don?t know."

"I remember one time - it might have been a couple times - at the Fillmore East in 1970, I was opening for this sorry-ass cat named Steve Miller. Steve Miller didn't have his shit going for him, so I'm pissed because I got to open for this non-playing motherfucker just because he had one or two sorry-ass records out. So I would come late and he would have to go on first and then we got there we smoked the motherfucking place, everybody dug it."

"I really liked Wynton [Marsalis] when I first met him. He?s still a nice young man, only confused."

"I would go to the library and borrow scores by all those great composers, like Stravinsky, Alban Berg, Prokofiev. I wanted to see what was going on in all of music. Knowledge is freedom and ignorance is slavery, and I just couldn't believe someone could be that close to freedom and not take advantage of it."

"I still got my Ferrari."

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

"I?ll play it first and tell you what it is afterwards."

"If they act too hip, you know they can't play shit."

"I?m always thinking about creating. My future starts when I wake up in the morning and see the light."

"If you don't know what to play, play nothing."