Miles Davis Play Quotations

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

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

It's not the note you play that's the wrong note - it's the note you play afterwards that makes it right or wrong.

You have to know 400 notes that you can play, then pick the right four.

I'll play it first and figure out what it's called later.

We don't play to be seen. I'm addicted to music, not audiences.

I don't pay no attention to what critics say about me, the good or the bad. The toughest critic I got is myself...and I'm too vain to play anything I think is bad.

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

The way you change and help music is by tryin' to invent new ways to play

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.

I like Stan [Getz], because he has so much patience, the way he plays those melodies - other people can't get nothing out of a song, but he can, which takes a lot of imagination.

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

My father's rich, my momma's good looking. Right? And I can play the Blues. I've never suffered and don't intend to suffer.

If you hit a wrong note, it's the next note that you play that determines if it's good or bad.

It took me twenty years study and practice to work up to what I wanted to play in this performance. How can she expect to listen five minutes and understand it?

It's not the notes you play, it's the notes you don't play.

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.

Play what you know and then play above that

You can tell whether a person plays well or not by the way he carries the instrument, whether it means something to him or not.

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.

Coltrane, you cant play everything at once!

When I heard Coleman Hawkins, I learned to play ballads

We're not going to play the blues anymore. Let the white folks play the blues. They got 'em, so they can keep 'em.

When the band plays fast, you play slow; when the band plays slow, you play fast.

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.

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.

It takes you years to learn how to play like yourself.

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.

You can't play anything on a horn that Louis Armstrong hasn't played