I haven’t been afraid of John Coltrane or Miles Davis or Bill Evans or Wayne Shorter or Herbie Hancock. Why would I be afraid of the Beatles?
As a child, I walked with my friends to Rosa Parks Elementary and then to Ben Franklin Middle School. I rode Muni to Galileo High School. And thanks to amazing teachers who believed in me and supported me along the way, I was able to matriculate to another public school: the University of California at Davis.
There’s a time when it was an event for a black person to be on television. Where black households would gather around, ‘Oh, you know, Sammy Davis is going to be on ‘All in the Family’ tonight! Let’s go check it out!’ It was a big, big thing.
Tattooing is my social life, too, so most of my time is taken up with that. People like Henry Lewis, Mike Davis at Everlasting Tattoo.
My dad loved jazz, so there was a little Miles Davis, Otis Redding, Donny Hathaway. My mum is French, so she’d listen to a lot of French music, but a lot of the music that actually formed my taste, I just found online.
I worked with Mrs. Davis for four years, and then she realized, as the material started getting harder, that I had never learned to read. I was just listening as she’d play the song, and I’d play it back. When that happened, she got very upset and stopped being my teacher.
The starting point of all great jazz has got to be format, a language that you can work within that, in some ways, is much tighter than the blues or even gospel. It’s all working towards the same destination – the difference being that Miles Davis flew there, and I’m still taking the subway.
One of the things that I loved about listening to Miles Davis is that Miles always had an instinct for which musicians were great for what situations. He could always pick a band, and that was the thing that separated him from everybody else.
Greg Davis, Ron Randleman, David Bailiff, Paul Rhoads, Urban Meyer. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention all of them as influences.
It’s funny, though, speaking of fathers and sons, because me and John Goodman played father and son, like, five or six years ago in the film ‘Death Sentence,’ and I got back with him again in ‘Inside Llewyn Davis.’
We’ve got to replace the statues of Jefferson Davis and JZ George in the U.S. Capitol, and the people of Mississippi ought to have a say in it.
If Miles Davis hadn’t died it would have been interesting to do an album with him, but there wasn’t much else that would have got me into the studio… although Herbie Hancock has just been in touch about doing something and that would be an interesting combination.
Everyone’s talking about Phil Davis and what he did in college. It’s an accomplishment to win an NCAA title. I don’t want to discredit that. But I believe if I would have wrestled him in college, I would have beat him.
When I was a kid, it was Bette Davis. She was my idol. I used to cut school and sit in the back of the theater; of course, I would have snuck in because I couldn’t afford a ticket.
My favourite performances are by actresses like Bette Davis in ‘All About Eve’ or Gena Rowlands in pretty much anything – performances that have nothing to do with age.
‘The Blacklist’ was really right place, right time. I read the script and met with Jon Bokenkamp, John Eisendrath, John Fox and John Davis, and we just hit it off. They understood that I was not so much trying to adapt to television, but adapt a cinematic style to the things that we were gonna do.
My dad is Jean-Paul Bourelly, a really prestige guitar player in Europe, and he toured with Miles Davis. I was always surrounded by the most prestige kind of musicians from Senegal, Trinidad, Poland, Nigeria, and all around the world.
It might sound strange now from where I’m standing as a world boxing champion, but I harboured serious thoughts, at the age of nine, of putting my whole life into snooker. I remember being fascinated by the game, watching the likes of Steve Davis, and thought I would do it.
You can’t replace Davis Cup with something else. Its love and lore won’t be surpassed any time soon.
I learn the techniques and then take what I need. I have the Essie Davis technique of acting. I’m an instinctive actress.
Having brought diversity to the air in the way that we have with Kerry Washington and Viola Davis toplining their shows, and then shows like ‘Fresh Off the Boat’ and ‘Black-ish,’ have been very important. I look forward to continuing in that vein.
I remember plastering the kitchen with Black Power pictures of Angela Davis.
I loss that fight to Phil Davis, but I’m not convinced on that fight. Because it wasn’t fair for me. I’d like to do another fight.
I did ‘Fences’ off-broadway at the Beacon Theater, so it’s amazing that Denzel Washington and Viola Davis brought it to Broadway.
One of the blessings I’ve had, really, for my entire career, is working with founders of companies, whether it was Bill Ziff at Ziff Davis or with Jerry Yang and David Filo at Yahoo.
I went to UC Davis because I wanted to be a vet. It’s a great profession if it’s right for you, but it’s memorizing the bones and the muscles, and I am terrible at stuff like that. Also, there’s a lot of blood and gore involved.
Miles Davis, his parents migrated from Arkansas to Illinois, where he had the luxury of being able to practice for hours upon hours. He never would have been able to do that in the cotton country of Arkansas.
The only person I have regrets about is Miles Davis. He and I had become good friends after we did a photo shoot, and coincidentally, we kept running into each other at parties and stuff. I regret not having written a hit for Miles Davis.
At key crossroads in his life, Vernon Davis has continued to make a conscious choice to grow as a person and player. His determination through adversity since his childhood days is commendable.
I heard Mr. Wild Bill Davis. I heard him play in 1930 and he told me that it would take me fifteen years just to learn the pedals, the pedals of the organ and I got mad.
I always felt that Bette Davis was one of the great screen actresses who never really got her due – she won two Oscars, but the last was in 1938, and that was really before all the great work that she did.
Miles Davis would have this lineup of all these amazing musicians and one day would just say, ‘We’re done.’ After tons of great records and tickets sold, he said, ‘Now I’m going to grow my hair out and play my horn through a wah-wah pedal.’ Rather than play it safe, he went on.
I wanted very much to be Miles Davis when I was a boy, but without the practice. It just looked like an endless road.
I’m thankful enough or blessed enough to be able to say that Miles Davis was a friend when he was alive, and he was a wonderful mentor and really, really funny, you know.
I do read a lot of autobiographies and biographies but from people who are not in my field – older women, older artists, Miles Davis.
Pete Wilson deregulated energy as a pay out to Enron, and we blamed Gray Davis.
Coltrane was moving out of jazz into something else. And certainly Miles Davis was doing the same thing.
Bette Davis was a close friend. She loved to have a good time.
Joan Crawford and Bette Davis are larger than life. They just are. They sucked all the oxygen out of a room: they’re icons; they loom large in our imaginations. But the truth of the matter is both women were diminutive.
I prefer playing ATP tournaments and Davis Cup competition rather than Olympic Games.
I want to be known as a triple threat. I have aspirations to win an Oscar and a Grammy, and I also want to win a Tony. I want to be one of those guys like Frank Sinatra or Sammy Davis Jr. that crossed all those barriers of entertainment.
The platform we had in Dallas, the 1984 Republican platform, all the ideas we supported there – from tax policy, to foreign policy; from individual rights, to neighborhood security – are things that Jefferson Davis and his people believed in.
When people are overlooking somebody like Phil Davis, it’s a dangerous thing.
Music is my only guide. I don’t care if people pigeonhole me. Miles Davis is my hero. He covered Cindy Lauper and Michael Jackson, and he didn’t give a hoot about what the purists said.
I never considered Miles Davis a perfectionist; I always considered him as an excellence-ist, where deviation is actually kind of cool.
I think it comes from really liking literary forms. Poetry is very beautiful, but the space on the page can be as affecting as where the text is. Like when Miles Davis doesn’t play, it has a poignancy to it.
Ossie Davis was a man with great integrity, great honor and someone who I feel has done us all a great service just by being on the Earth.
I don’t want to be famous. I want to be secure. I don’t want the world. I just want a piece of it. I want people to remember Eric Davis.
Chris Paul is one of those guys growing up, I guess I looked up to. Deron Williams was one of those guys, Dwyane Wade, Baron Davis.
That’s why I enjoy Davis Cup, and I really enjoyed college tennis. It’s very special. You want to go out there and compete your hardest, because you don’t want to let anyone down. You want to absolutely give it your all for your team. And that’s sort of the mentality I’ve taken to pro tennis.
I’ve always thought that jazz needs to be heard by a wider audience in Puerto Rico. I want to put together a series of free concerts in the small towns – one with Miles Davis music, another with bebop, maybe Duke Ellington. I want younger people to see what is possible.
