1.

He was the young romantic. 

He was the true romantic. He played ballads the way nobody else could play them. 

They weren't sentimentalized, they were beautiful and they were deep. They didn't require a lot of hand-wringing. And they were different from anybody else. You'd have these almost stark melodies in a romantic ballad; and the starkness would make the romance all the more compelling, and he knew that. It was just him and the trumpet and you were feeling as you watched and listened that you were sort of eavesdropping on a very private moment; it was always an imposition when the other musicians would come in. 

Miles' music appeals to the vulnerable side of people. His music speaks to the solitary person inside of each of us, and it soothes us in knowing that we all feel alone. But on the other hand, he swings, and this combination of two opposite things - you put them together - and that's a cocktail that's irresistible.

2.

Sarah Vaughn is my favorite singer. 

She had the most astonishing range of any jazz singer. 

She was extremely sophisticated harmonically, I mean in the way that Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gilespie and all the great instrumentalists of Bach were. People make the mistake of calling her operatic and saying that if she wanted to she could have been an opera singer and I think they're entirely missing the point. She had the range, but she had no interest in that kind of singing, her whole approach to phrasing is much more oriented around the church and around jazz. The tone of her voice, the richness of her voice for me is otherworldly. I feel I leave my body, when I listen to Sarah Vaughn. Chops like you wouldn't believe. She's a vocalist who could stand right next to an instrumentalist and deliver with as much dexterity and clarity as any of her time. 

Sarah Vaughn saw herself as a musician rather than a singer. She was a gifted pianist in her own right and 'when she closed her eyes on stage,' she said, 'she could see and sing lines that might have been improvised on the piano.' Musicians loved her for her perfect pitch and rhythmic sense; her sophisticated ear for chord changes, and her astonishing voice. She could sing everything, from soprano to baritone. They called her 'Sailor' at first, for the richness of her vocabulary and her fondness for good times. 

Later, she became known as Sassy. 'Sassy,' Dizzy Gilespie once said, 'can sing notes other people can't even hear'. 

In the words of The Temptations, my girl.