PLAYBOY: You've won all the trumpet polls. After yourself, how would you rank others?

DAVIS: After me! Hell, it's plenty great trumpet players don't come after me, or after nobody else! That's what I hate so about critics -- how they are always comparing artists...always writing that one's better than another one. Ten men can have spent all their lives learning technical expertness on their instruments, but just like in any art, one will play one style and the rest nine other ways. And if some critics just don't happen to like a man's style, they will knock the artist. That bugs the hell out of musicians. It's made some damn near mad enough to want to hang up their horns.

Trumpet players, like anybody else, are individualized by their different ideas and styles. The thing to judge in any jazz artist is does the man project, and does he have ideas. You take Dizzy -- he does, all the time, every time he picks up his horn. Some more cats -- Clark Terry, Ray Nance, Kenny Dorham, Roy Eldridge, Harold Baker, Freddie Hubbard, Lee Morgan, Bobby Hackett -- a lot of them. Hell, that cat down in New Orleans, Al Hirt, he blows his ass off, too!