Cab Calloway

90%, 100% are going there to hear the singing. The story is another thing. Nobody’s interested in the story. Happiness is happiness.

Everybody came. Everybody came to the Cotton Club.

Jazz was not only built in the minds of the great ones, but on the backs of the ordinary ones.

Everybody did something. It was very entertaining. We had a lot of fun. Lot of fun. And there was no segregation, that I could see. I never saw any.

We didn’t have any segregation at the Cotton Club. No. The Cotton Club was wide open, it was free

My audience was my life. What I did and how I did it was all for my audience.

Playing gives me as much good feeling now as it did when I was a bitty kid.

The way I look at it, they’re all part of my musical diary, and I can listen to any one of them and it will bring up memories of what was going on at that time.

Jazz improvisation is the art of drawing without an eraser.

To this day, I don’t like people walking on stage not looking good. You have to look good. If you feel special about yourself then you’re going to play special.

When I achieved what I thought the musicians were trying to do, the sound sort of bloomed. When it’s right, everything is beautiful.

I’ve said that playing the blues is like having to be black twice. Stevie Ray Vaughan missed on both counts, but I never noticed.

It’s not jazz as we know jazz here in America.

Art [Blakey] would take young people with a potential and help them develop a voice as a player and as a writer.

I got a chance to listen to and watch Thelonious Monk and his quartet play two shows a night, for six weeks. It was a great education. There was my university, man.

As far as music school goes, I walked through Berkelee one time.

I don’t do something because I think it will sell 30 million albums. I couldn’t care less. If it sells one, it sells one.

I thought Eric Clapton was good. He still is. Not only is he good – he’s rock’s #1 guitarist, and he plays blues better than most of us.

Count don’t do nothin’. But it sure sounds good.

Good Jazz is when the leader jumps on the piano, waves his arms and yells. Fine Jazz is when a tenorman lifts his foot in the air. Great Jazz is when he heaves a piercing note for 32 bars and collapses on his hands and knees. A pure genius of Jazz is manifested when he and the rest of the orchestra runaround the room while the rhythm section grimaces and dances around their instruments.

Too many young musicians today want to win polls before they learn their instruments.