Cab Calloway

We usually never got out of there before four or five o’clock in the morning. Every morning. So it was rough.

Everybody that you could name would join in our audiences from, Laguardia on down. Everybody came. Everybody came to the Cotton Club.

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.

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

A movie and a stage show are two entirely different things. A picture, you can do anything you want. Change it, cut out a scene, put in a scene, take a scene out. They don’t do that on stage.

At times as a performer they segregated us in some of theatres.

Keep searching for that sound you hear in your head until it becomes a reality.

The prospect of having to sit through one of Rachmaninov’s extended symphonies or piano concertos tends, quite frankly, to depress me. All those notes, and to what end?

The more real you get, the more unreal everything else is.

We made records to document ourselves, not to sell a lot of records. I still feel that way. I put out a record because I think it’s beautiful, not necessarily commercial.

There are no natural barriers. It’s all music.

Jazz is the big brother of the blues. If a guy’s playing blues like we play, he’s in high school. When he starts playing jazz it’s like going on to college, to a school of higher learning.

So much of Jazz doesn’t have an audience other than music students or musicians.

Living is easy with eyes closed.

Only the French, I guess, really use tenor and alto to any great extent in the orchestra.

Jazz is the false liquidation of art, instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture.

I was probably six years old when I first sang before an audience.

Music should enrich the soul; it should teach spirituality by showing a person a portion of himself that he would not discover otherwise. It’s easy to rediscover part of yourself, but through art you can be shown part of yourself you never knew existed. That’s the real mission of art. The artist has to find something within himself that’s universal and which he can put into terms that are communicable to other people. The magic of it is that art can communicate to a person without his realizing it.

Well if I could play like Wynton, I wouldn’t play like Wynton.

We really never know what we’re gonna play when we get on stage.

I’ve never recorded anything I didn’t like.