Cab Calloway

Everybody that you could name would join in our audiences from, Laguardia on down. 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.

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

Everybody came. Everybody came to the Cotton Club.

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.

You hear about the Duke Ellingtons, the Jimmie Luncefords, and the Fletcher Hendersons, but people sometimes forget that jazz was not only built in the minds of the great ones, but on the backs of the ordinary ones.

There has always been a tension between Jazz as a commercial music and as an art form.

So long as the human spirit thrives on this planet, music in some living form will accompany and sustain it and give it expressive meaning.

It’s easy in music to tell what’s good. It’s hard to tell what’s bad.

I’m still searching even today for a sound, like the guy that’s searching for a home. I haven’t been able to find that completely. I’m satisfied at times with the sound of my guitar… but it is a little sound that I hear but I can’t tell anybody about it. I don’t know how. But if I ever get it, I’ll know.

I saw music as a way to entertain people and take them away from their daily lives and put smiles on their faces, as opposed to what I see it being now, which is a way for me to actually communicate, and a way for me to tap into my subconscious.

It is people’s hearts that move the age.

To compose music, all you need to do is remember a tune that no one else has thought of.

One chord is fine. Two chords are pushing it. Three chords and you’re into jazz.

It’s not what they think, it’s about what’s best for the music.

You can read all the textbooks and listen to all the records, but you have to play with musicians that are better than you.

A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write to ultimately be at peace with himself.

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.

The fabulous places I’ve been, wonderful things that’ve happened, great people I’ve met ought to make a story.

Being a Jazz musician is not a rose garden!

If T-Bone Walker had been a woman, I would have asked him to marry me. I’d never heard anything like that before: single-string blues played on an electric guitar.