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.

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.

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.

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.

I’m not like a legend that – so I’m sort of in the middle in this sort of gray area where, you know, I’m creating music, and I’m not saying there isn’t an audience, because there is; because all of those people go out and spend $80 to $150 on a concert ticket.

Blues purists never cared for me. I don’t worry about it. I think if it this way: When I made ‘Three O’ Clock Blues’, they were not there. The people out there made the tune. And blues purists just wrote about it. The people is who I’m trying to satisfy.

Music washes away the dust of every day life.

Dance music-as I keep saying, you can dance to a windshield wiper… a windshield wiper that’s fairly steady gives you a beat and all you need is an out-of-tune playing ‘Melancholy Baby’ and you’ve got dance music.

I love it when people hear my music but can’t figure out what instrument I’m playing.

Jazz has such great feeling and emotional content it really doesn’t require technical understanding.

What does music mean to you? What would you do without music?

No two people on earth are alike, and it’s got to be that way in music or it isn’t music.

Keeping your artistic self as creative as possible is a balancing act.

By and large Jazz has always been like the kind of a man you wouldn’t want your daughter to associate with.

Just give a drum roll, announce my name and I come out and sing. I have a contract that says I’m a singer. So I sing.

I always play what I feel. I always feel like me, but I’m a different me every day. I get ideas from everything. A big color, the sound of water and wind, or a flash of something cool. Playing is like life. Either you feel it or you don’t.

I don’t consider myself a musician who has achieved perfection and can’t develop any further.

If you’re making money people don’t think you’re playing Jazz. When you’re not making money they think you’re a great Jazz musician.

Inspiration comes from tunes you play, other musicians and your own imagination.