Cab Calloway

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

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

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

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

Everybody came. Everybody came to the Cotton Club.

Judy Garland was the singer I most wanted to sound like then, not to copy, but to get some of her soul and purity. A wonderful young voice.

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.

We all do ‘do, re, mi’ but you got to find the other notes yourself.

Jazz is the most fun you can have with your clothes on.

Jazz improvisation is the art of drawing without an eraser.

Jazz is a spectacularly accurate model of democracy and a look into our redemptive future possibilities.

Ahhh – those Jazz guys are just makin’ that stuff up!

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.

It doesn’t have to be happy music to be inspiring.

The first jazz I heard was Duke Ellington. I was learning to play classical music, but my teacher swapped out those lessons for jazz lessons because I had started adding grace notes to Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff.

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 beat is a moment in the life a groove.

Jazz music has become academic. Sometimes that doesn’t feel right to me.

The great jazz instrumentalists taught me how to sing and interpret a song. they showed me how a horn can have as much personality as an actor.

Nothing is out of the question for me. I’m always thinking about creating. My future starts when I wake up in the morning and see the light…Then I’m grateful.