Cab Calloway

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

I play whatever the hell comes out… that’s it.

I want people to walk away with the same joy, hope and love that I put into my music.

[Ben Taylor] He is an interesting combination of the two of us. His voice box is more like mine but the way his tongue sits in his mouth, and the way he pronounces words, is just like James Taylor.

Love is sweeping the country.

Jazz musician is a combination entertainer, poet, singer, educator, student, artist, seducer and all-round good fellow.

My job is to write songs that have emotional meaning to me.

Whenever there’s a change with Jazz and its aesthetics, it’s almost always reflected with a change in the culture.

The first time I heard Bird play, it hit me right between the eyes.

You can’t copy anybody and end with anything. If you copy, it means you’re working without any real feeling.

I am not interested in compromising my music to make it palatable to an assumed sub-standard mass.

It’s the same for listeners. If you can’t stand your girlfriend, can’t take it anymore, put on your headphones and escape into another world.

Improvisation is the most widespread of all musical activities. Why did so many people spend so long pretending it never happened?

As a young cellist I had played to an audience that had included Pablo Casals and reacted with poor, nervous playing. Casals sought me out after the concert and praised me highly, somewhat easing the pain and thinking him a very kind man.

Sometimes I wish I could walk up to my music for the first time, as if I had never heard it before.

It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.