Cab Calloway

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

90%, 100% are going there to hear the singing. The story is another thing. Nobody’s interested in the story. Happiness is happiness.

Everybody came. Everybody came to the Cotton Club.

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

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

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

How are you going to know what’s new to play if you haven’t listened to everything that’s old?

The essentials of Jazz are: melodic improvisation, melodic invention, swing and instrumental personality.

That’s a great thing about jazz. We leave it a little space so that we have the opportunity to go where the moment takes us

You know at an early age if you have a talent for music.

Your own music comes out of your head and emotions, but it’s not etched in your system.

You don’t rehearse Jazz to death to get the camera angles.

It is this tendency to play with manic enthusiasm on every possible occasion that distinguishes the amateur Jazz musician from the professional.

You want the audience to feel what you’re doing.

In olden days a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking, now heaven knows, anything goes.

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.

Jazz music grabs you to the point where it never lets you go until the very last breath.

An entertainer pleases others while an artist only has to please himself.

In my family on my mother’s side we’re all church musicians first so I don’t remember a time when we weren’t doing something musical. My brothers and I sang in a little quartet, my aunts and uncles sang and my grandfather was a minister of music in our church, so walking and talking was like doing music for us.

Keep on listening and tapping your feet.

To this day, no one has come up with a set of rules for originality. There aren’t any.