Glenn Miller

I want a kick to my band, but I don’t want the rhythm to hog the spotlight.

I haven’t a great Jazz band and I don’t want one.

It’s been a big week for our side. Over on the beaches of Normandy our boys have fired the opening guns of the long awaited drive to liberate the world.

I haven’t got a great jazz band and I don’t want one. Some of the critics, Down Beat’s among them, point their fingers at us and charge us with forsaking real jazz . . . It’s all in what you define as ‘real jazz.’ It happens that to our ears harmony comes first. A dozen colored bands have a better beat than mine. Our band stresses harmony.

By giving the public a rich and full melody, distinctly arranged and well played, all the time creating new tone colors and patterns, I feel we have a better chance of being successful. I want a kick to my band, but I don’t want the rhythm to hog the spotlight.

I thought I had swell ideas and wonderful musicians but no one else did.

My role as a drummer is as a team player to enhance what is going on around me.

I use the audience as my color palette, my instrument.

Life is 10% what you make it and 90% how you take it.

When I started playing, I was playing just the harmonica. We’re back in the prohibition days. Like down a dark alley somewhere, you’d play for an illegal club that was probably right behind a police station, and what I’d do is sing and play the harmonica. It didn’t take me long to work out that I needed something more, and that was the guitar. So when you added the guitar, the harmonica and my voice, you would be talking with people mainly in the bar, or in the restaurant, or the people in the pub.

It’s always Jazz. You can put a new dress on her, a new hat, but no matter what kind of clothes she’s the same old broad.

Damn it, when I’m bombastic, I have my reasons. I want to be bombastic: take it or leave it.

They said Bird played bebop, but Bird could still swing. I’ve heard a lot of guys play bebop, but they wasn’t swinging.

Being a singer is a natural gift. It means I’m using to the highest degree possible the gift that God gave me to use. I’m happy with that.

I can tell whether a person can play just by the way he stands.

Sometimes you need to stand with your nose to the window and have a good look at Jazz.

Paint pictures with sound. First, find your white-the deepest, roundest sound you can play on the guitar. Then, find your black-which is the most extreme tonal difference from white you can play. Now, just pick the note where you’ve got white, pick it where you’ve got black, and then find all those colors in between. Get those colors down, and you’ll be able to express almost any emotion on the guitar.?

In Jazz, improvisation isn’t a matter of just making any ol’ thing up. Jazz, like any language, has its own grammer and vocabulary. There’s no right or wrong, just some choices that are better than others.

Don’t threaten me with love, baby. Let’s just go walking in the rain.

For me, there wasn’t a line between working and getting paid or simply playing for fun.

Jazz is a very accurate, curiously accurate accompaniment to 20th century America.