Sarah Vaughan

There are notes between notes, you know.

When I sing, trouble can sit right on my shoulder and I don’t even notice.

They always ask me the same questions. Where was I born? When did I start singing? Who have I worked with? I don’t understand why they can’t just talk to me without all that question bit.

What was the competition? Well, I remember this Puerto Rican who came out in a short skirt and a gun.

My dream is to do whatever I want without any interference from the record company.

There’s a category for me. I like to be referred to as a good singer of good songs in good taste.

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

[On urging Nyro to tell Barbara Streisand that ‘Wedding Bell Blues’ had been personally written for her] It’s not a big lie.

Jazz has always been a man telling the truth about himself.

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

The English pianist Alan Clare was once intrigued with a workman who was carrying out some remodeling inside his house. Clare was playing some recordings, and he began to notice that the workman was whistling along with whatever music he put on – Beethoven, Rachmaninoff, it didn’t seem to matter. Even if he hadn’t heard it before, he had the natural musical ability to follow a melody closely and almost automatically. Clare decided to give him a real test and dug up his recording of Art Tatum doing Tea For Two, with the ground-breaking chord changes Tatum introduced into the tune. The workman never lost a beat nor did he lay out for a bar or two to figure out what was going on. He tracked Tatum flawlessly through all his changes, and when the record ended, he spoke for the first time. He glanced at Clare and with classic English understatement said, ‘Tricky f**ker, ain’t he?’

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

The more vulnerable and the more confused the song is, the equal and opposite effect is how I feel after having written it.

Music is your experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.

Music was our wife and we loved her. We stayed with her, clothed her and put diamond rings on her hands.

Jazz is about being in the moment.

Darlin… be-bop is the music of the future.

Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.

I would say that a composer writes music to express and communicate and put down in permanent form certain thoughts, emotions and states of being. The resultant work of art should speak to the men and women of the artist’s own time with a directness and immediacy of communicative power that no previous art expression can give.

I liked blues from the time my mother used to take me to church. I started to listen to gospel music, so I liked that. But I had an aunt at that time, my mother’s aunt who bought records by people like Lonnie Johnson, Robert Johnson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and a few others.

I feel I have only scratched the surface of what I know I am capable of doing.