Cab Calloway

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

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.

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 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.

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

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

If I’m going to sing like someone else, then I don’t need to sing at all.

You will never know what the meaning of Jazz is if ask what it means.

Give it a good go, try to have fun at it, try to pass on some good notes and some good sounds to your fans, and I don’t think you will have wasted your time.

I don’t like to look back because the whole point in Jazz is doing it now.

When Jazz broke through in England, I remember sneaking to listen on the radio much to my parent’s disapproval.

The high note is not the only thing.

Jazz has an aesthetic intimacy, a romantic transference.

I’m trying to get people to see that we are our brother’s keeper. Red, white, black, brown or yellow, rich or poor, we all have the blues.

To the person who uses music as a medium for the expression of ideas, feelings, images, or what have you; anything which facilitates this expression is properly his instrument.

Don’t say Aretha is making a comeback, because I’ve never been away!

The music scene is more competitive in the States.

I started out to become a jazz pianist; in the meantime I started singing and I sang the way I felt and that’s just the way it came out.

If you want to know about the Sixties, play the music of The Beatles.

And if I had a preference, it would be to be able to not be in the studio until 4 in the morning.