Scatman Crothers Quotes

We used to play the Savoy Ballroom, and we always had a boogie tune in the set. Bands like Tommy Dorsey used to do a little boogie woogie. The big bands.

The Big Band Era is my era. People say, 'Where did you get your style from?' I did the Big Band Era on guitar. That's the best way I could explain it.

I think somewhere in the back of my mind I've always wanted to make a whole swing album.

I love oldies just kind of sweet, slinky, Fifties music. The slow stuff. And Billie Holiday.

Most of what I listen to now is mainstream jazz from 1935 right up to and including early bebop and cool jazz.

I've always been crazy for the American songbook.

I used to work over a bar. That was - there was no stage. I stood over a tiny bar. Louis Prima, rest his soul, he worked there. I was the guy that filled in when he was off the stage.

I came through the bebop era, and to me that was enough.

In the mid-1930s, a lot of the Big Bands sounded the same.

I fell in love with playing the trumpet because of what we call 'hot jazz' of the 1920s and 1930s, music that has a higher energy to it.

My father was a part of that generation, and my mother, too - the late-'30s, early-'40s big-band generation. Frank Sinatra, Art Blakey, Gene Krupa, Billie Holiday - all that stuff was in my background.

We went to see all the shows. American musical theater and jazz were very big.

When I was a kid, I used to listen to my Emerson radio late at night under the covers. I started by listening to jazz in the late 1940s and then vocal harmony groups like the Four Freshmen, the Modernaires and the Hi-Lo's. I loved Stan Kenton's big band - with those dark chords and musicians who could swing cool with individual sounds.

Benny Goodman was one of the big influences as a clarinet player. That's why I wanted the clarinet.

I appreciate men like Ben Webster and Coleman Hawkins very much.

I grew up in Pittsburgh, and regularly, my parents would take us to the Holiday House Supper Club to see acts like Nancy Wilson, Sarah Vaughn, Ben Vereen, Freda Payne, Stephanie Mills, and The Temptations, to name a few.

Most of us remember Nat King Cole as a vocalist. His warm, grainy baritone is still so closely identified with such familiar ballads as 'Stardust' and 'The Christmas Song' that it's hard to imagine anyone else performing them.

The jazz boom was goin' on then so there was a lot happenin' in New York at that time.

I'm an American songbook guy, though I've got eclectic tastes. I really love the American songbook. I've taken up the ukulele, and so you can play 'Five Foot Two' and Hawaiian music, but you can also do some of the great tunes, like 'You Go to My Head,' 'I Guess I'll Hang My Tears Out to Dry,' 'Taking a Chance on Love.'

And I loved Fats Waller. I love his instrumental abilities, his vocal abilities and his sense of humor.

So I went into jazz and performed in jazz clubs all over the country.

At 14 and 15, I used to listen to Tito Puente, Dave Valentine and everything that was happening with American jazz. I love it.

One of the pleasant duties of America's most famous announcers during the relatively short swing era of the big bands was to host late-night remotes from some of the most famous ballrooms throughout the country.

I listen to a lot of jazz. I'm a big Sinatra geek. I love Chet Baker.

I want people to feel what it was like in the '40s. That's when popular music in the United States was so beautiful. Frank Sinatra, the Pied Pipers, Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, Tommy Dorsey, Billie Holiday. That's when popular music had deeper values, to me. This was music that was selling millions of records.