Eddi Reader Quotes

Swing will never sound as good as it did in the '40s.

There was a period which I refer to as the 'Golden Age of Jazz,' which sort of encompasses the middle Thirties through the Sixties, we had a lot of great innovators, all creating things which will last the world for a long, long time.

I think I'd be a million times more successful and more iconic if I was a singer in the '40s. I'd be allowed a level of mystery, and I think I'd suit that decade.

All of the most popular music of the '30s and '40s were deeply informed by jazz.

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

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

I grew up in the Great Depression, and the jazz artists and Dixieland musicians were at the core of our communications and enjoyment. They were not passing fancies. They are something that is, and will be, listened to again and again. I have a space of reverence for some of those old jazz stars such as Sydney Bechet and Louis Armstrong.

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.

Each decade, I've lived in that decade, so I could easily shed the '20s, the '30s, the '40s.

I quite fancy the 1940s. I like the trams and the trousers.

In the Bay Area, there was a resurgence of Dixieland jazz in the '40s - there was the Frisco Jazz Band, and Lu Watters and the Yerba Buena Jazz Band.

I like to listen to classical music... I like mainline jazz.

I didn't really grow up on hip-hop. Ella Fitzgerald and the old school jazz divas are more my comfort zone.

I grew up listening to Frank Sinatra, riding in the car with my grandpa, and I was just intrigued by it.

The first time I heard a Billie Holiday record, I thought, 'What's so great about Billie Holiday?'

I've always been in love with that Delta-flavored music... the music that came from Mississippi and Memphis and, especially, New Orleans. When I was 14, I was in a wanna-be New Orleans band in Toronto.

I used to play too with a boy who played a saxophone. We didn't play no blues, we'd play a lot of love songs - 'Stardust', 'Blue Moon', 'Out Cold Again', 'Sophisticated Lady', 'Stars Fell On Alabama', a lot of different stuff.

I find early jazz to be the most revolutionary music of its time.

My mother used to play nothing but Billie Holiday.

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.

And, well of course, Count Basie, and I think all of the black bands of the late thirties and early forties, bands with real players. They had an influence on everybody, not just drummers.

I still prefer the bebop of the '40s. The very stuff I started out with is still the best to me. I have come full circle.

For me it's the high-water mark of American culture - not so much contemporary jazz, which has become kind of academic, but the jazz from the '20s on through the '70s.

I always felt like I was born in the wrong time period. I felt like I should've been born in the mid-to-late '40s.