American Songbook Quotes

I'm a fan of Jerome Kern and Gershwin. That's my kind of music.

I love swing, jazz, blues, standards. I love the American songbook, Gershwin, Berlin. It's all that. So I'm born in the wrong era and I just don't fit into the 21st century at all.

I wanted to grow up to be George and Ira Gershwin from the age of about six.

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.'

I was lucky enough to have the songs in my first show written by George and Ira Gershwin. Then Cole Porter wrote five shows for me.

For many years, I've always been attached to what they call the Great American Songbook, and Kern was a great leader of that because he had the classical training of Europe. He impressed all the greatest composers, like Cole Porter and Gershwin. They couldn't believe he was writing the songs he was writing.

Ira Gershwin, shame on him. I mean, some of the writing.

I've always been crazy for the American songbook.

I think I've got to go back to 'Someone to Watch Over Me.' I think it's a perfectly written song. I really do. I think it's one of the great songs in the American Songbook, and it speaks to love in its simplest and purest form.

My father had lived in the States in the 1960s for a while and came to love American Songbook material. Even today, he sometimes recognizes singers that I never even heard of, which is beautiful and inspiring.

Presenting the American songbook as a living, breathing entity that's expanding all the time is very important.

But me and my sister knew all the Doris Day and Frank Sinatra songs, too.

When I play live in restaurants and cafes, I don't play my own stuff. I play jazz and 'American Songbook' standards, and I'll fuse it with top 40.

People think jazz music is all standards and the Great American Songbook. But it's really about the sensibility, the feel you bring to the music.

Tony Bennett is an iconic jazz legend.

Love me some Tom Kitt; he's awesome in every way.

A lot of the greatest compositions were made famous by Sinatra.

My style of music is the great American songbook meets the pop world of the Seventies and Eighties.

Musical theater is an American genre. It started really, in America, as a combination of jazz and operetta; most of the great musical theater writers in the golden era are American. I think that to do a musical is a very American thing to me.

My initial training was on the keyboard - mainly the great American songbook. In junior high, during the day, I was a classical clarinetist, but after school, I played New Orleans jazz and big-band music.

I have to say I owe my career to the master composers of the Great American Songbook who have written such high-quality songs - the best popular music ever composed.

I've always loved Elton John and that is one of my favorite songs by him and Bernie (Taupin). The American songbook is ever-expanding and I feel like it works well with what I was trying to say.