Louis Armstrong playing trumpet on the Judgment Day.
Jazz is rhythm and meaning.
Be-bop wasn't developed in any deliberate way.
You can't teach it [jazz singing]. There's nobody who can teach you how to sing jazz. Either you know how to sing jazz, or you don't.
Jazz has been such a force in music, that any musician, including classical composers, have been influenced, and obviously performers, also.
The one radio voice that I listened to above others belonged to Ella Fitzgerald. There was a quality to her voice that fascinated me, and I'd sing along with her, trying to catch the subtle ways she shaded her voice, the casual yet clean way she sang the words.
Sarah Vaughan was the Charlie Parker of the vocalists during the 1950s.
The first records I heard were from Dizzy Gillespie and people like that.
I actually got thrown into my Bar Mitzvah because my teacher, my Cantor, did not tell me that they would all say 'amen' at the end of each, for want of a better word, paragraph. And that threw me completely. I almost went into an Ella Fitzgerald sort of scat.
The way I was singing the songs was jazz
Jazz was the pop music of its day, and all American popular music has stemmed from it one way or another.
Louis Armstrong is jazz. He represents what the music is all about.
As a singer, I float around. I'm kind of scatty, bouncing around a lot. I try to adapt to what's going on around me in the song and the arrangement.
If you listen to Louis Armstrong from 1929, you will never hear anything better than that really, and you will never hear anything more free than that.
If anybody was Mr. Jazz it was Louis Armstrong. He was the epitome of jazz and always will be. He is what I call an American standard, an American original.
I would love to sing with Ella Fitzgerald.
As far as music, Louis Armstrong is one of my heroes.
One of my biggest musical influences is definitely Ella Fitzgerald as a vocalist.
I would say my greatest musical influences have been Ella Fitzgerald and Mary J. Blige.
Jazz is people's music, a collectivity.
My music is jazz.
Black musicians were imitating speech cadences, and Kerouac was imitating the black musicians' breath cadences on their horns and brought it back to speech. It always was speech rhythms or cadences as far as the ear that Kerouac was developing. All passed through black music.
I was three or four, and my mother would have a Bing Crosby record playing through the house. It was my introduction to jazz, harmonies, melodies, musicianship, and emotion.
If you don't like Louis Armstrong, you don't know how to love.
I'm a trumpet player, and I sing jazz.
