Big Band Era Quotes

I think the zenith of popular songwriting to the United States of America was that period that started in the '20s and went into the '50s. It was the period of the great American standard song.

I've always liked Frank Sinata and Big Band music.

I was brought up on listening to 78 rpm records from crooners to opera singers to solo piano players.

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

To sing with Frank Sinatra in any capacity at all is overwhelming.

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

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.

My musical development stopped when Frank Sinatra died.

There will never be another Frank Sinatra. I never wanted to be another Frank Sinatra. I only wanted to be another Michael Buble.

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.

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.

I worked hard learning harmony and theory when I was growing up in Chicago in the 1920s.

Since the advent of Benny Goodman, there have been too few clarinetists to fill the void that Goodman left. Ken Peplowski is most certainly one of those few. The man is magic.

I think that band [Glenn Miller] was the beginning of the end. It was a mechanized version of what they called jazz music. I still can't stand to listen to it.

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.'

Quincy Jones' autobiography 'Q' is very good. Because he's a master at music, he's one of our greatest composers, and its good for him to have a book and tell the good ole days when he was with Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Sarah Vaughan and Ray Charles.

I've always been crazy for the American songbook.

I had a lot of fun with Frank Sinatra, because he was such a hooligan, and so to himself, he was the king, and everything was his way, and I enjoyed watching that.

My mother was really into big band. It was played in the house all the time.

In black culture, you know, we used to go swing dancing. We used to go out to go dance and actually have fun.

Intimate singing had a wonderful style in the '30s and '40s. It came out of Broadway and the jazz of Louis Armstrong and Billie Holliday. But Sinatra created the best romantic era that we've ever had.

My great-grandmother was in one of the first girl bands, in the 1920s. Their outfits were mental: velvet bloomers with big ribbons and headpieces. They were brilliant.

I'd like to do a complete album of covers with no songs written after 1937.

Big band music, to me, it really has three key elements. First is the lyrics are really sweet, and they're just really family-friendly. The second thing is the music is jazz music, so the music is complicated enough to hold your attention for 5 or 6 million plays. That makes the songs interesting. The last part is the fact that it's danceable.

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