Big Bands Quotes

My father was a jazz tenor sax player. He played in a lot of big bands. So I had that sound around me all the time. The first record that really caught my ear was Clifford Brown's 'Brownie Eyes.' I grew up listening to John Coltrane and Illinois Jacquet. This is where I come from... I love improvisational music.

Rock and roll and swing never quite mixed. Rock and roll came in and just blew everything out of the water. Big bands were dead.

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.

Metal needs to be exposed to more people, so it's good for rock if there's bigger bands.

I love horns, and the bigger the band, the better it sounds to my ear.

The '60s was a magical time in the music business. So much creativity and talent. I think a lot of it came from the fact that we had grown up before rock n' roll. We listened to all the great songwriters and big bands, songs with great lyrics and melodies. I think that really influenced everybody.

The history of all big jazz bands shows was, first they played for dancing, and then they played for singing.

Rock 'n' roll accepted me and paid me, even though I loved the big bands... I went that way because I wanted a home of my own. I had a family. I had to raise them. Let's don't leave out the economics. No way.

There was a period after my first solo album came out that about 50 per cent of my work was with symphonies and big bands. We did the Captain and Tennille as well, but it ended up being about 50-50.

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.

My mother told me when I was a toddler and in the crib that they would have music playing, and the thing when I lit up was boogie-woogie or something out of the Louie Jordan period of sometimes big bands, and then all kinds of things.

In the 70s, what thrash was there? Punk came on, and that was cool. But there was no thrash. There were dinosaur big bands, and that was great. Those were my influences.

I always loved all kinds of music. I would watch musicals a lot as a kid, on TV, watch the Fred Astaire movies. I'd watch 'The Wizard of Oz.' I was a big Jerry Lewis fan, and they'd have these big bands and someone singing - some siren, or some guy singing some gorgeous song. I was always enamored of that style of music.

From the small clubs of the Harlem Renaissance where he began playing saxophone to world tours for the biggest of the big bands, Benny Carter redefined American jazz. From the start, his fellow musicians said the way he played the sax was amazing. They say that about me, too. (Laughter.) But I don't think they mean it in quite the same way.

Gene Krupa was my big hero, and I used to play on my mother's flour cans and sugar cans with the kitchen knives, listening to the big bands on my dad's records. Gene Krupa and Harry James.

I've worked with a number of big bands, but there's nothing in life like the Basie band.

My mother did play classical piano, not that well. And actually, my father sang with the big bands - he sang with Bob Crosby's band - but he had to give up show business when his father died. He had to come back to Montgomery and take over the furniture store.

If you started in New York you were dealing with the biggest guys in the world. You're dealing with Charlie Parker and all the big bands and everything. We got more experience working in Seattle.

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

It's certainly no coincidence that big bands became the entertainment of the army in WWI and WWII, and that jazz drumming style is very military influenced. The snare drum comes from the military and becomes the core kind of sound of jazz drums.