People sometimes forget that jazz was built not only in the minds of the great ones but on the backs of the ordinary ones — ordinary musicians.
Cab CallowayYou hear about the Duke Ellingtons, the Jimmie Luncefords, and the Fletcher Hendersons, but people sometimes forget that jazz was not only built in the minds of the great ones, but on the backs of the ordinary ones.
Cab CallowayI think it was just an opera. Now, you go to opera, you expect to see and hear what the opera is. So, it was Catfish Row. It was singers. Marvelous voices. It didn't make no difference what color they were
Cab CallowayYou don't think it was because a white man wrote it, a black man wrote it, a green man wrote it. What-doesn't make a difference!
Cab CallowayA movie and a stage show are two entirely different things. A picture, you can do anything you want. Change it, cut out a scene, put in a scene, take a scene out. They don't do that on stage
Cab CallowayAnd then there's my Grandson: He's certainly got the music together, there's just no question about it.
Cab CallowayEverybody that you could name would join in our audiences from, Laguardia on down. Everybody came. Everybody came to the Cotton Club.
Cab CallowayWe usually never got out of there before four or five o'clock in the morning. Every morning. So it was rough.
Cab CallowayIt's very difficult to photograph an opera. And they messed up on it. It just wasn't there. And I don't blame the Gershwins for taking it away. Of course, if they had gotten the original company to have done it, it would have been very good
Cab CallowayThat's what George wrote! He wrote it. Why change it? There was this European company that I was speaking about awhile ago - course, didn't nobody know what Porgy was.
Cab CallowayEverybody did something. It was very entertaining. We had a lot of fun. Lot of fun. And there was no segregation, that I could see. I never saw any
Cab Calloway