Top 40 Big Band Quotes

With my little band, I did everything they did with a big band. I made the blues jump.

Not many people come out of a big band as the lead singer/songwriter and making a record, and all of a sudden we’re all happily sailing at the same pace as we were before.

When I first set up my big band, I only had Gilson Lavis, the drummer from Squeeze, with me. He was the core element. Whenever a group hits the big time, they always get a new drummer because they really need that. You can make do with rubbish elsewhere.

My dad was a huge big band and jazz fan, and we both sort of enjoyed be-bop, but man, it required so much skill to play it. And then there was cool jazz, the era that Miles, Coltrane, and Ornette ushered in, and that found a home in me. It turns out that that music was just really where I breathed.

I like having a big band because it gives you more options. They can always not play and I can do the quiet stuff, but when we want to do the big arrangements, we can.

Not everybody wanted a female to be the front face of a big band, you know… You had to be three times better than a man had to be.

My brother was always in bands and on the road when I was a kid and he was my inspiration. He never made it with a big band, in fact he never made a record. Here he is fifty-something years old.

Being such a big band is never a problem but it can be distracting.

Ella can work nightclubs that Duke might not be able to work, because of having the big band. Where they go now is strictly a matter of their own names and talents.

I always told the people at Cal Arts that if they wanted me to do Jazz studies, first of all, there couldn’t be a big band within 500 miles and that I could do what I wanted to do. And they said I could.

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.

I like the power and versatility of a big band and how an orchestra can vary the dynamics from very loud to very quiet, and SNJO covers those bases.

We don’t have the big-band mentality. We never wanted to become a big band.

With a smaller setting, you have a lot more freedom and flexibility within a given moment, but not necessarily the velocity you have with a big band.

Something happened in the nineties. There was a shift. I don’t want to blame it on grunge or the rise of indie – but that was basically it. It was seen as dirty and kind of ignorant to have these ambitions, to want to be a big band.

I still love recording and still love the stage, but like my dad, I have the most fun when I am in front of that glorious orchestra or that kick-butt big band.

Being from a big band is great because you can do other bands.

I still miss music and singing. One day, I’m going to sing with a big band.

I was a fairly good amateur musician, and I was an average professional. But the one thing I saw was that the big band business was fading.

When do you suppose the electric guitar was invented? If you thought the 1950s, you’d be wrong. If you can muster a recollection of hearing electric guitar in Lionel Hampton’s big band in the 1940s and date it to that decade, you’d still be off – by more than 30 years.

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

I grew up in a very musical family, my father was a musician and a big band leader and made records.

We want to be big… we want to be a big band, but we don’t want to be your best friends.

Living composers writing for big band are very few and far between. There are not a lot of them, and I have a talent for doing it. I am zeroing in on what I do best.

There’s sort of an open offer to work with a guy in Los Angeles who does big band and orchestra arrangements who was at least an acquaintance to Les Baxter before he passed away.

It was by listening to Goodman’s band, that I began to notice the guitarist Charlie Christian, who was one of the first musicians to play solos in a big band set-up.

I was growing up at a time when music was growing and changing so fast. I had learned all the big band sounds of the 1940s, Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey. But then along came Chuck Berry, Les Paul, Fats Domino and I figured out how to make their music as well.

You don’t get anything easy when you come from a big band and you go and start another one. You learn real fast that, ‘Wow! I went from the top of the mountain to all the way back to the bottom, and I’ve gotta start over.’

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

I started a big band when grunge was popular. I mean, that didn’t make much sense.

Since the big band started I’m just always swamped with movies and things. It certainly pays the bills and it’s very satisfying, because I get to write all these big charts and all this crazy music.

One interesting thing about jazz, or art in general, but jazz especially is such an individual art form in the sense that improvisation is such a big part of it, so it feels like it should be less soldiers in an army and more like free spirits melding. And yet, big band jazz has a real military side to it.

My brother had a big band in high school; after that we continued to play together, eventually forming a group called the Jazz Brothers, that recorded for Riverside Records.

I played Big Band jazz music. I wasn’t into rock and roll. I was just there because it was a living. I surprised everyone. I’m still surprising people.

When I got my band in 1983, I knew what I had to do. If I’m going to have a big band, they’re going to have to sound equally as good as what I’m used to hearing.

Bacharach has such a brilliant ear for melody and his music has a completely timeless feel to it; I thought it would be great to do a whole album of his music and to record with a full orchestra and big band which is something I hadn’t done before.

So I was always around music and my dad was in his own way a progressive jazzer, a big band jazzer guy.

I was a fairly good amateur musician, and I was an average professional. But the one thing I saw was that the big band business was fading. So I made an economic decision, and it turned out the best judgment I ever made in my life.

Because usually in the past when I was in a big band, that was all I did.

When I’d hear something that sounded like I could follow it – most of those big band jazz tunes are blues anyway – I would hum it and play with the fiddle while I was humming.