Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I've always been crazy for the American songbook.
My style of music is the great American songbook meets the pop world of the Seventies and Eighties.
I publish my own music. I'm creating my own songbook. It works that way for me; I'm very independent.
Presenting the American songbook as a living, breathing entity that's expanding all the time is very important.
People think jazz music is all standards and the Great American Songbook. But it's really about the sensibility, the feel you bring to the music.
When I play live in restaurants and cafes, I don't play my own stuff. I play jazz and 'American Songbook' standards, and I'll fuse it with top 40.
I can go from one extreme to another, from playing at the Sydney Opera House on the Songbook tour to shows with Soundgarden at Voodoo Fest, all in a week.
Donna Summer was one of the strongest female singers in pop music. She was very underrated as a vocalist and a writer, and her songbook is just outrageous.
I've been doing a lot of studying singing, and I'm thinking of recording an album containing all my old war horses and putting out a songbook at the same time.
I love swing, jazz, blues, standards. I love the American songbook, Gershwin, Berlin. It's all that. So I'm born in the wrong era and I just don't fit into the 21st century at all.
My initial training was on the keyboard - mainly the great American songbook. In junior high, during the day, I was a classical clarinetist, but after school, I played New Orleans jazz and big-band music.
My father had lived in the States in the 1960s for a while and came to love American Songbook material. Even today, he sometimes recognizes singers that I never even heard of, which is beautiful and inspiring.
I think I've got to go back to 'Someone to Watch Over Me.' I think it's a perfectly written song. I really do. I think it's one of the great songs in the American Songbook, and it speaks to love in its simplest and purest form.
From their '61 Cavern Club debut to their last rooftop concert eight years later, The Beatles gave every serious artist in their wake the songbook and sound for their career. It's the musical trough from which nearly every musician drinks.
As a teenager, in my songbook, I used to script what my lighting would be like. I used to dance in my roo;, it was like putting myself in a trance, and making myself feel good about things, almost like a private ceremony of begging people to like you.
In America, at the beginning of talkies, they pulled Fred Astaire from the theaters and put him on the screen and had all of these great composers write songs for him. They call it the Great American Songbook; I call it the Fred Astaire Songbook because they were written for him.
For many years, I've always been attached to what they call the Great American Songbook, and Kern was a great leader of that because he had the classical training of Europe. He impressed all the greatest composers, like Cole Porter and Gershwin. They couldn't believe he was writing the songs he was writing.
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.'
