A Quote by Clark Terry
Count Basie was college, but Duke Ellington was graduate school.
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My father was incredible on trumpet and played with the likes of Duke Ellington and Count Basie.
My father was a huge jazz fan, so I remember him playing Duke Ellington, Sarah Vaughn, and Count Basie.
I was raised on jazz. My father, from the time I was born, used to get up early on Saturdays and Sundays and put on Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Kenny Burrell, Sarah Vaughn, John Coltrane - all these great, classic albums.
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.
My dad was a jazz fan and he used to have lots of old 78s, so I grew up with big jazz bands and the likes of Duke Ellington and Count Basie - although I really liked show tunes from those big musicals as well. I've always kept my ears open, as it were, when it comes to music. It doesn't matter to me what type of music it is. If I like it, I'll listen to it.
The Metropole Orchestra is like Count Basie or Duke Ellington with strings... it's strings that swing. Strings that swing like Dizzy Gillespie... keep swinging, baby. And when you have all of that special excellence of the Metropole Orchestra, then your music just flies - it soars in a way that's really magical.
I was always moved by all of the music. As a young man, Duke Ellington and Lionel Hampton, Count Basie and all these great musicians would come through our town of Memphis. There wasn't adequate hotels, so these musicians - the lady who ran the theater knew my mother, who had a large house, and many of them would stay with us. So that was another great blessing, so I'm always around these great geniuses, and to realize their humanity is such a touching thing.
I could turn on my radio in the morning when I was getting dressed for school and hear Frank Sinatra and Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman and think this is the music. Now that music is art. Ellington is art. At that time it was just what you heard on the radio. Cole Porter was just a guy who wrote pretty songs and Billie Holliday would sing them.
I got a poster from Columbia Records, and there's Miles Davis, Charlie Mingus, Ellington, Count Basie - everybody in that poster has died, I'm the only one left. And great players like Paul Desmond and Gerry Mulligan, it's hard to believe they're gone because we were all so close. But I believe in the future and the tradition will go on.
As for my band, well, my mentors were Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Jimmie Lunceford, and no one had a band more smartly dressed than Duke.
I remember the night when I was playing at Birdland, and Duke Ellington walked in wearing that cap of his and with all his elegance. The Duke then came backstage, and I was there with my band. That's the one thing I miss.
I was scheduled to graduate from high school in 1943, but I was in a course that was supposed to give us four years of high school plus a year of college in our four years. So by the end of my junior year, I would have had enough credits to graduate from high school.
We want our students to graduate from high school, but we want them to graduate with a plan, whether it's college or career.
My teachers are Duke Ellington and nature.
I decided that I would be one of the biggest new names; and I actually had some little fancy business cards printed up to announce it, 'Count Basie. Beware, the Count is Here.'
I think, overall, there is a lack of diversity in the arts. I'm thinking about when I was in grad school: I could probably count on one hand the number of minority students in the graduate school program.
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