“Without a doubt, Armstrong was the greatest trumpet player of the century — the most powerful, the most touching, the most varied”

As Raymond Chandler once wrote, “All us tough guys are hopeless sentimentalists at heart.”

“Nobody who played jazz was considered able to walk in and do a studio call. They were convinced you couldn't read, or you wouldn't show up, or you'd fall down drunk”

“Many jazz musicians don’t like singers, and some will go to great lengths to avoid play­ing for them. Not without rea­son. Frank Sinatra is a rare excep­tion.”

“Sinatra remained white America’s last completely satisfying definition of masculine style — to somewhat disconcerting effect, let me add”

“Like Garbo or Chaplin, he looms over the cultural life of the century, defying analysis, because every generation has to figure him out from scratch.”

“Critics and musicians have placed him in that inviolable musical trinity with Ellington and Armstrong, and still he remains the most elusive of our native-born geniuses”

“He remains an invisible man in black music history. Rumors swirl — some say he's a junkie, others insist his masculinity is a fraud... Gospel singers whispered his name, women fol­lowed him home, junkies and drag queens idolized him.”

“Maybe the best that can be said of jazz in the ’70s is that it didn’t just survive. It established its own precedents and raised important questions about an art that was finally pushed beyond its golden age.”