Lionel Hampton Quotes

those manufacturing companies: America! With our pocket money we bought flat packets of chewing gum, beautifully wrapped, that included a picture of a movie star – we collected those – and it all smelled strange and rosy: America! On short-wave radio an army station crackled into the room, with an announcer who might start talking right over a swing band: America! Lionel Hampton came to the Netherlands in September 1953 and his saxophonist lay on his back onstage and carried on playing. Hampton abandoned his vibraphone to play drums for a while and to do an improvised dance to ‘Hey-Ba-Ba-Re-Bop’. De Gelderlander, our provincial newspaper, wrote: ‘How vast must be the emptiness of those hearts that have lost any longing for values more exalted than those of Negro moaning.’ But

Lionel Hampton would invite a woman from the audience to dance with him, but

Benny Goodman, Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Billy Eckstine, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Paul Whiteman, Tommy Dorsey and his Orchestra, Lionel Hampton, the Mills Brothers, Woody Herman, and Nat King Cole. “Mona Lisa, men have named you,

to Tommy Dorsey and Albert Ammons and Benny Goodman and the Platters and Doris Day. I changed my mind about the good old days. They were great. Or think about it this way: Would you rather listen to Lionel Hampton or a guy bouncing up and down while grabbing his crotch? Gee, I don’t know.