[Dixielandjazz] At the Cotton Club, a Bandleader Who Found Fresh Ways to Keep the Beat - New York Times

[Robert Ringwald]

At the Cotton Club, a Bandleader Who Found Fresh Ways to Keep the Beat
by Neil Genzlinger
New York Times, February 25, 2012
The "American Masters" programs on PBS are almost always rewarding, but the episode
about Cab Calloway on Sunday night on Channel 13 in New York (and on Monday night
on many other PBS outlets; check local listings) is unusually so, with smart, well-presented
insights into his music, his dancing, his acting and his barrier-crossing appeal.
The film, "Cab Calloway: Sketches" by Gail Levin, jettisons much of what would be
in a conventional biography -- we are given only a vague picture of his early life
-- and instead focuses on his work as a bandleader, in savvy but accessible detail.
A grandson, C. Calloway Brooks, explains the unusual Calloway practice of having
the bass play slightly ahead of the beat, with the drums staying fractionally behind.
"The bass player pulls the whole groove forward," Mr. Brooks, himself a bandleader,
explains. "It gives it tremendous momentum. A weak drummer would speed up. They'd
say, 'Oh, I've got to lock in with the bass player, so I've got to speed up to get
with that bass player.' But what you have to do is have the strength to be able to
stay in the center of the beat and let the bass player play in front of the beat."
That was one of the things that gave Calloway, who died in 1994, a distinctive sound
and helped propel him to success at the Cotton Club in Harlem and, with the recording
of "Minnie the Moocher" in 1931, to national cult status. Another, of course, was
his wildly energetic scat singing.
"There was nobody in his band who could play out of their horn more jazz than he
could get out of his throat," Mr. Brooks says.
The film also explores Calloway's crossover appeal in amusing but forthright detail,
with comments about how his straight hair and relatively light skin tone made him
more acceptable to white audiences of the day. That made for a certain incongruity
when "Minnie the Moocher," a song with a catchy singalong chorus that was actually
about shady characters, became a national hit.
"When I look back now and think of middle-class whites hi-de-ho-ing as Cab Calloway's
singing about cocaine, it's like surreal," the critic Gary Giddins says. "How clueless
was white America?"
Ms. Levin wraps the film in a clever device with a sweet payoff: she periodically
shows footage of a painting of Calloway as it takes shape. At the end, the painting
comes to animated life -- a fitting metaphor for what this film does for Calloway
himself.



--Bob Ringwald
www.ringwald.com
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--Bob Ringwald
www.ringwald.com
Fulton Street Jazz Band
530/ 642-9551 Office
916/ 806-9551 Cell
Amateur (Ham) Radio K6YBV

"There are three things I like about being on an Italian cruise ship 
First their cuisine is unsurpassed.
Second their service is superb.
And then, in time of emergency, there is none of this nonsense about women and children first."
--Winston Churchill.