[Dixielandjazz] Cab Calloway documentary reviewed - San Francisco Chronicle

[Robert Ringwald]

'Cab Calloway: Sketches': A Hi-De-Ho Legend
by David Wiegand
San Francisco Chronicle, February 24, 2012
Cab Calloway's grandson tells the story of how the great singer-bandleader created
his signature style of bonelessly serpentine movement onstage.
Back in the day, Calloway, the subject of a Black History Month documentary by Gail
Levin on "American Masters" Monday night, kept a rooster with him as he and his band
traveled from gig to gig. While on the train, Calloway spent hours observing how
the rooster strutted back and forth, preening its feathers, extending its neck, advancing
one foot forward and then seeming to pull the rest of its body along to catch up.
Watch vintage footage of Calloway onstage, decked out in white tie and white tails
to match his wider-than-a-mile grin, you instantly see how the story might very well
be true. When not bouncing up and down on his toes or frantically dancing while conducting,
he's undulating across the stage like that preening rooster. It's no wonder many
believe Calloway was moonwalking long before Michael Jackson.
Calloway was a true original, says author and jazz critic Gary Giddins in "Cab Calloway:
Sketches." He stumbled into the New York music scene in the midst of the Harlem Renaissance
by winning a two-week gig at the famed Savoy Ballroom, only to be given his two-week
notice just as the gig started.
He bounced back immediately, finding a new and better home for his band at the Cotton
Club, the Harlem nightclub famous for offering white audiences the best in black
entertainment. To play at the Cotton Club, says one of Calloway's daughters, you
had to pass the brown paper bag test: Your skin tone could be no darker than a brown
paper bag.
The eminent jazz historian Stanley Crouch says that while Calloway's gifts were immense,
he never could have scored such pioneering crossover success if he'd not been light-skinned
and if his hair had not been straight.
In addition to his career as a bandleader, Calloway was famous as a singer -- he
all but owned the song "Minnie the Moocher," which he appropriated from his sister
Blanche (a pioneer in her own right as a female bandleader) and sang until his death
in 1994.
The song is a sly blues about drugs and sex, but with many of the lyrics in jive,
few in the white Cotton Club audience knew what it was really about:
"She messed around with a bloke named Smoky
She loved him though he was cokey
He took her down to Chinatown
He showed her how to kick the gong around."
Impressionistic focus
The beauty of Levin's film is that it isn't a straight biography, but rather, as
the name "Sketches" implies, a more impressionistic focus on Calloway's artistry
and influence.
Between commentary by Calloway's daughters, Cecelia Calloway and Camay Calloway Brooks,
horn player Gerald Wilson and film director John Landis, we watch artist Steve Brodner
attempting to capture Calloway in a large-scale paint sketch. Later, Matthew Rushing,
dancer-choreographer of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, turns Calloway's
movement into a dance piece, in effect, a pas de deux with Brodner's now-animated
sketch.
Huge chunks of Calloway's long life and rich career are left out, including co-starring
with Pearl Bailey in a national tour and Broadway run of an all-black "Hello, Dolly!"
in 1967. In their place, we get a fascinating dissection of Calloway's high musical
standards from his grandson, bandleader Chris "Calloway" Brooks.
'Blues Brothers'
Landis is on hand to discuss the making of "The Blues Brothers" movie. The film certainly
merits mention because Calloway's rousing performance of "Minnie" introduced him
to a brand-new audience in 1980. But the segment goes on a bit longer than necessary,
and when compared to the insight into Calloway's career and African American cultural
evolution in the 20th century by Crouch, Giddins and others, it seems relatively
unimportant.
Another Calloway film is much more interesting and much more culturally significant:
"Stormy Weather," the 1943 Hollywood film featuring Calloway, Lena Horne and Bill
"Bojangles" Robinson, with Fats Waller, the Nicholas Brothers and choreographer Katherine
Dunham and her dancers.
The cast was an African American "royal family" of music and dance, captured on film
at a time when African Americans were mostly restricted to cameo appearances in mainstream
movies so they could be trimmed out when the films played in the South.
Levin's approach to "Sketches" is bold and often thrilling. We may not need to know
about "Hello, Dolly!," but Levin has done a magnificent job of analyzing the heart
of Calloway's artistry. If that leaves us wanting to know more, it's because Calloway
himself was such a giant, a sketch could never do him complete justice.


--Bob Ringwald
www.ringwald.com
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