[Dixielandjazz] Cab Calloway documentary previewed - Baltimore Sun

[Robert Ringwald]

PBS Treats Baltimore's Cab Calloway as an American Master
by David Zurawik
Baltimore Sun, February 25, 2012
It's not often in judging the biography of a great artist that you can just pick
up the phone and call one of the people who knew him best -- and remains a principal
keeper of the historical flame.
But that is exactly the case with Cab Calloway, the Baltimore-raised jazz bandleader,
singer and actor who is profiled in TV's "American Masters" series at 10 p.m. Monday
on PBS.
Camay Calloway Murphy, the performer's daughter, lives here and is happy to talk
about her late father and how she feels he is treated in "American Masters Cab Calloway:
Sketches."
"I love the documentary," says Murphy, founder of the Cab Calloway Jazz Institute
and Museum at Coppin State University. "And what I truly love is its sense of movement,
the way it captures the feeling of electricity and constant activity that my father
generated."
As she sees it: "His music was more than just from his throat. It was from his feet,
from his knees, from his hands, from his hair. You know, it came from everywhere.
And they really brought that out in the documentary through some different ways of
telling his story."
While Emmy Award-winning director Gail Levin built her film on such staples of traditional
documentary storytelling as great archival footage, interviews and talking heads
offering informed analysis, she also made some daring and original choices. In telling
the story of this hip-shaking, zoot-suited bandleader who started during the Harlem
Renaissance era, she employed a visual artist, a choreographer and even animation.
Yes, Levin has a man dancing in an empty studio, a guy sketching at an easel and
Saturday-morning cartoonlike characters as key parts of a documentary for one of
the most distinguished and celebrated series on PBS. And it all makes for an engaging
and illuminating portraits of an American artist.
"I think one of the most important things in telling the story of a life is trying
to capture the essence of that life," Levin said. "It's not about 'He was born here,
he did that there and he grew up here,'" she explained. "I really wanted to figure
out a way to make this guy real and present now."
To do that, Levin says, imbuing the film with a constant sense of movement was key.
"It's remarkable how many people really don't know him," she explained. "It's remarkable
how many don't know how much of an effect he's had on what's modern -- hip-hop, rap,
street dancing, break dancing, Savion Glover, one thing after another. So it was
really important to me to create something that was contemporary. To make people
feel like, 'Wow, this guy's cool.' To make him dance again. And for all of that,
movement was crucial."
Calloway and his family moved to Baltimore from Rochester, N.Y., in 1918, when he
was 11 years old. He started taking music lessons as a teenager, and it was at Frederick
Douglass High School that he truly developed as a musician, according to his daughter.
"I really think my father had such an excellent career, because he had these excellent
teachers here in Baltimore who trained him as if he was going to be a star," Murphy
says. "He said this himself, that they gave him all the performance-type of tools
he needed to have a career and sustain that career. And in those days [the 1920s],
they didn't really do jazz as a study. Maybe they'd do spirituals, something that
might have some syncopation, but it wasn't jazz per se. He was trained in classical
music."
Murphy, a retired teacher and school principal, says she can't help but note that
an African-American teenager in Baltimore in the 1920s had more educational opportunities
in the arts and music than such youngsters do in some schools today.
"So his training in classical music allowed him to go into something like 'Porgy
and Bess,'" she added. "It allowed him to go onto Broadway and sing in musical revues.
And he would not have been able to do any of that after his band career was waning
if not for the training at Douglass."
Calloway's resume beyond bandleader and singer suggests his wide-ranging talents.
In 1938, he published a "Hepster's Dictionary" of jive-talking slang -- a lexicon
that would be embraced by Beats in the 1950s. In 1943, he starred in the feature
film "Stormy Weather" with Lena Horne. His "Minnie the Moocher" trademark song broke
the color barrier and became a crossover hit, landing some of Calloway's dance moves
and his music in a "Betty Boop" cartoon.
But he is most widely known for his band career, which kicked into high gear in Harlem
in the 1930s at the famed Cotton Club.
The film opens on the image of an old-time emcee sitting at a table in front of a
microphone on a nightclub stage.
"This program is coming to you from the Cotton Club in Harlem, New York City," the
announcer says. "Now, Cab Calloway, the Prince of Hi De Ho, will entertain you with
hotcha razzmatazz."
And on the downbeat of his baton, Calloway, looking tall, slim and fine in white
tie and tails, starts sliding, gliding and bouncing around the stage in front of
his band. The moves are smooth and lighting-quick, and unlike anything you have ever
seen -- even decades later from James Brown.
While all kinds of people in the film link the movements to hip-hop, the Calloway
seen in this vintage film reminds me of the Minnesota musician Prince in his early
days. That's one of the links I see between Calloway and hip-hop today. But that's
the kind of film this is: It not only makes you want to get up and dance, it makes
you want to connect your own cultural dots.
"If you look at Cab Calloway at the Cotton Club in the beginning, in the context
of Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson or Louis Armstrong, where in the hell does
the stuff he's doing come from?" jazz critic Gary Giddins asks in a voice-over. "There's
nothing like it. Louis Armstrong's scat is very musical and very intricate, but it's
not the theatrical craziness Cab is willing to unleash on the stage."
John Landis, who directed Calloway late in the artist's life in the 1980 film "The
Blues Brothers" with John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, says simply, "Cab Calloway is
hip-hop."
And with those words, and with the screen filled with the images of Calloway doing
his stuff onstage almost a century ago, the film is off and running.
There are some traditional interview moments that are used to tell the Calloway story.
In one, Murphy talks about the "odor" and the "aura" of her father from her earliest
memories as a little girl.
"It was sort of like the odor you smell when you go backstage, and you smell the
mixtures of perfume and cigarettes and makeup, and it all gave him a sort of an aura
that I remember as being good," she says sniffing the air as if she might find the
long-lost scent again.
There are also interview moments that brilliantly contextualize Calloway in terms
of race and culture. Cecelia Calloway, another daughter, talks about the "brown paper
bag test" that was used to gauge acceptable skin color for the women in the Cotton
Club's chorus line. That was the world of race in which Calloway had to make his
way.
And cultural critic Stanley Crouch is stunning in his analysis of how Calloway's
hair and the wild ways in which he swung it to and fro onstage defined a new space
in the 1930s and 1940s between black and white identity. Crouch's take on Calloway's
hair alone is worth the time spent with this film.
But in the end, what makes this production soar are moments like the ones with Matthew
Rushing, choreographer and principal dancer of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.
Levin uses Rushing throughout the film to talk about Calloway's movements and connect
them to both formal modern dance and the urban movements of today like hip-hop. At
one point, viewers are treated to a performance in which Rushing mimics the movements
of Calloway in archival footage until the poetry and modern dance of Calloway are
impossible to miss.
At the documentary's end, Rushing starts to perform the Calloway movements alone
in an empty studio -- and is then joined by an animated version of Calloway that
appears like a spirit from another world dancing side by side with the choreographer.
Levin says she wanted to "sort of copy Gene Kelly and Jerry Mouse, in 'Anchors Aweigh,'
but without the budget."
She did better than that. For a few seconds there at the end of "Cab Calloway: Sketches,"
she makes you believe that Cab Calloway, who died in 1994, is dancing again across
the stage.


--Bob Ringwald
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