[Dixielandjazz] Cab Calloway documentary previewed - Journal News

[Robert Ringwald]

PBS to Air Film on Greenburgh's Cab Calloway
by Peter D. Kramer
Journal News (Westchester, New York), February 23, 2012
For nearly 60 years, from the Roaring Twenties forward, when generations of even
casual music listeners heard the phrase "Hi-De-Ho," an image sprang instantly to
their mind: a sharp-dressed man in front of a band, dancing like there was no tomorrow,
with a Cheshire cat grin, his hair flopping around like it had a mind of its own.
Cab Calloway was the man.
With Sunday's premiere of "Cab Calloway: Sketches," on PBS's "American Masters" series
(8 p.m. on WNET/Thirteen), documentary filmmaker Gail Levin hopes to introduce the
man who created "Minnie the Moocher" -- and danced with Betty Boop -- to a whole
new generation.
"This guy is very modern, very hip, very everything," Levin says. "People should
know him. He's cool. He's an original."
To Chris Calloway Brooks, he'll always be "granddad," the bandleader who lived on
Knollwood Road in Greenburgh until his 1994 death.
Brooks, who lives in Fleetwood in an apartment filled with "Hi-De-Ho" mementoes and
memorabilia, carries the Calloway torch and continues to lead a band called The Cab
Calloway Orchestra, which plays a couple of dozen dates a year.
He is one of the voices in "Sketches," wearing a Zoot suit and discussing its international
provenance: the slave master's coat, Cuban pants, British shoes, a Swiss watch, a
Chinese silk tie with a French print, Egyptian cotton shirt and a wide-brimmed hat
like those worn by slaves, topped with a Native American feather.
Brooks' mother, Camay, describes her father's particular scent: "He smelled like
backstage," she says. "He smelled good."
Calloway's rise, as Levin recounts, came after he got stomped at the Savoy.
His band, The Alabamians, was crushed in a battle of the bands at Harlem's legendary
Savoy Ballroom. Members of the winning band, The Missourians, liked what they saw
in Calloway's antics -- the way he "gave it the business," his fluid motion with
a baton in his hand, the way he worked the crowd -- and hired him.
It wasn't too long before Calloway had an orchestra of his own, filling in for Duke
Ellington as the house band at Harlem's segregated Cotton Club.
With "Minnie the Moocher," a woeful tale of a girl done in by drugs, Calloway had
a No. 1 hit and a million seller and became a pop-culture icon, aided by the Fleisher
Bros. cartoons.
"I've always found it amazing that he was simultaneously an adult entertainer and
a joy to animators and kids," Levin says.
There aren't many acts who can trace their careers from George Gershwin to The Beatles.
Cab Calloway might have been the only one.
Gershwin modeled Sportin' Life in "Porgy and Bess" (now back on Broadway) after Calloway's
on-stage persona. It wasn't until 1952 that Calloway played the role, in a European
tour of the musical.
And Calloway was on "The Ed Sullivan Show" on Feb. 23, 1964, when that band from
Liverpool made their third appearance in three weeks on the show.
"Sketches" features another filmmaker who reignited Calloway's fame for a new generation:
John Landis, who directed 1980's film "The Blues Brothers," in which the bandleader
was once again out in front, singing "Minnie the Moocher."
Landis -- who had taken the time to find Calloway's original orchestrations for "Minnie"
-- recalls that the bandleader was none too pleased when he arrived for the "Blues
Brothers" recording session. He had just released a disco version of "Minnie" and
thought that the role in the movie would feature that track. After Calloway pouted
and gave a lackluster take, Landis told him it wasn't great.
"I didn't realize you wanted great," Calloway shot back testily, and went on to make
a flawless recording, the one heard in the film.
Calloway is depicted as a stern bandleader -- Brooks recalls band members would call
him "The General" or "Crab Calloway" -- but a showman through and through.
"No player could get more jazz out of his instrument than he could get out of his
throat -- or the audience," Brooks says.
___________________________________
Cab Calloway Owes His Debut, and His Comeback, to Chicago
by Dave Hoekstra
Chicago Sun-Times, February 23, 2012
Long before there was Black History Month, there was Cab Calloway.
During the 1930s and '40s the jazz-blues-swing-poet introduced an urban African-American
lexicon to an unsuspecting white audience 365 days a year. He sang about reefer while
dressing high. He wore Zoot suits accented by a wide-brimmed white hat that was derived
from plantation life. Calloway's hit song "Minnie the Moocher" ("The Hi De Ho Song")
actually was the dark story of a female hustler whose pal Smokey showed her how to
"kick the gong around" (slang for smoking opium).
He was totally dracula -- or "something in a class by itself," as defined in "Cab
Calloway's Hepster's Dictionary," published in 1938.
Calloway enjoyed a career resurrection at the age of 73 in 1980, when he sang "Minnie
the Moocher" in the hit "Blues Brothers" film. Calloway re-recorded the vocal track
at Universal Recording, the home of latter-day Chess records and Vee-Jay sessions
in Chicago.
One of the most original artists of the 20th century is the subject of the don't-miss
documentary "Cab Calloway: Sketches," which airs at 10 p.m. Monday on WTTW-Channel
11 as part of the "American Masters" series. Emmy-winning filmmaker Gail Levin uses
the animated sketches of New Yorker-Rolling Stone magazine artist Steve Brodner as
a thread to bring Calloway to life. (He died in November 1994.)
Calloway dances again. He smiles again at the world of cultural possibility.
Although Calloway came of age at the Cotton Club in Harlem (during a time when blacks
were not allowed to sit in the audience), his Chicago connections are important.
His older sister Blanche was the bandleader for Blanche Calloway and her Joy Boys,
a Chicago-based band that included Louis Armstrong and future Calloway drummer Cozy
Cole. Cab Calloway debuted in Chicago in 1928 at the Dreamland Cafe.
According to Dempsey Travis' "An Autobiography of Black Jazz," the Dreamland was
managed by Bill Bottoms, who later became the chef for boxer Joe Louis. Calloway's
first full-time gig was as house singer with Armstrong and Earl Hines at the Sunset
Cafe, 35th and Calumet. The mobbed-up Sunset was the South Side's version of the
Cotton Club, with chorus girls, comedians and tap dancers.
"Sketches" points out how Calloway co-opted the theme of "Minnnie the Moocher" from
Blanche, the first female bandleader leading men through the South.
And then there was "The Blues Brothers," where Calloway was introduced to another
generation.
The hourlong documentary closes out on a high note with the "Blues Brothers" segment.
There is no mention of Calloway's death. "Blues Brothers" director John Landis offers
engaging and vivid recollections of working with Calloway, especially trying to get
Calloway hep to a vintage version of "Minnie the Moocher." Calloway was set on using
a disco version he had just recorded.
Levin also sits down with Blues Brothers band members Steve Cropper (guitar), Lou
Marini (saxophone) and Duck Dunn (bass) at the historic Gallagher's Steakhouse in
New York. Dunn says the "Minnie the Moocher" concert segment -- shot before 5,000
young adoring fans at the Palladium in Los Angeles -- was the first time he performed
in a tuxedo.
That was the way of Cab Calloway.
"The 30th anniversary of 'The Blues Brothers' in 2010 and Cab was the impetus for
getting this thing started," Levin said earlier this week from New York. "I wanted
to make people realize this guy was cool, and let's put him out there again. He is
very much the DNA of what has followed him in terms of hip-hop, rap and rock. I have
to be delicate about this, but it was a hard story to pitch. People don't tend to
remember and don't seem to understand why that content is still so valuable."
"American Masters" in New York co-produced "Sketches" with Artline Films in Paris,
France, ARTE France and AVRO in the Netherlands.
"At the beginning getting interest in American co-involvement was very, very hard,"
Levin said. "It was also very hard to book it. Andre 3000 [of OutKast] basically
played Cab."
And Wyclef Jean opened his 2001 "All Star Jam @ Carnegie Hall" with "Minnie the Moocher."
"My hopes were to find someone very contemporary where you could seek lineage in
a certain way," Levin said. "But these get harder to book because these people are
very busy." Levin does include Matthew Rushing, the young choreographer and principal
dancer for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, and Chris "Calloway" Brooks, the
eloquent bandleader who is a spittin' image of his grandfather. The honesty of cultural
critic Stanley Crouch is great, especially when he uses Calloway's straight hairstyle
to explain the artist's crossover appeal. "White people said, 'He's coming our way!'"
Crouch says with a mock turn of a full head of hair.
"Sketches" also incorporates footage of an intensely reflective and sophisticated
Calloway in the 1980s on the New York PBS talk show "Day at Night."
Levin was born in Chicago before her family moved to Nebraska to pursue its retail
clothing business. Levin was born in the Lying-In Hospital in Hyde Park, where her
aunt, Dr. Bernice Neugarten, was at the University of Chicago pioneering the study
of aging in human development.
"My goal all the way through this was to get Cab in the present and not to make him
some long-ago thing," Levin said. "He was seductive in an unwholesomely wholesome
sort of way. Everybody, regardless of race, was pulled into the magic of him."
___________________________________
Get the Lingo
There's a scene in "Cab Calloway: Sketches" where the bandleader sings about "jive
talk, lingo all the jitter bugs use today."
Here are a few actual jive talkin' entries from "Cab Calloway's Hepster's Dictionary,"
which Calloway published in 1938:
Armstrongs (n.) Musical notes in the upper register, high trumpet notes.
Barbecue (n.) The girl friend, a beauty.
Frisking the whiskers (v.) What the cats do when they are warming up for a swing
session.
Igg (v.) To ignore someone, ex. "Don't igg me!"
Jitter bug (n.) A swing fan; formerly a person addicted to "jitter sauce" (liquor).
Licking the chops (v.) See "frisking the whiskers."
Spark jiver (n.) Electric organ.
V-8 (n.) A chick who spurns company, is independent, is not amenable.


--Bob Ringwald
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