Search Results

This chapter describes the part played by Cab Calloway in the revival of Porgy and Bess. The depression that had enveloped Cab since he laid off his big band began to lift as he threw himself into the challenge of singing in the revival of Porgy and Bess. Calloway's main feature song here was “There's a Boat That's Leaving Soon for New York.” His vocal mannerism of soaring into falsetto for occasional words seems initially unsettling, but the sly confidentiality with which he entices Bess, one of the characters in the play, is very moving. Porgy and Bess, was presented briefly to the Nixon Theatre in Pittsburgh before being extended for a further month at the National Theatre in Washington, D.C.

This chapter describes Cab Calloway's solo career from 1974 until 1978. In the 1970s, he joined forces with Anita O'Day, Ray Eberle's orchestra, and a jazz group led by Ray McKinley at Pasadena Civic Auditorium, to “recreate the sounds of the 40s.” During his run in Hello, Dolly! he took time out to visit the studios and record an album covering not only the best known songs from that show but those from Cabaret and Mame as well. His album The Hi-De-Ho Man spanned his work for that label from the mid-1930s to 1947.

This chapter discusses Cab Calloway’s articulation and portrait of irreverence as a distinctive mode of religious skepticism in African American religious history through his music and his 1976 autobiography, Of Minnie the Moocher and Me. His adolescent tensions with his respectable middle-class African American roots and religious upbringing shaped his early career, shedding light on the impactful presence of black men and women’s comedy that poked fun at African American religious life based on intimate familiarity with it. Comedic religious subjects generated a “knowing” laughter among African Americans with intimate knowledge of these irreverent caricatures because of their own experiences with religious life. Producing this laughter encouraged African Americans to embrace a kind of religious affiliation or participation that appreciated humor about matters that they had been instructed to treat with reverence. Through humor, irreverence oriented African Americans toward religious affiliation in ways that differed from radical humanist critiques of African American Protestant Christian theology and practice. In Cab Calloway’s early career, he made a concerted effort to produce humorous irreverence by replicating the sights, sounds, and behaviors of black Protestant church settings, characters, events, and experiences.

This chapter describes changes that befell the Cotton Club Dance Orchestra as a result of the actions of Chu Berry. Berry was a tenor saxophonist who made some of his finest records in Cab Calloway's band. Together, they made instrumental records less than a month after Chu Berry arrived. The band started playing two full-blown instrumentals, “Queen Isabella” and “Savage Rhythm.” Berry lifted the band's game musically, and provided it with a means of commanding the stage when Calloway was in his dressing room.

This chapter looks at the life of Dizzy Gillespie, the trumpeter of Cotton Club Dance Orchestra. Gillespie's entry into the trumpet section did not fit into the framework that Cab Calloway had established for himself and his men, either socially or musically. Gillespie's aim was for a more complex style of his own. His performance then became subpar with the live performances of the band. He was also accused of having a hot temper and unstable character.

The virtual absence of critical attention to jazz humor is striking—especially for a music that delights in improvisation, unexpected turns of phrase, and rhythmic play. This chapter examines how taking humor seriously offers jazz scholars a set of analytical tools that not only help to identify its musical pleasure and creative ingenuity but also serve to deepen our understanding of its musical, political, and historical dimensions. Incorporating insights from the philosophy of humor and the history of American humor helps us to understand canonical figures and humor-laden artists underserved by jazz discourse, including Sarah Vaughan, Slim Gaillard, Cab Calloway, Dorothy Donegan, and Horace Silver.

“Ol’ Man River” was frequently heard on television during the height of the civil rights era—from roughly 1957 to the end of the 1960s. This chapter considers eleven televised versions performed by singers Sam Cooke, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Judy Garland, Cab Calloway, and Sammy Davis Jr. and a recitation of the lyric by actor Henry Fonda. Analysis of these performances includes both matters of musical style and visual presentation. Discussion of Garland’s two televised versions highlights how one female performer remade “Ol’ Man River” as a personal anthem. Sinatra’s and Davis’s late 1960s versions find these iconic performers altering small details in their respective approaches to the song, drawing attention away from or directly to the confrontational content of Hammerstein’s lyric at a time of heightened racial tension.