William “Woogie” Harris and Cab Calloway at the Loendi Club, April, 1938
Cab graduated from Frederick Douglass High School in 1927.
(Calloway was one of the great showmen of the 20th Century...)
Calloway was one of the great showmen of the 20th Century who excelled as a bandleader, vocalist, dancer, and actor for over 60 years. His recording career is showcased on this collection of over 100 songs including his signature "Minnie the Moocher," "Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea," "The Reefer Man," "The Jumpin' Jive," "Hi-De-Ho Man (That's Me)" and more.
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(Jazz singer and bandleader Cab Calloway is most closely a...)
Jazz singer and bandleader Cab Calloway is most closely associated with The Cotton Club, a Harlem nightclub where he was a regular performer from 1930 onwards. Initially brought in as a replacement for the touring Duke Ellington & His Orchestra, Cab and his orchestra proved so popular they were quickly installed as a co-house band. Many of the records that would become major hits received their first airing at The Cotton Club, with songs such as Minnie The Moocher as indelibly linked to The Cotton Club as the performer. This collection gathers together twenty of Cabs best known titles, including the obligatory Minnie The Moocher and Reefer Man.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00DI4HR4W/?tag=2022091-20
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00005O13O/?tag=2022091-20
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001QFNLRM/?tag=2022091-20
(The legendary Cab Calloway had a career that stretched fr...)
The legendary Cab Calloway had a career that stretched from the 1920s to the Hollywood blockbuster "The Blues Brothers". His orchestras brought to the world some of Jazz's greatest stars of the future. Our ongoing series that looks at actual chart records by Jazz and Blues greats features 20 of Cab's Billboard chart entries.
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http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01NBVUMQN/?tag=2022091-20
Actor bandleader singer songwriter
Cab Calloway was born in Rochester, right on Christmas Day 1907. Cab's father was a lawyer, and his mother was a teacher and organist. He was not the only child in the family, he had a sister older than him for 3 years, her name was Blanche. In 1918, the family moved to Maryland, where his mother found work in the local church.
In 1922, Cab's parents arranged for him private voice lessons. Although his parents and his voice teacher discouraged him from listening to and singing jazz, he began to frequent speakeasies and jazz clubs in 1924. In 1925, he played drums and sang with a jazz combo at several clubs in Baltimore. He also performed in several revues and musicals at his high school and local theater.
Cab excelled at sports in his high school, and played basketball with the Negro Professional Basketball League on the “Baltimore Athenians” in 1926.
His elder sister, Blanche Calloway, lived in Chicago and was enjoying great success as a singer and bandleader. She helped her little brother land his first job as a performer after he graduated from Frederick Douglass High School in 1927. He often credited her for inspiring him to start a career in show business.
His parents wanted him to be a lawyer, like his father, so he enrolled at Crane College in Chicago, but he was more interested in singing and entertaining. He left school to sing with the Alabamians band.
Cab began directing his own bands in 1928 and in the following year went to New York City. There he appeared in an all-black musical, Fats Waller’s Connie’s Hot Chocolates, in which he sang the Waller classic “Ain’t Misbehavin’.” In 1931 he was engaged as a bandleader at the Cotton Club; his orchestra, along with that of Duke Ellington’s, became one of the two house bands most associated with the legendary Harlem nightspot. In the same year, Calloway first recorded his most famous composition, “Minnie the Moocher,” a song that showcased his ability at scat singing. Other Calloway hits from the 1930s include “Kickin’ the Gong Around,” “Reefer Man,” “The Lady with the Fan,” “Long About Midnight,” “The Man from Harlem,” and “Minnie the Moocher’s Wedding Day.”
Although his band rose to fame largely on the strength of his personal appeal, some critics felt that Calloway’s antics drew focus away from one of the best assemblages of musicians in jazz. Calloway led a tight, professional unit during the early 1930s, but many regard his band of 1937-42 to be his best. Featured sidemen during those years included legendary jazz players such as pianist Bennie Payne, saxophonists Chu Berry and Ike Quebec, trombonist-vibraphonist Tyree Glenn, drummer Cozy Cole, and trumpeters Dizzy Gillespie, Doc Cheatham, Jonah Jones, and Shad Collins. The decline in popularity of big bands forced Calloway to disband his orchestra in 1948, and he continued for several years with a sextet.
Calloway also had a successful side career as an actor. He appeared in several motion pictures, including The Big Broadcast (1932), Stormy Weather (1943), Sensations of 1945 (1944), and The Cincinnati Kid (1965). George Gershwin had conceived the role of “Sportin’ Life” in his 1935 jazz opera Porgy and Bess for Calloway; the entertainer finally got his chance at the part during a heralded world tour of the show in 1952-54. In the 1960s, Calloway appeared on Broadway and on tour in Hello, Dolly!, portraying the role of Horace Vandergelder opposite Pearl Bailey as Dolly Levi, and he again starred on Broadway in the 1970s in the hit musical Bubbling Brown Sugar. His best-known acting performance was also his last, as a jive-talking music promoter in director John Landis’s comedy The Blues Brothers (1980). The film featured Calloway singing “Minnie the Moocher” every bit as energetically and eccentrically as he had performed it in 1931.
In 1985, Calloway and his Orchestra appeared at The Ritz London Hotel where he was filmed for a 60-minute BBC TV show called The Cotton Club comes to the Ritz. Adelaide Hall, Doc Cheatham, Max Roach, and the Nicholas Brothers also appeared on the bill.
On June 12, 1994, Calloway suffered a stroke. He died five months later on November 18, 1994, at age 86.
Calloway was an energetic and humorous entertainer whose performance trademarks included eccentric dancing and wildly flinging his mop of hair; his standard accoutrements included a white tuxedo and an oversized baton. He was a talented vocalist with an enormous range and was regarded as “the most unusually and broadly gifted male singer of the ’30s” by jazz scholar Gunther Schuller. He received numerous awards and honors for his work.
(Jazz singer and bandleader Cab Calloway is most closely a...)
(Calloway was one of the great showmen of the 20th Century...)
(The legendary Cab Calloway had a career that stretched fr...)
Quotations:
"People sometimes forget that jazz was built not only in the minds of the great ones but on the backs of the ordinary ones - ordinary musicians."
"You hear about the Duke Ellingtons, the Jimmie Luncefords, and the Fletcher Hendersons, but people sometimes forget that jazz was not only built in the minds of the great ones, but on the backs of the ordinary ones."
"You don't think it was because a white man wrote it, a black man wrote it, a green man wrote it. What-doesn't make a difference!"
"It's very difficult to photograph an opera. And they messed up on it. It just wasn't there. And I don't blame the Gershwins for taking it away. Of course, if they had gotten the original company to have done it, it would have been very good."
"Everybody did something. It was very entertaining. We had a lot of fun. Lot of fun. And there was no segregation, that I could see. I never saw any."
Calloway was an energetic and humorous entertainer whose performance trademarks included eccentric dancing and wildly flinging his mop of hair; his standard accoutrements included a white tuxedo and an oversized baton. He was a talented vocalist with an enormous range and was regarded as “the most unusually and broadly gifted male singer of the ’30s” by jazz scholar Gunther Schuller.
Quotes from others about the person
In his book The Big Bands, George T. Simon noted: "the esprit de corps of the Calloway band was tremendous, and the great pride that the musicians possessed as individuals and as a group paid off handsomely in the music they created. "
Cab married Wenonah “Betty” Conacher on July 26, 1928 with whom he had a daughter Constance. They divorced in 1949. He married Zulme “Nuffie” MacNeal on October 7, 1949. They had three daughters, Chris Calloway, Lael Calloway-Tyson and Cabella Langsam. With Zelma Proctor he had a daughter Camay.
