by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Afterwards PBS showed a one-hour American Masters on Cab Calloway, called “Cab Calloway: Sketches,”
which was an interesting program but could have been better if the director,
Gail Davis, had trusted her material more. “This film is not just another
biopic in the sense of interviews and recollections, but a reinvigoration of
the whole Calloway presence – a reprise of a timeless virtuoso,” Davis said in
an interview on the PBS Web site, which meant in practice that the film was
tied together by a sketch artist doing a life-size drawing of Calloway in
action, and though there were some interesting interviews (two of his daughters
and his grandson Cab Calloway Brooks, who leads a Calloway revival band and
contributed a fascinating little demonstration of the Calloway sound —
according to Brooks, Calloway had his bass player play just ahead of the beat,
his drummer right on it and his saxes lag behind a bit) some of the talking
heads were almost unbearably pretentious — notably jazz historian Gary Giddins
and especially self-proclaimed
“hanging judge” Stanley Crouch, a Right-wing African-American with a really
pompous and supercilious manner who made the point that aside from Louis
Armstrong, every Black performer who’s crossed over to the white audience has
been light-skinned. (He’s not quite right — does the name Nat “King” Cole mean
anything to him? Or Ella Fitzgerald? —
but he has a point; he suggested that the relatively light complexions
of Duke Ellington and Calloway echoed through the ages until they ended up in
Michael Jackson’s physical transformation, and tried to extrapolate from that the
idea that white audiences like their Black entertainers as “white” as possible:
Ellington, Calloway, Billie Holiday, Lena Horne and those chorines at the
Cotton Club who had to pass the so-called “brown paper bag” test: they couldn’t
have skin darker than a brown paper grocery bag — though Armstrong’s last wife
Lucille broke the color line at the Cotton Club and Louis was proud of her for
that!) I rued all the stupid talking heads for taking time away when we could
have been watching Calloway — who was filmed quite often (probably more than
any of the other great Black crossover artists of his generation) because his
act was so spectacularly visual: he was both a great singer and a fabulous
dancer.
The show also made me more curious about Cab’s sister, Blanche
Calloway, who led a band of her own called “Blanche Calloway’s Joy Boys” and
really did do a woman’s version
of Cab’s act — though apparently it was Blanche who blazed the trail and Cab
who followed: the show includes a record she made for the cheapie Melotone
label called “Growlin’ Dan” that apparently contained most of the lyrics of
“Minnie the Moocher,” the song that launched Calloway to mega-stardom and is,
as the show pointed out, a quite dark number about mercenary sex and drugs that
probably passed muster with the censors in the record and movie businesses just
because the white censors were too naïve to realize what it was about. (The
show includes a bit of Cab’s performance in the film The Big
Broadcast, in which he did “Kickin’ the
Gong Around,” one of the follow-ups he did to “Minnie” and an even more
explicitly drug-oriented song — but, alas, it left out the astonishing gesture
in which Cab puts the sleeve of his jacket to his nose and sniffs it, making visually clear what the lyrics are about!) Cab
Calloway: Sketches is a bit of a missed
opportunity — maybe this sort of documentary might be appropriate for a subject
like Charlie Parker, of whom very little film exists, but for someone who was
filmed as often as Calloway, and as spectacularly (in everything from Betty
Boop cartoons to band shorts for Paramount and Warners and full-length features
— The Big Broadcast and International
House at Paramount and The
Singing Kid at Warners — preserving some of
his astonishing specialties at a time when he was in both his physical and
musical prime — as well as some early-1940’s “Soundies” that preserve his best
band, the one with Dizzy Gillespie, Chu Berry, Milt Hinton and Cozy Cole), the
documentary should have presented as many clips as possible, at full
length (a particular bête noire with me and music documentaries: instead of slicing
filmed performances into little snippets and/or having people talk over them,
why not show complete songs, start to finish, and give the neophytes a fair
chance to appreciate just how great these people were?), with minimal
interviews and commentaries to narrate the performer’s life story and put the
clips in context.
The show got better later on when in fact it did just that:
Levin interviewed John Landis, director of The Blues Brothers, about how Calloway came to be in that movie and to
do a revival version of “Minnie the Moocher,” and his accounts (and those of
the famous musicians who appeared in that movie, including guitarist Steve
Cropper and bassist Donald “Duck” Dunn — both white, by the way) of how
Calloway’s number went down were marvelous. It seems that Landis and his
musicians took great pains to obtain the original charts for Calloway’s 1931
record of “Minnie,” only when Cab came to the studio to record the song he
said, “What’s this old shit?” It turned out that the year before he had
recorded a disco remake of “Minnie” and he wanted to do that version in the film to promote his new record — and
Landis had to talk him out of it as politely as possible and say the whole
point of his appearance was to evoke the glory days of the 1930’s. Calloway
relented and let the band cut “Minnie” with the old arrangement — they were
using the standard modern technique of recording the backing first and adding
the vocal later — and when Calloway went into the vocal booth they did about
six takes and Landis said of the last one, “It’s good,” but he made it clear
that “good” wasn’t good enough for what he wanted — and a pissed-off Cab went
back into the booth and recorded the superb version that’s in the movie (which
I recall in toto as an atrocious
movie made watchable only by the
superb Black guest stars: Calloway, James Brown, Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin).
