By Alyn Shipton
Clad in white tie and tails, dancing and scatting his means in the course of the "Hi-de-ho" refrain of "Minnie the Moocher," Cab Calloway exuded a sly appeal and class that endeared him to legions of enthusiasts.
In Hi-de-ho, writer Alyn Shipton deals the 1st full-length biography of Cab Calloway, whose vocal theatrics and flamboyant degree presence made him one of many highest-earning African American bandleaders. Shipton sheds new mild on Calloway's lifestyles and profession, explaining how he traversed racial and social obstacles to develop into one of many country's such a lot liked entertainers. Drawing on first-hand money owed from Calloway's kinfolk, acquaintances, and fellow musicians, the ebook strains the roots of this song icon, from his adolescence in Rochester, long island, to his lifetime of hustling at the streets of Baltimore. Shipton highlights how Calloway's wish to make money to aid his child daughter brought on his first holiday into express enterprise, whilst he joined his sister Blanche in a touring revue. starting in vague Baltimore nightclubs and culminating in his alternative of Duke Ellington at New York's famed Cotton membership, Calloway honed his presents of scat making a song and call-and-response exercises. His occupation as a bandleader used to be matched by way of his genius as a talent-spotter, evidenced by means of his hiring of such jazz luminaries as Ben Webster, Dizzy Gillespie, and Jonah Jones. because the swing period waned, Calloway reinvented himself as a musical theatre superstar, showing as Sportin' lifestyles in "Porgy and Bess" within the early Nineteen Fifties; in later years, Calloway cemented his prestige as a dwelling legend via cameos on "Sesame highway" and his show-stopping visual appeal within the wildly renowned "The Blues Brothers" motion picture, bringing his trademark "hi-de-ho" chorus to a brand new new release of audiences.
greater than the other resource, Hi-de-ho stands as an wonderful, not-to-be-missed portrait of Cab Calloway--one that expertly frames his enduring value as a pioneering artist and entertainer.
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Extra resources for Hi-De-Ho: The Life of Cab Calloway
Sample text
The enforced return to the Midwest had revitalized the Missourians’ sound, and it is easy to discern why Cab heard in its playing the same excitement and swing that had made him want to recruit Count Basie on his visit to Kansas City. The first disc the band made at the June session, “Market Street Stomp,” starts with some accomplished and deftly played brass section work, followed by precisely articulated reed riffs, and Wheeler’s swaggering trombone. Thornton Blue’s clarinet weaves fluently over the ensemble, and even if Andy Brown’s tenor already sounds slightly dated for 1929, it is played with great control and certainty.
The arrangement nods in the direction of Louis Armstrong’s 1929 recording of the piece, not least in the final vocal chorus where Cab weaves in and out of the band’s stabbing chords like a horn player, before the lead trumpeter Lammar Wright punches out the same high-register closing riff as is used on Armstrong’s disc. By contrast, “Gotta Darn Good Reason Now,” the other track from this session, is nothing like as exceptional, but “St. 8 The band went on to make further sessions for the Brunswick label in October, November, and December.
More interesting are the artistic failures. These include a stilted version of “Jenny Lee” in which the band sounds more like Paul Whiteman’s society band than a hard-swinging midwestern jazz orchestra, not least because the trumpet soloist (most likely the newly arrived Wendell Culley) does an accurate recreation of Whiteman’s erstwhile star soloist, Bix Beiderbecke. Equally unconvincing is “Yaller,” a song that laments the lot of the “high yaller,” the light-skinned African American who “ain’t even black .