Before Sammy Davis Jr. broke into Las Vegas, before Marian Anderson smashed the color barrier in opera, before Paul Robeson rose to become the music world`s fiercest champion of civil rights, another black entertainer was redefining mainstream culture in America.
Though today he is remembered mostly for his signature white tie and tails as well as his irrepressible stage show, Cab Calloway also stands as one of the last living survivors of a grim era in which blacks were decidedly unwelcome in America`s performing arts.
”I can`t say it was really too tough for me to deal with the racism,”
says the 82-year-old song-and-dance man, who is as understated in conversation as he is ebullient on stage. In his spacious, two-story home in suburban New York, its every room gilded with photos, recordings, sheet music, plaques and other mementos of 60-plus years in show business, Calloway does not care to linger over past wounds.
”The key to survival was keeping focused on doing your thing,” adds Calloway, who will solo in ”Big Band Night at the Cotton Club,” a musical evocation of the early days of black nightclub entertainment, Sunday evening at Ravinia.
”You tried to concentrate on your performance and tried to forget that there were hardly any blacks in the audience (in the `20s and `30s, black audiences were barred from entering certain theaters, relegated to the least desirable balcony seats in others).
”But don`t think the Cotton Club was anything like the movie of the same name (the 1984 musical film by Francis Ford Coppola). It was nothing like that at all.”
The legendary Harlem club of the late `20s and `30s was not just a glittering, glamorous entertainment den. It also stood as a monument to racism, with ”a log cabin motif on the walls,” Calloway once recalled.
”The musicians played on a stage that was supposed to be the front porch of a Southern mansion.
”This was where the so-called carriage class went to hear all the black performers. Very few Negroes came in unless they were working there. They weren`t welcome and had to know somebody to get in.”
Yet from this environment, Calloway, as well as entertainers such as Lena Horne and others, sprang to international stardom.
For Calloway, the journey had begun in Roaring `20s Chicago. His father, a prominent Baltimore attorney, had died when Cabell Calloway Jr. was 8, and the young Cab eventually moved to Chicago to study law at Crane College. He made pocket change boxing in amateur prize fights and playing jazz saxophone on Chicago`s then-thriving club scene.
”My first paying job was in Chicago, down at the old Dreamland on South State, then the old Sunset Cafe at 35th and Calumet,” he once said. ”And then I was on my way.”
Having tasted the life of an entertainer, ”I quickly decided to give up law,” Calloway says. ”Or I should say I didn`t decide it: It decided itself. ”I wasn`t torn between the two, or anything. The music took me away from all that.”
After enjoying smashing success in Chicago as leader of the Alabamians, Calloway took the band to New York, where they bombed. But Calloway recovered quickly, taking over the Missourians in 1929, the group that quickly became the house band at the Cotton Club, after Duke Ellington left to try Hollywood. By 1931 Calloway had written and recorded the tune that would make him an international star: ”Minnie the Moocher,” a hard-driving number about the era`s drug of choice, cocaine.
”That song came about because I always had used `St. James Infirmary Blues` as my theme song until I decided I`d rather have one of my own,”
recalls Calloway of the song with the ”hi-de-ho” lyrics that became his trademark.
”So I just sat down and wrote `Minnie the Moocher,` and it took off-pronto.”
In large part that was due not so much to the song itself as Calloway`s manic performance of it. No jazz singer before Calloway, and none since, has scat-sung quite like he does. He yowls, yells, bellows, leaps from high pitches to low, creates sound effects that even he might be incapable of repeating. What he loses in refinement he more than regains in intensity.
These riotous sounds, delivered by Calloway`s genuinely warm baritone, made Calloway a star. And with his newfound fame he catapulted into entertainment arenas that long had been banned to blacks.
In short order, Calloway:
– Sang and danced, charismatically, in one of Hollywood`s first musicals, ”Big Broadcast of 1933.”
– Led one of the best jazz bands of the `30s, its personnel including such then-unknown players as trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, saxophonist Ben Webster, bassist Milt Hinton and tenorist Chu Berry, who agreed to join the band only if Calloway agreed to put down his own saxophone. He did.
– Inspired George Gershwin to create the role of Sportin` Life in ”Porgy and Bess” (1935). Though Calloway was unable to take the part because he was booked for a European tour, he played the role with abandon, and to universal acclaim, in the `50s opposite Leontyne Price.
When the big bands began to die off after World War II, Calloway simply reinvented himself as a solo act.
”A lot of guys were scared, but I knew it wouldn`t be the end of me,”
Calloway says.
”When all the big-band rooms started closing, I worked bars and lounges. ”Nowadays, anybody can write a song and be a hit. You just put together some one-chord number and you`re famous. Back then, it took a little more.
”To this day, I`m constantly working on my voice, constantly trying to keep it the best I can.
”What it does, of course, is another thing. At my age, one day it might do one thing, another day it might not.”
Even as Calloway`s career entered its sixth decade, he was being rediscovered by a young audience that watched his jazz-age routine anew in the John Belushi/Dan Aykroyd comedy ”The Blues Brothers.”
And just last year the very hot Janet Jackson chose to partner Calloway in her ”Alright” video.
The man seems never to go out of date, never to tire out.
”I`m a professional entertainer so I just keep going, keep going, keep going,” says Calloway, who adds that he is negotiating for a film about his life, although he won`t reveal more than that. He spends most of his time in the air, jetting from concerts to recording dates.
”Just yesterday there was a camera crew here all day-from 5 o`clock in the morning `til 6 o`clock at night. They were from that show `Lifestyles of the Rich and Beautiful,` ” says Calloway, referring to ”Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.”
”They wanted to do a story about me and my house (in which Calloway and his wife have lived for 38 years and raised their three children).
”But you know what? They didn`t find any rocking chairs here.”
