HI-DE-HO

Jive-spouting bandleader gets a long-overdue first full-length biography.

The Times (London) jazz critic Shipton (I Feel a Song Coming On: The Life of Jimmy McHugh, 2009, etc.) takes a sometimes overly detailed and not always revealing look at the antic “Hi-De-Ho” man Cab Calloway (1907–1994), who burst onto the national scene in the early ’30s with his vocal hit “Minnie the Moocher.” Raised in Baltimore, Calloway followed in the musical footsteps of his sister Blanche, who became a revue star at Chicago’s Sunset Café, where Louis Armstrong also made his mark. Calloway quickly eclipsed his sibling with his extroverted singing and dancing—his players claimed that his bandleading relied more on miming than on musicianship—and he became a reigning hep cat in the early ’30s at New York’s Cotton Club. Within a few years, his band rivaled Duke Ellington’s orchestra in popularity, and he achieved crossover fame through film appearances (and some vocal shots in Max Fleischer’s Betty Boop cartoons). Calloway recorded prolifically through the late ’40s, when changes in musical fashion forced him to lead a small combo. He installed himself as a cultural institution in the ’50s and ’60s with appearances on stage in Porgy and Bess and Hello, Dolly! and on film in The Blues Brothers. Shipton labors mightily to make a case for Calloway’s abilities as a jazz leader whose groups included such great talents as Ben Webster, Milt Hinton and Gillespie (who was expelled after he cut his boss with a knife). However, it was Calloway’s novelty vocals that made him famous, and the author’s technical readings of recordings don’t offer convincing evidence to the contrary. Too often the book sags under the weight of gig details and band itineraries, and Shipton ultimately fails to supply any sense of his subject’s inner workings. Details of Calloway’s personal and family life usually take a back seat to the progress of his musical career.

Readers get the scat but not the whole cat.