Cab Calloway's grandson is keeping things swinging
02/10/03
Carlo
Wolff
Special to
the Plain
Dealer
Expect high style, high-stepping, good humor
and deep theatricality when the Cab Calloway Orchestra plays the Palace Theatre
today. Even though its creator died nearly nine years ago, the orchestra is
determined to keep the legacy of the big-band swing era so alive and kicking
that it's more swing than legacy.
Under the direction of Calloway's grandson,
C. Calloway Brooks, the orchestra updates traditional repertoire from the Harlem
Renaissance era, along with some Brooks originals.
Many remember Calloway for his appearances
in "The Blues Brothers" movie and Janet Jackson's "Alright" video. Others
recall him for cameos in films such as 'The Cincinnati Kid" and "St. Louis
Blues." Yet others remember him as an early prince of hip for tunes such as
"Minnie the Moocher," "I Beeped When I
Should’a Bopped" and a series of ditties based on "Hi-De-Ho." "I
feel he's sort of the icon of the swing era," Brooks said in a recent telephone
interview from his home in Westchester County, N.Y.
Although the music Calloway made in the late
1920s to thelate'40s is easy to characterize, his mastery of the media made him
timeless, Brooks said. Cab Calloway and His Orchestra performed tunes
characterized by low-register saxophones, virtuosic trumpets and a Kansas
City-style rhythm section, Brooks said. In fact, he said, the group anticipated
the more overtly jazzy styles of Count Basie in the Missourians, the band
Calloway fronted at Harlem's Cotton Club early in the Depression.
Among the musicians who played in the band
fronted by the "Royal Highness of Hi-De-Ho" were saxophonists Ben Webster and
Chu Berry, bassist Milt Hinton, drummer Cozy Cole and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie.
While his influence was greatest in jazz,
Calloway was echoed stylistically by Kid Creole and the Coconuts, the great'80s
band led by August Darnell, and by Prince, the most flamboyant rock artist of
that decade, 'We're kind of like the Swiss Army knife of bands," said Brooks,
who launched his orchestra in the late 1990s. "My Granddad's persona is able to
plug into a lot of settings. For me, that's the quintessentially American
feature about it, It's able to combine many diverse aesthetic streams in a way
that's greater than the sum of its parts and still manages to appeal to the
different sensibilities it encounters."
Brooks' orchestra aims to evoke the early
20th century.
'You had people like Benny Goodman and Count
Basie and Duke Ellington and my grandfather, all of whom went into this Harlem,
post-Louis Armstrong milieu. They pulled together streams from Africa and from
Hasidic and Hispanic music, and during that time, this music was loved
popularly," he said.
How does his grandfathers legacy live on
today? "I think almost all of hip-hop, a lot of rhythm and blues, a little bit
of rock'n'roll," Brooks said. "And the whole subcultural language. He was a real
pioneer of that."
To reach Carlo Wolff:
music@plaind.com
| 
