CAB CALLOWAY (1907-1994)

Musicologists often find it neater to trace the roots of soul, blues and rap back to their African origins. In the process, they can often avoid exploring the far untidier influence of the African-American entertainment tradition in which Cab Calloway was a pivotal player.

During its peak in the ’30s and ’40s, Calloway’s big band was the most popular with the black audience, outdrawing even the Count Basie, Lionel Hampton and Duke Ellington orchestras. And yet, though Calloway employed such legends as Ben Webster and the pre-bop Dizzy Gillespie, jazz buffs have sometimes been suspicious of his popularity and showmanship.

August Darnell never made that error; he always insisted that Calloway was the fundamental influence on Kid Creole and the Coconuts. More than anyone except Louis Jordan, Calloway was the bridge between the big bands and the new-fangled form of Rhythm’n’Blues.

In his tuxedo, tails and processed hair, Calloway might have been the epitome of black class, Duke Ellington’s successor at the Cotton Club at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, yet he was far more than just a showy bandleader. For instance, his band was so successful , Calloway could afford to hire his own train to transport them through the segregated South. Long before Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights era, that was as proud as black pride could then get.

THIS SPORTING LIFE

Besides his singing, Calloway was also one of the original professors of jive talk. Songs like ‘Minnie The Moocher’ were littered with references to marijuana yet still weren’t denied airplay and, in 1938, he published the first of several dictionaries of jive.

That alone makes Calloway one of the proto-rappers, a man whose influence can clearly be discerned in Lieber and Stoller’s records with The Coasters. And if Calloway’s bands have rarely been acclaimed for their instrumental innovation, their hard-riffing populism was a model for those post-war black bands who, by focusing on singers and rousing saxophone players, were the seedbed of R’n’B.

In one sense, Calloway has been a critical victim exactly because of his versatility as one of the greatest black popular entertainers of his era. Post-bop, critics have always tended to separate jazz from R’n’B and ignore the black Harlem Apollo audience that happily listened to both. Critics forgot the tradition of black vaudeville where Bessie Smith might sing on the same bill as the comic team of Moms’n’Mabley and the greatest black tapdancer, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson.

George Gershwin knew better, modelling the character, Sporting Life in Porgy and Bess on him. Yet such was Calloway’s fame in the ’30s that he turned down the role in the original Broadway production because his band was booked so far ahead.

The bridge between Gershwin and rap, Cab Calloway’s art and long life almost spanned the century. The Hi-De-Ho man should be associated with far more than a secondary BBC sitcom.