Cab Calloway

Cab Calloway made such a large number of recordings that the laws of chance and the vagaries of the music industry generally conspire to create chaotic Calloway compilations composed of sensibly chosen and/or idiotically selected titles. Fortunately, Living Era's Hi-De-Hi! is a 98-percent worthwhile overview of material culled from Calloway's best years: 1933-1947. There are enough standard sing-along-with-Cab numbers in here to adequately represent this singer's archetypal role as the man who bellowed so artfully and forced others to do the same (this is best demonstrated in "Zaz Zuh Zaz" when he makes his band sing gibberish in unison falsetto). Here too are several excellent demonstrations of Calloway's highly developed ability to scat with studied abandon; numerous exercises in hip vernacular, and a gorgeous debut recording of "I'll Be Around" with smooth backup vocals by the Cabaliers. Here also are two of the best drug-related tunes of the entire period; "Kickin' the Gong Around" opens with lurid references to heroin and cocaine, while "Reefer Man" was such an effective advertisement for marijuana that Calloway had to stop performing it after FBI agents began shadowing the band. Most importantly perhaps from a jazz head's perspective, there are a number of fine instrumentals featuring some of the greatest improvisers of the entire era: drummers Cozy Cole and J.C. Heard, bassist Milt Hinton, trumpeters Dizzy Gillespie and Jonah Jones, trombone/vibraphone man Tyree Glenn, and saxophonists Hilton Jefferson, Chu Berry, and Ike Quebec. Nearly 25-percent of the tracks on this compilation are instrumental, which is a larger-than-average quotient in the Calloway reissue discography. The one incongruously inserted track is "Angels With Dirty Faces," a cotton candy number written by Phil Spitalny with a white-girl vocal by June Richmond. It could easily stump the experts, for without clues one would never guess that this bit of fluff had anything whatsoever to do with Cab Calloway. ~ arwulf arwulf, All Music Guide