Continued: CD Reviews

LEGENDARY RADIO BROADCASTS: FATS WALLER AND CAB CALLOWAY (Storyville 103 8413)
WALLER: Crazy 'bout My Baby; Truckin'; I'm Gonna Sit Right Down; Christopher Columbus; Honeysuckle Rose; I've Got My Fingers Crossed; It's a Sin to Tell a Lie; Until the Real Thing Comes Along; Hallelujah Things Look Rosy Now; A Thousand Dreams of You; The Joint Is Jumping; Summertime; Stompin' at the Savoy; Go Down Moses; Ain't Misbehavin'; Winter Weather; Cash for Your Trash; There's a Girl in My Life; Tea for Two; Your Feet's Too Big; Handful of Keys.
CALLOWAY: Minnie the Moocher; Limehouse Blues; I Can't Resist You; Hard Times; Fifteen Minute Intermission; I'll Pray for You; Boog It; Cupid's Nightmare; King Porter Stomp; Foo a Little Ballyhoo; If This Isn't Love; Russian Lullaby; I Was Here When You Left Me; St. Louis Blues; Frantic on the Atlantic; 9:20 Special.

Reviewed by William J. Schafer

This two-CD package selects material from various radio broadcasts for two of the giant entertainers of the 1930s and '40s to show intriguing sides of men who were often accused of being merely clownish or trivial. Waller was a practiced and gifted radio comedian-singer, and Calloway led a first-rate swing band that transcended his jump-and-jive personality, and these tracks bring out these qualities in both jazzmen.

The Waller tracks, drawn from many broadcasts from 1936-43, are mostly brief renditions, interlaced with asides and jokes, and they let Waller's larger-than-life personality shine in all its facets. He extemporizes wisecracks, exchanges teasing with announcers and, as always, plays impeccable and stirring piano. The tunes are his basic Waller repertory with a few surprises -- a straight rendition of a spiritual, "Go Down Moses," the very pretty and offbeat ballad "Winter Weather," a respectful "Summertime." And then there are the manic, minstrelesque effects on barnburners like "This Joint Is Jumpin'," "Handful of Keys" and "Christopher Columbus" (two versions -- one PG-13, the other R-rated).

Waller was a multi-faceted genius whose fate it was to be under-rated by nearly all contemporaries except his fellow musicians, who knew for sure he was really God Almighty come again with His big left hand to sort out us sheep and goats. The broadcasts catch him live and bubbling over, a one-man laugh and lyricism factory who could keep the Red Network alive and perking all by himself. The musical edges are much rougher than on his studio recordings, but this is the Fats Waller who showed up everyday as a multimedia showbiz behemoth and genial airwaves companion of a sort that no longer exists in our popular culture.

Cab Calloway was best known as a frenetic and inexhaustible frontman for a great Swing band and a scat singer with iron lungs, prehensile hair and a truly memorable surreal comic sensibility. He was a handsome and charismatic singer who often looked as freakishly eccentric as Batman's Joker and who was unafraid of expressing any comic impulse his music suggested. He writhed, waggled, flopped his head and long hair like a cheerleader's baton, threatened to jump right out of his zoot suit and distorted his features and the language flowing with his singing, so much so that booklets translating his jive argot were popular, and he prompted fads of jazzy language almost as bizarre as the "vout" vocabulary of guitarist-scatman Slim Gallaird.

These broadcasts (1940 and '45) draw from live location shots and show Calloway in his regular work role as leader of a distinguished band and only incidentally as a showoff vocalist. His routines had a basic visual aspect nearly as important as his singing, and radio was not as friendly to Calloway as to Waller, whose huge, fuzzy personality seemed to spring directly out of the old Emerson radio right into your living room. You had to SEE Calloway to get about 50 percent of his frenetic weirdness. But the band emerges as a stirring and riveting entertainment factor in itself.

Calloway emerged as a notable singer when he fronted the old Missourians band in the early 1930s, and it was already a seasoned, individualized group. Through the Swing Era, Calloway was a major if cryptic figure. He and Waller were so familiar in the popular imagination that Warner Bros. cartoons could co-opt them freely. They were as famous as Little Orphan Annie, Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny. Few jazz musicians have ever reached that plateau of pop glory. By the 1940s Calloway had developed a seasoned band with great soloists -- Hilton Jefferson, Chu Berry and Walter Thomas (saxes), Milt Hinton (bass), Jonah Jones and Dizzy Gillespie (trumpet) and a host of other big names.

The tunes here feature the band more than Calloway, although there are three versions of his signature tune "Minnie the Moocher," and an odd number called "Foo a Little Ballyhoo," and a sophisticated jive number, "Frantic on the Atlantic." The band shines on fine arrangements -- "King Porter Stomp" (not the ubiquitous Henderson chart), "Russian Lullaby" (a 1940s anthem, given the USSR and the War), a lively jumper "Boog It" and an intricate and mysterious number that might have charmed Stan Kenton, "Cupid's Nightmare." The band and Calloway comport themselves well as musical forces not to be dismissed as mere novelties or vaudeville turns.

If you have an interest in either Waller or Calloway, this belongs in your collection with the basic studio and jukebox numbers. The CDs illuminate the most intriguing facets of both giants of jazz and of their pop culture. Available from www.storyvillerecords.com.

December 2008 issue | © 2008 The Mississippi Rag

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