Calloway Taps Original Hepcats for Jazz Review

To catch a Cab, call him early. Most days, Calloway, 82, the man who helped put New York’s Cotton Club on the map in the ‘30s, heads out for Aqueduct, the Long Island race track where he pursues his life’s passion: betting on thoroughbreds.

However, this weekend Calloway pulls himself away from the track to make his only Southern California appearances in this year’s version of “Gotta Sing, Gotta Dance,” an elaborate review of jazz and tap dancing from the ‘20s and ‘30s. Shows will be Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights at the Civic Theater in downtown San Diego.

Besides Calloway and a huge supporting cast, show producer Donald Wolfe has lured the Nicholas Brothers (Harold and Fayard), the tap dancers who worked the Cotton Club with Calloway in the ‘30s. In San Diego, the brothers will take the stage with Calloway for the first time since they performed with him in the 1941 film “Stormy Weather.”

Talking by phone from his home in White Plains, N.Y., Calloway said he never grows tired of entertaining people.

“Audiences are beautiful, I love ‘em. They’re all good.”

Calloway first hit it big in 1930, when four shady mobsters cornered him one night at the Crazy Cat in New York City, where he had a steady gig. They sat him down and informed him he was moving his act to the Cotton Club, where they upped his salary from $100 to $200 a week.

As the club’s No. 1 band leader, Duke Ellington, became busy with other commitments, Calloway took over his starring role.

A whole generation of hepcats were weaned on Calloway’s famous “Hi-de-hi-de-hi-de-ho” chant with audiences during the song “Minnie the Moocher.” Calloway also wrote or collaborated on dozens of the best-known swing jazz hits of the ‘30s and ‘40s, tunes such as “Three Swings and Out,” “I Like Music Played with a Swing Like This,” “The Jumpin’ Jive” and “Are You Hep to the Jive?”

The titles barely capture the flavor of hepcat ‘30s language, which Calloway helped create. His “Prof. Cab Calloway’s Swingformation Bureau,” a swing handbook published in 1939, introduced American squares to such hepcat musicians as Satchmo, Bix and Bojangles, and such early jive talk as, “Greetings, gate, let’s dissipate.”

“Gotta Swing, Gotta Dance” was dreamed up by Donald Wolfe, a Los Angeles scriptwriter and film editor who actually began assembling the show in the late ‘50s, though he didn’t know it at the time.

“I used to work at Warner Brothers with a guy whose father was one of Ellington’s managers. He had all these Big Band charts, and he knew I was interested in music. I bought them from him at a bargain price. Eventually, I assembled a large collection of original Paul Whiteman material,” Wolfe said, referring to the legendary Big Band leader. “Now I’ve got a garage full of stuff.”

In 1980, Wolfe, a fan but not a musician, wanted to hear his charts played live.

“I put together a collection of L.A. musicians who knew the styling of that period, which is difficult to duplicate. Some of the guys had the old instruments: the C melody sax, the bass sax. These were younger guys who somehow got into that era. It sounded great.”

During the ‘80s, the group began playing clubs and private parties for corporations like General Motors. From there, it was just another step to large, glamorous halls like the Ordway Theatre in St. Paul, Minn. The band, known as the Rhythm Kings, sold out its last show there two years ago.

Eventually, the band was joined by many other performers, until it became a revue almost as elaborate as the fantastic stage productions presented in the ‘30s at the Cotton Club, where the bandstand was a replica of a southern mansion and black entertainers played for mostly white audiences.

Three years ago, Wolfe cornered Calloway backstage at the Vine St. Bar & Grill in Los Angeles.

“I started talking to him. He liked what we were doing, and we presented a concert at UCLA on the Fourth of July. He had been coming out of retirement on his own. Now that he’s out, he doesn’t want to stop.”

As a special guest, Wolfe has roped dancer Betsy Baytos, a dancer who practices “Legomania” as taught by “Wizard of Oz” scarecrow Ray Bolger.

“It’s that rubber-legged style, and she’s probably the last practitioner,” Wolfe said.

Also featured are the Hotcha Hoofers, the revue’s resident dance troupe, and the Gingersnaps, a group of spry, dancing grandmothers, all Broadway chorus-kick veterans.

“Gotta Sing, Gotta Dance” includes a lot of swing from Wolfe’s original Whiteman and Ellington charts, but the two-hour show climaxes with Calloway leading a 15- to 20-minute medley, including “Hi-De-Ho” before the Nicholas Brothers’ dance a “Tap Challenge” and Calloway joins them again on stage during “Fascinatin’ Rhythm” and “I’ve Got Rhythm,” the final two numbers.

After being barnstormed by interviewers for 60 years, Calloway doesn’t volunteer much information.

His musical tastes? He said he has some 2,000 CDs, and mentions one by young jazz trumpet phenom Wynton Marsalis, plus “a classical thing I heard last night, made over in Vienna: flute, bass, piano, violin, cello.”

What does he have to say about the “Hepster’s Dictionary” he wrote in 1944?

“That was the beginning of rap.”

Does he laugh when he sees young entertainers struttin’ their stuff, using words like “chick” and “gimme some skin” as though they were just invented?

“Yeah. None of that jazz the kids go for is new. It’s all been done before.”

Did musicians really talk jive as defined in his dictionary and “Swingformation Bureau?”

“Oh sure.”

Asked to reveal his secret to a long and happy life, he said, “I don’t know. I couldn’t answer that. I’m normal like everybody else, and I do normal things.”

There are a few million jazz fans who wouldn’t necessarily agree.