Results for "Cab Calloway"

Cab Calloway

Born: December 25, 1907

The legendary "Hi De Ho" man was a energetic showman, gifted singer, talented actor and trendsetting fashion plate. A truly larger than life figure in American pop culture, immortalized in cartoons and caricatures, Calloway also led one of the greatest bands of the Swing Era. Consistently ranked among the top bands of the 1930s and 1940s, Calloway's orchestra entertained millions during its heyday, and the bandleader himself continued thrilling audiences up until the time of his death. Born in Rochester, New York, Cab grew up in Baltimore. He studied music and voice as a youth, singing at local speakeasies when he could

Seeing Jazz: The Photography of Luciano Rossetti

by Karl Ackermann
March 11, 2021

As a jazz venue, the mid-town Manhattan club Royal Roost had a short life span. The Royal Roost opened in 1948, but the jazz scene had moved past it less than two years later. In Greenwich Village, twenty-five-year-old photographer Herman Leonard had just opened his first photography studio to the south. A bebop fan, he was ...

Roy McCurdy: From Cannonball to the Rochester Music Hall of Fame

by Scott Gudell
February 19, 2021

When we placed a call from New York to Los Angeles in the early part of 2021, the articulate and vibrant drummer Roy McCurdy answered and quickly connected us back to the 1950s. He told us about his hometown of jny: Rochester, New York, his early days performing with Chuck Mangione and Gap Mangione and how ...

2020: The Year in Jazz

by Ken Franckling
January 2, 2021

The COVID-19 pandemic put the jazz world in a tailspin, just like the world at large, in 2020. And there is plenty of uncertainty going into the new year about what “new normal: might emerge from the darkness. International Jazz Day, like so many other things, became an online virtual event this time around. Pianist Keith ...

Nancy Kelly: A Dynamic And Determined Voice

by Scott Gudell
December 16, 2020

Nancy Kelly has been singin,' swingin' and scattin' for a long time. Her first musical path took her into the world of classical music when she started playing by ear at age three and her mother guided her to piano lessons by age four. The Beatles arrived a decade later and she abruptly shifted her allegiance ...

Indian Sun: The Life And Music Of Ravi Shankar

by Ian Patterson
November 20, 2020

Indian Sun: The Life And Music Of Ravi Shankar Oliver Craske 658 Pages ISBN: 978-0-571-35085-8 Faber & Faber2020 The title of Oliver Craske's fascinating and exhaustively researched biography of Ravi Shankar, one of the greatest artists of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, is something of a misnomer, for ...

Rahsaan Roland Kirk: An Alternative Top Ten Albums Guaranteed To Bend Your Head

by Chris May
November 2, 2020

Jazz musicians are rarely called shamanistic but the description fits Rahsaan Roland Kirk precisely. Clad in black leather trousers and heavy duty shades (he was blind from the age of two), a truckload of strange looking horns strung round his neck—two or three of which he often played simultaneously--twisting, shaking and otherwise contorting his body, stamping ...

Rudy Royston: Little Steps, Big Pictures

by Ian Patterson
August 3, 2020

Everybody needs a helping hand now and then. Rudy Royston understands that. The Covid-19 pandemic has caused gigs to completely dry up for all musicians, and with that, their main income stream. Yet there are still mortgages, rents and bills to pay, and children to feed. It says something about the precarious finances of a jazz ...

Sex & Drugs & Jazz & Jive: Top Ten Stash Records Albums

by Chris May
June 16, 2020

With all the transgressive flair you would expect of bohemian New York City in the 1970s and 1980s, Bernie Brightman's Stash Records made its name with a hugely entertaining series of sex and drugs-themed compilations of swing-era recordings. The first was Reefer Songs in 1976. But Brightman's legacy extends much further. There was a finite amount ...

Jumpin Jive: Cab Calloway and the Nicholas Brothers

Featuring the music of Cab Calloway
Duration: 4:47
May 26, 2020