Dakota Staton and Cab Calloway

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Dakota Staton’s albums were the first Soul Jazz LPs I ever bought; I’ve liked her for a long time, without really appreciating her. So until a year or so ago, I only had a couple of her albums on CD. I’ve bought four this year, about three the year before, so I’ve been listening to her a lot recently.

Similarly, Cab Calloway. He’s always been someone I’ve known about – hard to miss, really. But a couple of years ago, I got his 4 CD Quadromania set and began to get Cab. Last month, I bought the two JSP 4 CD boxes covering the period 1930 to mid 1940 – a period not greatly explored by the 29 tracks in the Quadromania set. This set is amazing! Cab is really unappreciated, I think.

And so is Dakota – and for the same reason, I believe.

The first thing that hits you, listening to all the early recordings, is what an incredible voice Cab had. Few singers had his range and power and breath control. And none made the use of these assets that Cab did.

Because the second thing that hits you is how very little Cab was influenced by Louis Armstrong – and EVERYONE was influenced by Armstrong, whether they were jazz singers or not. But Cab was completely different – so different as to seem eccentric. But, though he was certainly eccentric, he wasn’t merely eccentric. Everything he sang is wholly jazz – he was an improviser well beyond most jazz singers – and yet much more than jazz. Few jazz singers mangle the American language in the way Cab did. Most seek to interpret a song so as to bring out the meaning of the words. But with Cab, it’s as if the words – I think mainly written by others, though there are no composer credits on the JSP package – were no more than a convenient way for Cab to improvise sounds that, combined with the soaring and dipping of his extraordinary voice, formed a music that was indubitably his and was also terribly, terribly, hip – so hip that he could sing some of the most awful songs, such as “Black rhythm”, with lyrics that nowadays seem patronisingly racist – and dispense (almost) completely with the meanings the songwriters had thought they were conveying.

His image was important, too, and Cab was one of the few singers who controlled his own image – flamboyantly over the top.

And it seems to me, listening to the two of them in fairly close proximity, that Dakota was a singer – the singer – of the same stamp as Cab. She used weird effects – little girl voices; an English accent; whoops; operatic power flights; yells; whoops; sobs; screams – and she, too, had an over the top image with big hair, fur stoles, magnificently sequined dresses into which she appeared to have been sewn; truly an anti-jazz image.

Like Cab, Dakota made listening to her as much fun as looking at her. But unlike him, Dakota didn’t seem to subvert the songs she so cavalierly mangled. Indeed, some of them, like “It could happen to you”, are really enhanced by the pace and exuberance of her delivery.

So I have a definite feeling that Dakota was carrying the same flag as Cab.

Oh, and they both had the wonderful Benny Carter doing arrangements for them!

MG