Once, in all innocence, I asked Dizzy Gillespie whether the story that he had been kicked out of Billy Eckstine's band for throwing spitballs was true.
"Nooo," he said dismissively, looking pained. "It was Cab Calloway's band." End of interview. I had touched a nerve.
The spitball incident, which took place in September 1941, became famous in the annals of jazz. Gillespie, just 22, but already playing in a revolutionary style, had joined the Calloway band two years earlier. Bored by the standard arrangements, he often experimented in his solos, and there was constant tension between him and the leader, who basically wanted good musicians in the band to benefit his singing and dancing.
"Why can't you play like everybody else?" Calloway would demand. "Why do you make all those mistakes and have all those funny sounds come out of your horn?" Gillespie would look contrite and then retaliate by lobbing spitballs at the trombone players. And he wasn't the only one.
The spitball that broke Cab's back, so to speak, was launched while the Cabjivers, a small group composed of tenor saxophonist Chu Berry, drummer Cozy Cole, guitarist Danny Barker and Milt Hinton, the bass player, were out in front of the band performing. What Calloway saw from the wings was a deprecating wave of one of Dizzy's hands as he held his nose with the other (actually a commentary on Hinton's solo), while a spitball rose from the trumpet section and landed right in the spotlight.
Backstage, words were exchanged between the bandleader and trumpet player, tempers flared, a knife flashed, and although Hinton deflected the blade, Calloway was cut on the wrist and leg, not seriously, before others separated them. Gillespie was summarily dismissed. He met the band bus on its return to New York and apologized to Calloway, who touched his hand and moved on. So did Gillespie, through a succession of large and small groups until he landed in Billy Eckstine's big band in 1944, where he found Charlie Parker and helped to invent modern jazz.
But Dizzy didn't throw the spitball! For a time, the blame centered on Hinton, who confessed to the crime, according to Calloway's 1976 autobiography, "Of Minnie the Moocher and Me." Anyway, Gillespie later had his revenge -- from the stage of Carnegie Hall. It was during a Cab Calloway band reunion concert. Instructing the musicians, except Hinton, to be prepared when he finished his solo, Dizzy grabbed the microphone, stopped the music, and hollered "Who threw the spitball?" Everybody in the band except the bass player rose and replied in unison "Not me."
Calloway appeared, said "Diz, I know you didn't do it," and embraced Gillespie. The audience loved it. Ah, show biz.
Hinton's own book, "Bass Line," published in 1988, contains a long chapter on his 16 years with the Calloway organization. (In it he deflects blame for the spitball incident onto another trumpet player, Jonah Jones, claiming logically enough, that since he was in the spotlight himself he couldn't have done it.)
Jones was just one of several excellent musicians that Calloway assembled after he took over an existing band called the Missourians in 1930. Others were tenor saxophonists Ben Webster and Illinois Jacquet, and trombonists Tyree Glenn and Quentin Jackson. The leader himself was just 22 when, at the behest of the mob, they moved from midtown's Crazy Cat to Harlem's legendary Cotton Club to replace Duke Ellington's band. With a built-in radio show, their new theme song, "Minnie the Moocher," was soon heard nationwide.
Calloway maintained the band until 1948. Critics slighted its jazz contribution: "The theme is weird and smacks of the Duke," said a Downbeat writer in 1940, reviewing a Calloway recording. "It is without regret that we report Cab keeps his mouth shut on both sides." Yet in addition to mundane material, they played Benny Carter arrangements and, said Hinton, "I don't think the public ever realized how good the musicianship was in the band." (He reported that a Texas saxophone replacement stared intently at one of the charts, then remarked to his seatmate "It's gonna be hell goin' through here.")
Calloway was a strict disciplinarian who instilled a sense of dignity and worth in his musicians and kept them well paid and on the road. "We had only one star in our band, Cab," said Hinton.
But after all, it was his band and he was a star. Onstage, Calloway moved with an athlete's natural grace, sang in a full-toned baritone, and was a radiant showman. He danced beautifully. His conducting, in a late pneumatic style, was transcendent -- even the baton seemed to be made of rubber.
"My main purpose through it all has been to entertain," Calloway wrote. The recordings were relatively few, but his films are readily available on videotape. In "Stormy Weather," 1943, one of the first Hollywood musicals with a black cast, Calloway shared top billing with Lena Horne and Bill Robinson. (Fats Waller and the dancing Nicholas Brothers also appear.) Halliwell's Film Guide, not given to excess in critical appraisal, gave it three stars and said: "Virtually a high-speed revue with all-black talent, and what talent!"
Cab Calloway, who grew up in Baltimore and died last week at age 86, was a big man physically -- and in a lot of other ways.
James D. Dilts is a Baltimore writer.