by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The Basin Street Revue
showed at least one indication of how tacky these productions were — Count
Basie was advertised in the opening credits but he was not to be seen in the
show (he is in the Rhythm
and Blues Revue, performing with a small
band featuring Wardell Gray on tenor sax and white clarinetist Buddy de
Franco), but the people who were
visible were quite good enough. The show opened with Lionel Hampton doing a
stomping number on the cusp between jazz and R&B, “Ding Dong Baby,” after
which Sarah Vaughan came out and did “You’re Not the Kind” at a faster tempo
than the one she’d recorded with Musicraft with George Treadwell (her
trumpet-playing husband) and Bud Powell in 1946 (and though we saw only the
bell of a trumpet — not its player — I assume it was Treadwell because he was
still her musical director as well as her husband in 1952). After that we had
one of the horn players from the Paul Williams band, Jimmy Brown (absolutely
not to be confused with the later R&B/soul superstar James Brown — Jimmy had a perfectly nice urban-blues voice
but he was never going to rock down the Apollo with it), doing a song called
“My Love Is True.” After that the
next act was a heavy-set Black woman singer/pianist named Martha Davis — “the
female Fats Waller!” I joked, and while she didn’t have Fats’s puckish sense of
humor she did play a good deal
like him and she dared a song, “We Just Couldn’t Say Goodbye,” on which she was
competing with the Boswell Sisters and Frank Sinatra, and she held her own. After that was a comedy routine between Mantan Moreland and
Nipsey Russell which featured one of those double-talk routines Moreland did a
lot of in the later Monogram Charlie Chan movies, and after that Amos Milburn
came out, not for one of his
rockin’ boogie specialties but for a ballad called “Bewildered” at which he was
quite good (and no, it wasn’t the
Rodgers and Hart “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” but a different song —
though good enough it would deserve revival).
Next up was Faye Adams, the Black
contralto whose star-making hit “Shake a Hand” was eventually covered by Paul
McCartney (in close to her original key!) doing a song called “Somebody
Somewhere” — as a song it’s hardly in the same league as “Shake a Hand” but
it’s nonetheless worth hearing and she’s marvelous (she was stuck on the
uncertainly distributed Herald label during her peak years and therefore didn’t
get the chance at mega-stardom Dinah Washington, LaVern Baker and Ruth Brown
did). After that the Clovers returned for one of their biggest Atlantic hits,
“Lovey Dovey” (though the performance here was pretty weak and the studio
recording was actually more exciting), and then Sarah Vaughan came out again
and applied her awesome vocal skills and chops to a pretty mediocre song, “For
a Lifetime.” Then Honi Coles and Cholly Atkins came out and did a song about
bebop — for once they sang as well as danced — and afterwards Herb Jeffries did
a song called “A Woman Is a Worrisome Thing,” actually one of the better pieces
of material he got after he left Duke Ellington and no longer had access to the
great Ellington and Strayhorn songs he’d sung with the Duke’s band (though its
debt to the similarly titled “A Woman Is a Sometime Thing” from the George
Gershwin opera Porgy and Bess is
pretty obvious), and the show came to a rockin’ conclusion with Cab Calloway,
20 years after his emergence but still surprisingly lithe and in control of his
body, rockin’ out with “The Calloway Boogie.” These shows, directed by Joseph
Kohn and shot by Don Malkames (who seemed to be the go-to guy for just about all independent producers shooting in New York then),
are tackily produced in the extreme (they’re faked to look like live
performances but every time Kohn supposedly cuts to the audience it’s the same stock shot of an audience as spotlights sweep over
it!) and shot with almost no imagination, but they’re welcome glimpses of
performers who either weren’t otherwise filmed at all or whose other film
appearances (like Ellington’s and Calloway’s) were in the contexts of big,
lumbering white musicals in which they were nothing but guest artists.
