In addition to possibly qualifying as the most neatly decorated of all Proper Boxes,
This Is Hep wins high marks for being one of the biggest and best
Cab Calloway collections ever assembled. With four CDs to fill and a considerably huge body of work to choose from, the folks at Proper covered many of the essentials by roping in highlights dating from a 19-year segment of his long and eventful career. Young
Calloway's certifiably hot tracks include triumphs of artful rowdiness like "Bugle Call Rag," "St. Louis Blues," the famous "Scat Song," and a wild version of "Nagasaki," which features the extroverted vocalist at his most dazzling. The second category to consider, if we are to make organized sense of this nutty grab bag of swinging entertainments, would be songs with markedly topical content, like "The Jungle King," "Everybody Eats When They Come to My House," and "A Chicken Ain't Nothin' But a Bird."
Calloway does delightfully weird things with his voice during "Chinese Rhythm," and although his bizarre chattering is funny, one cannot ignore the fact that he's making a mockery of a language spoken by fully one-fifth of the world's population. (A similarly entertaining if potentially insulting example of lampooned ethnicity is "Chinatown, My Chinatown" recorded by
Slim Gaillard and
Slam Stewart in 1938.)
Calloway attracted lots of attention in the early ‘30s by singing about uncontrollable controlled substances. Two of the best of his dope tunes are "Reefer Man" and "The Man from Harlem." With the "Calloway Boogie," "Jumpin' Jive," and "Hey Now, Hey Now,"
Calloway helped to establish a trend in jump music. This category would also include
Joe Liggins' "The Honeydripper" and
Buster Harding's "I Want to Rock," with bouncing backup by a vocal harmony group billed as
the Cabaliers.