Pharaoh's Blues Library
by Skaught Patterson

El Torreon center of invention for Cab Calloway, scat singing

Cab Calloway was born in New York and raised in Blatimore, so the Kansas City connection in Calloway's career might not be blatantly obvious at first blush, but for a time Calloway absolutely made the scene in Kansas City. Most of his local story revolves around El Torreon, then a new and extravagant ballroom at a point in history when ballrooms were all the rage.

Cab Calloway got his start in the usual way, singing in church. Nothing his parents could do could dissuade him from listening to jazz and blues music during his youth. They plied him with classical training, and eventually he hit the road performing in a traditional black musical revue called Plantation Days with his older sister Blanche, herself a leader of a big band before Cab became one.

Calloway later shared the house band title at the Cotton Club in Chicago with Duke Ellington's band. His success was brimming as he began to enjoy weekly national radio broadcasts of his shows. Eventually he led his own band, of which Dizzy Gillespie was a member.

Calloway's importance to Kansas City lies in El Torreon Ballroom. Today it is a music venue that caters to rock and punk, and before that it was, during the seventies, renamed the Cowtown Ballroom, playing host to rock legends the likes of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Van Morrison, Hot Tuna and John Mayall. In the sixties it was El Torreon Skating Rink. Going back to the late thirties, the same building was known as the Avalon Supper Club (UMKC, Club Kaycee). But its true heyday was in Cab Calloway's era. The ballroom indeed started its history as El Torreon Ballroom, and one of the earliest acts to play there was Cab Calloway.

In 1927 the manager of El Torreon forced a group of musicians called the Missourians to use the services of Cab Calloway as their vocalist. The Missourians were not fond of the idea of having a vocalist at all and tried to drown out Calloway by blaring loudly on their instruments all night long. Not to be outdone, Calloway soon began appearing with a megaphone in hand and innovated his famous scat style of singing as a way of taunting his own back up band. It all happened in El Torreon, and Calloway later taught his scat style directly to Louis Armstrong, who was integral in making scat a standard jazz style, known throughout the world (Orlando Sentinel). The megaphone also stuck with Calloway for the rest of his life, becoming part of his stage presence and his iconic image.

Calloway was such a hit at El Torreon that he maintained a long term standing engagement there which was so popular that the competing ballroom, called the Pla-Mor Ballroom, was compelled to sign up Andy Kirk and His Twelve Clouds of Joy for their own standing engagement in order to earn back a reasonable share of the Kansas City ballroom crowd (UMKC, Club Kaycee). Winnwood Beach in the Northland, a beautiful amusement park of the early 1900's era, also hosted both Cab Calloway and the Clouds of Joy quite often. That site has since been plowed under to make way for a shopping plaza full of the usual mundane chain stores, but El Torreon remains as a legacy to the golden age of Kansas City blues and jazz and a hidden history of musical invention.

Skaught Patterson also writes for the Kansas City Blues and Jazz Examiner and the National Blues Examiner.