Big Bad Voodoo Daddy keeps swinging to the tunes of Cab Calloway
Big Bad Voodoo Daddy
Big Bad Voodoo Daddy
When: 8 p.m. Sunday, April 18
Where: Philharmonic Center for the Arts, 5833 Pelican Bay Blvd.
Admission: $50
Information: 597-1900 or
For better or worse, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy and Cab Calloway share a similar fate.
No matter how good the music they made over the years is, both are now remembered most for their roles in films that captured the American zeitgeist. For Calloway it was the role of mentor and stop gap for Jake and Elwood in "The Blues Brothers." For Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, it was as the band that got Mike to dance with his newly found girl in "Swingers."
Put that together with the love both shared for ribald ditties about getting loose — see Calloway's "Reefer Man" and Big Bad Voodoo Daddy's "You and Me and the Bottle Makes Three" — and it makes sense that the last men standing from the '90s swing revival would have made an album of Calloway tunes.
The band is in Naples on Sunday as part of the tour supporting the album "How Big Can you Get?: The Music of Cab Calloway," which the band released nearly a year ago. The concert at the Philharmonic Center for the Arts starts at 8 p.m.
"His energy was amazing," says trumpet player Glen "The Kid" Marhevka of Calloway. "His charisma was a template for the approach of our live show."
Since forming in the late '80s, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy had often covered Calloway's signature song, "Minne the Moocher," and the song is referenced in their song "Mr. Pinstripe Suit."
"We'd always talked about doing more of his songs and then the time just seemed right to do Cab Calloway stuff," Marhevka says about the album's genesis. "He's overlooked in a lot of ways. People just think of him as the ‘Hi-De-Ho Man' or ‘Blues Brothers.' They don't list him as a jazz great."
Marhevka might have a point. Calloway's big band was always in the shadow of Duke Ellington's. They filled in for Ellington at the famous Cotton Club when his band was on tour. And while they eventually became a co-headliner at the Cotton Club and toured the country, they could never outpace Ellington's genius.
Marhevka said the band wanted to raise awareness about Calloway's music, which may seem strange since not that many people have too much awareness of Big Bad Voodoo Daddy right now. After being shot to the forefront of the swing revival thanks to "Swingers," the band's 1998 album "Americana Deluxe" went platinum. It seemed like the band was poised to do big things after playing in the 1999 Super Bowl halftime show.
But the swing revival sort of petered out with the turn of the decade, leaving bands like the Squirrel Nut Zippers and Cherry Poppin' Daddies without much of an audience.
"Nothing really changed for us," Marhevka says. "Selling all those records was nice, but it didn't make us rich. There are seven guys in the band. We still had to be out there touring and working. Same as we are doing now."
After touring a little longer on the Calloway record, the band is going back in the studio to continue the evolution of its swing sound.
"We've been doing it for years," Marhevka says. "We've kept doing what we want to do and that's what we'll keep doing."
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