New York -- Puffs of smoke rose lazily through the dark room, the brass trio wailed their opening notes and the show was under way.
The smoke wasn't from cigarettes but from incense, the setting wasn't a crummy blues joint but the world's largest Gothic cathedral, and this was no ordinary gig but a star-studded send-off for Cab Calloway, the handsome, Baltimore-bred charmer who became an international star and one of the most beloved swing-era figures.
"Hi-di-hi-di-hi-di-ho!" Bill Cosby echoed Mr. Calloway's calling-card lyric from the pulpit of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine last night, where some 2,500 fans and friends gathered to celebrate the legendary entertainer in appropriately exuberant fashion.
In a memorial service both sacred (Psalms and hymns) and profane (snippets of Mr. Calloway's trademark songs, "Minnie the Moocher" and "Reefer Man"), the singer-conductor, who died Nov. 18 after suffering a stroke in June, was remembered with fondness, a few tears, but mainly a whole lot of joy.
"I want the rafters to rock," his daughter, Camay Calloway Murphy, who lives in Ashburton, said before the ceremony.
She got her wish.
While the service began with a solemn procession and haunting Psalms by the cathedral's choir, it soon progressed into a rollicking show of memories and tributes and music from Mr. Calloway's contemporaries as well as those who succeeded him and considered him, as the great bass player Milt Hinton told the crowd, their "musical father."
"I think it's all right if you just loosen up a piece now," Mr. Cosby told the quiet crowd.
They did, chuckling at the reminiscences from dancer Gregory Hines, tapping their feet to jazzy tunes from the likes of Mr. Hinton, Illinois Jacquet, Doc Cheatham and Panama Francis, and participating in volleys of "hi-di-hi-di-hi-di- hos" with another Calloway daughter, Chris Calloway Cross.
There were even messages, read by former New York mayor David Dinkins, from President Clinton ("Cab Calloway a true legend among musicians of this century," Rev. Jesse Jackson ("His smile was as electric and contagious as the flu.") and Baltimore Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke ("I know he will be greatly missed.")
Calloway's fellow performers marveled at the breadth of his career, which began shortly after he graduated from Frederick Douglass High School in Baltimore in 1927, continued into the Cotton Club era of Harlem and left its mark from Broadway to Europe.
