Compiling a collection on the basis of ‘hits’, using the post-1936 Billboard ‘Hit Parade’ (and similar unofficial charts) and then the same magazine’s ‘Music Popularity Chart’ from 1940, tells us a little about which songs by an artist sold well, but it not always an indicator of musical quality.

There are plenty of Calloway’s popular numbers here, of the kind that he would repeat night after night, based on the ‘Minnie The Moocher’ saga, that alluded in code to drug use, including ‘Smokey Joe’ being ‘cokey’ and Minnie herself ‘Kicking the Gong Around’ (slang for opium usage). Not that the liner notes would tell you much about that, and some of the statements therein are factually incorrect, as well as Bennie Payne’s forename being spelled two different ways! Equally, some of Cab’s wilder and most inventive vocals such as ‘Nagasaki’ are also absent. The band’s most musically significant pieces did not always have Cab himself in them — Chu Berry’s ‘Ghost of a Chance’, Dizzy’s composition ‘Pickin’ The Cabbage’ or Milt Hinton’s ‘Pluckin’ The Bass’ feature, for example — and there’s no sign of these here. The notes suggest that ‘Reefer Man’ had Jimmy Smith as the bassist, whereas it was always (as James Popa’s specialist discography confirms) Al Morgan’s feature, and a more resourceful compiler might even have replaced the commercial recording with the soundtrack of the band’s fine version in the 1933 movie International House. This sounds like carping, but for those of us who have tried to keep Calloway’s name in the forefront of jazz lovers’ awareness, it’s frustrating to find a new issue focusing on work that was not always his best. If you want a thorough cross-section of the band’s output, then nothing has so far bettered the 4CD Properbox This Is Hip, released in 2008.