Alyn Shipton, Hi-De-Ho: The Life of Cab Calloway (Oxford, $29.95). This is, surprisingly, the first full-length biography of the creator of Minnie the Moocher and Smokey Joe, and it’s a solid piece of work, a bit short on color but thoroughly reliable and informative. Contrary to the received view of snobbish jazz critics, Calloway was a first-rate jazz-flavored pop singer whose vocals were comparable in quality to the brilliant ensemble playing of the big band that he led throughout the Thirties and Forties, and Shipton gives him his due. Must reading for swing buffs, especially in tandem with The Chu and Dizzy Years, Hep Records’ indispensable two-CD compilation of Calloway’s key 78s (TT).

Murray Perahia, Perahia Brahms (Sony Classical). An anthology of Brahms’ finest works for solo piano–the Handel Variations, the B Minor and G Minor Rhapsodies, and the ten intermezzi and other short pieces of Opp. 118 and 119–all played in an understated, unexaggerated style that emphasizes their autumnal virtues. Not only is this the strongest single-disc collection of Brahms’ piano music since Van Cliburn’s My Favorite Brahms, originally released in 1975, but Perahia’s chastely classical playing contrasts very nicely with Cliburn’s expansive romanticism (TT).

Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson (Ghostlight). Now on CD, the score of the first Broadway musical ever to make fully effective and idiomatic use of rock. Michael Friedman’s hard-edged, guitar-driven emo-style songs are tuneful, smart, and catchy (especially “Ten Little Indians”). Nor is there the slightest trace of slickness: this is real rock, not the synthetic kind. See the show by all means, but the best of it is right here (TT).

David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Updated and Expanded (Knopf, $40). There’s still no room for Whit Stillman or Parker Posey in the newly revised fifth edition of the most idiosyncratically interesting of all books about movies, which says much about the author’s increasingly quaint big-is-best perspective: David Thomson continues to believe that Hollywood has the power to make America a better place, and fears that it is no longer fulfilling its culture-shaping potential. Fortunately, you can easily ignore that aspect of the book and concentrate instead on its crisp, wholly personal, and unfailingly illuminating appraisals of everyone from Humphrey Bogart to Orson Welles. Thomson may be old-fashioned, but that doesn’t make him predictable, much less irrelevant (TT).

Scott Eyman, Empire of Dreams: The Epic Life of Cecil B. DeMille (Simon & Schuster, $35). Who knew that the private life of the man who made The Ten Commandments and The Greatest Show on Earth would turn out to be so scandalous? Yet DeMille’s three mistresses are only a small part of this solidly written, impeccably researched biography, which traces with satisfying skill the nineteenth-century roots of the director’s grandiose, often cartoonish style of epic filmmaking. It’s one of the best Hollywood biographies to come along in recent years (TT).

A Life in the Theatre (Gerald Schoenfeld, 236 W. 45, now closing Nov. 28). David Mamet’s 1977 two-man play about a pair of actors, one young and one old, who are battling for dominance over one another, now on Broadway in a production graced by a superlative performance from Patrick Stewart. Though his acting is unmistakably English in tone–Americans expect a faster pace in Mamet–Stewart is fully alive to the complicated mixture of envy and rue that his character feels as he watches his younger, more talented colleague (T.R. Knight) take flight. The results are poignant and compellling (TT).

Me & Orson Welles (Warner). Richard Linklater’s 2009 film, now out on home video, is a witty, ingenious, perfectly cast, brilliantly designed, and astonishingly well informed backstage rom-com about the Mercury Theatre’s 1937 Broadway production of Julius Caesar. It didn’t get nearly as much attention as it deserved when it was released, and I saw it purely by chance on an airplane a couple of months ago. Catch up with it now and prepare to be both charmed and enthralled. I don’t know when I’ve seen a better movie about what it feels like to put on a play (TT).

Rosanne Cash, Composed (Viking, $26.95). This is a remarkable piece of work, a making-of-an-artist memoir by a musician who is equally adept at writing prose. Composed is–all at once–funny and poetic and down to earth, and Cash also has a great many exceedingly shrewd things to say about the music business and its discontents. Don’t go looking for gossip, but if you want to learn about the inner and outer lives of one of our very best singer-songwriters, you won’t be even slightly disappointed (TT).