Slim Gaillard -- Slim Gaillard Rides Again

http://www.ecompil.fr/bk_img/0000/7314/5897/6127/00731458976127/00731458976127_S.jpg

I love this album. I wrote this unfinished bit about it a couple of years ago. Please excuse the sophomoric writing and feel free to correct me on anything:

... one night we suddenly went mad together again; we went to see Slim Gaillard in a little Frisco nightclub. Slim Gaillard is a tall, thin Negro with big sad eyes who's always saying 'Right-orooni' and 'How 'bout a little bourbon-arooni.' In Frisco great eager crowds of young semi-intellectuals sat at his feet and listened to him on the piano, guitar and bongo drums. When he gets warmed up he takes off his undershirt and really goes…
Dean stands in the back, saying, 'God! Yes!' -- and clasping his hands in prayer and sweating. 'Sal, Slim knows time, he knows time.'

Jack Kerouac, On The Road

As far as I know, there hasn’t been a full-scale re-evaluation of Slim Gaillard yet. But to that particular brand of tastemaker whose mission it is to exhume the forgotten gems of the cultural expanse, Gaillard should be a small motherload: He has been immortalized in the coolest book of the last fifty years, yet remains obscure; his music is truly unique, a novelty act pursued well beyond its shelf-life; and he manages to be both bizarre and immediately enjoyable – a difficult balance to sustain.

After having a few crossover hits in the early 50s with the Bebop group Slim & Slam, songs that established his trademark nonsensical adlibbing, Slim began to fade into obscurity. By the time he released “Slim Gaillard Rides Again,” the 60’s were knocking on the door, the beatnicks who had comprised his audience were moving en masse to the suburbs, and those who would have taken their place as Slim’s devotees were largely opting for rock n roll over stream-of-consciousness interpretations of jazz standards.

Which is why this album is so fascinating. It would be the last album he recorded for ten years, and there is, if not an undercurrent of anxiety, a kind of nothing-to-lose abandon, as he pushes further into those idiosyncracies that once functioned merely to distinguish his music. Here they become the music.

Chicken Rhythm, for example, an earlier recording that featured a perfunctory chicken cluck approximation in the chorus when he recorded it with Slim & Slam, is here nothing but chicken sounds. Two-plus minutes of chicken sounds over a spare guitar. “Oh, Lady be Good” had previously been a relatively straight cover, appended with a scat breakdown at the end. It re-emerges here with frantic but playful subversion pervading every line, woven into the gaudy fabric of the song. And “How High the Moon,” a standard with which he had earlier gone through the motions, here mutates into an extended tangent of how potatoes on the moon grow to the size of the Hollywood Bowl, and so (sustaining the odd inner logic that makes the whole album tick) must therefore be peeled with bulldozers...

Etc...

So: Deservedly forgotten curio or demented jazz masterpiece? Is this more well-known than I thought? Recommendations for similar stuff? In any case, it’s weird, and everyone should have it in their living room for when the guests come over, in my honest opinion. Sukiyaki Cha Cha alone is worth the price.

Is this more well-known than I thought?

I don't think it is either

I need this BAD. I absolutely love Slim Gaillard, one of my favorite musicians ever. I knew I should get serious about my girlfriend when she too flipped for "Serenade to a Poodle" and "Potato Chips" on Laughing in Rhythm: The Best of the Verve Years. That's where to go next if you don't know it already. The 4CD Proper box, also confusingly titled Laughing in Rhythm, is full of great finds and duff audio, but it retails cheap.

Also seek out 1938-1946 on the French Best of Jazz label (used copy going for $58 on Amazon, oy) and, much easier to find, Columbia/Legacy's The Flat Foot Floogie by Slim & Slam (Stewart, his old bassist/partner).

The Best of Jazz comp has "Slim's Jam" and "Dizzy's Boogie," recorded with Parker & Gillespie in 1946--as sidemen. THAT'S how cool Slim Gaillard was.

(Those songs, and most of them really on the Best of Jazz comp, are also on the aforementioned box.)

Few musicians had better songs about food: "Eatin' with the Boogie," "Potato Chips," "Matzoh Balls," "Tutti Frutti" (not the Little Richard one, obv.).

Palm Springs Jump is BEST SONG EVER

songs about food: don't forget "Dunkin' Bagels"

Haven't heard this album, but that's a beautiful record cover.

i can up this somewhere for you later matos, if you like, and thanks for the suggestions. i'll def try to find that comp.

this is also occasion enough to post probably the best video on youtube:

WOW thank you for that. I never look for stuff on YouTube, I really oughta start, esp. w/Slim.

The Verve comp is probably the most charming album I've heard. I've played it so much.

Palm Springs Jump is BEST SONG EVER

word. isn't it credited to slim + someone else? i forget who.

At one point he was Marvin Gaye's father-in-law.

Apparently the founder of Yep Roc records is a huge fan with a shelf full of Slim Gaillard records. I believe "Yep Roc" is the title of one of his songs. I finally heard SG for the first time this weekend. Definitely interested in checking out more.

I have only the great Verve comp. I'll have to check this out.

>> I believe "Yep Roc" is the title of one of his songs.

Hells, yeah! "Yep Roc Heresy," lyrics Slim-o-rooney-ized from an Armenian restaurant menu!

He should have written a cookbook:
We're going to cook up a fine dish, real groovy. Wrap up some fine grape leaves and chip up a little lamboroonie. Sprinkle on a little fine riceorootie and a little pepporoonie, a little peppovoutie. And sprinkle on a little saltoroonie to put the seasoning in there, that makes it really mellow. Then you take and you nail an avocado seed up in the ceiling and let it vout for a while..."

Exchange from a different thread last year, about a mysterious 45 on my shelf:

Dancing Panther Danceband "Cement Mixer (Put-Ti Put-Ti)"/"Tropic Love" (Warner Bros., year unknown.) Was there a vout revival in the early '60s? Is "vout" even what stuff by Slim Galliard (who wrote the A-side, though I'm not sure I've ever heard his version) was called? He was, like, a beatnik jazz dada nonsense rapper from, more or less, the swing era or thereabouts, right? Anyway, A-side slings hipster slanguage about cement mixers: "A bottle of reet/con-creet." Mix up the gravel with water and "see the melorooni come out…keeno!." "Who wants a bucket of cement?" Words hit me as sort of scatological, somehow. Music starts out sounding like a fairly fake version of jump-blues-like dance jazz at first, but then the sax comes in and it's very real. (Not as wild as the sax dance of Joey Dee's song, but close.) B-side's an instrumental mixing up lounge, Latin, jazz, and Hawaiian music -- related possibly to Martin Denny's exotica or maybe Esquivel's space-age bachelor pad music, which is why I'm guessing early '60s.

― xhuxk, Sunday, 16 September 2007 02:52

yeah, Slim Gaillard was in and out of the music biz between the 30s and 80s (b. 1911?-d.1991), and was back in by the late 50s, so may well have inspired an early 60s album. Originally known for singing, playing guitar and tap-dancing simultaneously, and Slim and Slam (Stewart, bassist) had a hit,"Flat Foot Floogie (Was A Floy-Floy)" in late 30s. Orig "Flat Fleet Floogie," and for that dis to military, was drafted (change to"Flat Foot" albili didn't keep him out). Recorded with Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, and stole the show live, at least according to Brian Priestley's notes to Laughing in Rhythm: The Best of the Verve Years (the fleet/foot thing is mine, not BP's) No "F.F.F." here, nor "Cement Mixer," (maybe those weren't on Verve), and I'd need to find some more Gene Krupa cigarettes to get into all of this, but I do dig most of it. "Arabian Boogie" might've inspired Professor Longhair; "Serenade to a Poodle" woofs eloquent; "Soomy Roomy (Song of YXabat)" is a great parody of Yma Sumac and the whole exotica thangette; "Genius" (AKA "Ride Slim Ride") has him as a one-man-band and vocal group, overdubbing eight instruments and a bunch of mouth sounds(incl. harmonies), and making it sound comfortable, in 1951, when overdubbing was something of a chore. There's also "Yo Yo Yo," "Yip Roc Heresy," "Chicken Rhythm" (chorus: "Buk Buk Buk Buk!").Also in the booklet, Harvey Pekar and Joe Sacco's cartoon essay spots him between Charlie Christian and Chuck Berry, Priestly has him early associated with other swing-to-bop teadrinkers like Harry The Hipster Gibson,and Leo Scatman Watson, King Cole Trio(I'd say Cab Calloway before that, and Louis Jordan along side in the later 40s, and even Bob Wills, when he starts bouncing the falsetto around, and of course he invented his own language before Magma)(okay, more like Beefheart, because it twists English to its own purposes) "Gomen Nasal" indeed, and Gezundheit.

― dow, Sunday, 16 September 2007 06:34

Then you take and you nail an avocado seed up in the ceiling and let it vout for a while..."

awesome

isn't it credited to slim + someone else?

Probably Slim & Slam, mentioned upthread.

Yeah, Slim & Slam

This thread got me on a Slim kick now.

His catalog is HUGE. I didn't realize I had only scratched the surface until last night.

songs about food: don't forget "Dunkin' Bagels"

― bendy, Wednesday, January 7, 2009 6:36 AM (12 hours ago) Bookmark

Also, Carne, from 1945.

Dude can do little, if any, wrong.

upped this on nb

um...where again?

Slim discography

http://home.earthlink.net/~copaceticcomicsco/ProperSlimDisc.html

wow good deal

Finally found a decent-priced copy of this online and received it today. It's a true classic.

Just found a used copy of the Proper box for only $15...how can you beat that? (a-roonie)

Yeah, I'm spinning the Proper box today and it's chock full of the kind of vocal jazz workouts I love ("Atomic Cocktail", "Dunkin Bagels", etc). It's so damn cheap, I'm gonna have to pick it up. Is there anything critical missing from it?

apparently would have been his birthday today so here's a 1970 clip from the Flip Wilson show
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thA6nULIiew

awesome, thank you for this

Yeah I should have pointed out that I had heard the track Motorcycle as something that Dizzy Gillespie went into in the middle of a song he was playing live in Paris. Hadn't connected to it being a Slim Gaillard track until I heard him playing it there.

Here's some more this time with some time musical partner Slam Stewart and several fantastic dancers though not sure those uniforms are standard
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrcZqnICYbs&feature=share

this is part one of a four-part BBC documentary, recommended to me by youtube last night. really strange stuff:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbdGTqoOg8w

was listening to slim on youtube after picking up a copy of "laguna" on 78, with dodo marmarosa on the melodisc label. i can't stop listening to it. here's a different version of the same tune:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dys-LaORaG8

has anybody heard his two 45s from the late '60s on epic? one is a cover of "blowin' in the wind". seems promising!

That BCC thing made my day! Sun Ra meets Bourdain, or vica versa

yeah, it's amazing!

a cover of "blowin' in the wind". seems promising!

i tracked down a copy of this and it was a bit of a letdown. in the words of my friend, "it sounds like andy kaufman doing frank sinatra"

What a coincidence, I just had an urge to listen to "Avocado Seed Soup Symphony" this morning. I hadn't seen the Flip Wilson clip before now, what fun! Slim's left hand is boogie woogie perfection. Looking forward to the BBC doc.

just seen you can get the proper still.
Have had teh single disc of teh same title since the mid 90s. Great stuff.
Met him at teh Wag club once. Wish I had a decent place to go and dance to jazz still, Sundays at Dingwalls was good too.