[Dixielandjazz] Slim Gaillard

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

Of course Slim Gaillard was born on the planet Saturn, and later made a financial arrangement in which he swapped birth certificates with Sun Ra -- a musician worth naming on this site for the amazing performances he pulled off using I think scores from his time long before with Fletcher Christian -- come to think of it, it was actually Fletcher Henderson. 
Nobody knew what Sun Ra would do at the Edinburgh Jazz Festival, long enough ago, but it turned out on the same lines as the Savoy Sultans, with an interlude of mystical ecology  -- which let those like me who couldn't resist the impulse to dance (gasp!) pause for a breather 

In an ideal world some of the mainstream wilder than most things as musical Sun Ra recorded would be made available to OKOM enthusiasts who liked the Savoy Sultans' Frenzy....  and would I fear say some other things he recorded belong in outer space....  


Perhaps a career as a pseudo-Cuban inspired Slim's claim of beginnings as the son of a Cuban steward on a cruise liner  -- stranded on Crete as a boy, but able to make his way back across the Atlantic and drive limousines for gangsters in Detroit, but have a nervous breakdown because B 19 bombers no more had a reverse gear than the burning shells flying up at them from German anti-aircraft guns, and he was flying one of the bombers. 
As I recall, one jazz writer bumped into Slim at an airport, and was told he had a weekend gig in a Paris club playing the music of Ernest Lecuomo (I found a second-hand copy of a recording of him playing that music in a nice shop in Stuttgart once, but lacked the funds to buy it). 

George Melly did report travelling to a Belfast jazz festival with Slim, in the course of speaking of Slim's remoteness from daily reality.  The hefty police presence at Belfast airport during the very nasty troubles of the time occasioned Slim to comment, with an alarmed look, that he didn't expect his presence in the city would have raised the danger of race riots. 

He was it seems much appreciated when I suppose with benefit of Mellyfluency he was enrolled as a member of the Chelsea Arts Club,  echoes of Whistler and Oscar Wilde, with the curious if touching consequence that a film about the establishment commemorating its centenary and visiting its I gather celebrated Sunday breakfast around that time featured glum faces above platters of full English breakfast and "you heard about Slim?"  Wherever he came from, this was a singular approximation to a wake. 


He could also sing.  Really sing. A friend who tutored me in my non-jazz singing had never heard of Slim but was enthralled with the series SLIM GAILLARD'S CIVILISATION involving a world record sized coffee cup and the dunking of a bagel modelled on something from Indiana Jones. The voice and glorious unreality enthralled him.  Besides a recording with a cast of stupendous British and other musicians any not strictly Bixieland member of this list would welcome with open arms, an insurance company with Amicable in its business name hired Slim for a TV commercial which ought to be on YouTube.  Slim out-sang anybody around in the past quarter century, and concluded "Are you an amicable man?"
He certainly was, quite apart from rumours of children in numbers which had a Chelsea Arts Club precedent in Augustus John...  
Of late it seems a Slim lookalike has been engaged to appear in another commercial, the bonnet and grey beard quite notable.  Dearie me!
I thought Slim's restoration to music and a move to UK which seemed to continue a long time, with various appearances, had some strong connection with HEP RECORDS' boss Alasdair Robertson's unearthing and issuing and paying proper royalties on radio recordings of Slim from long before.  If this is not the case, well, HEP deserves a decent laudation. 

"Cement Mixer" was I think the recording which was declared obscene in the USA in the 1940s. If I have the name wrong, certainly it was a recording equally innocent of the salacious which revealed wholly incidentally that Slim's sense of the ridiculous was rivalled by an unconscious performance of the ridiculous in the country Slim for artistic purposes chose not to have been born in, and to have driven limousines for gangsters in... and not indeed to die in...  with a revised official year of birth of 1911,  


an amicably uncommon man!

Robert R. Calder