[Dixielandjazz] Slim Gaillard

[Steve Voce]

On 20/08/2015 16:45, Ken Mathieson wrote:
> Hi Folks,
>
> I mailed Alastair Robertson of Hep Records about his recollections of 
> recording Slim and here's his reply:
> snip>
> Slim was essentially a con man -
But a very nice con man!
This was how my conversation with him wound up. Not much exaggeration 
here, I think. But I cut some out at the time.
Steve Voce


> Bulee Slim Gaillard's greatest talent is his turbulent surrealist 
> imagination, which is on a par with Spike Milligan's in the greatest 
> days of the Goon Shows. He is also gifted with a relaxed and most. 
> attractive voice which is musical even in speech, as shown by his 
> intoxicating recordings of Travellin' Blues and Slim's Jam. He is a 
> good guitarist and a gifted pianist who can play better with the backs 
> of his fingers, as he regularly does, than most can do with the 
> fronts. He is a good vibraphonist, too and is perhaps best known as a 
> composer and lyricist — in the latter capacity he can truly be said to 
> have changed the language.
> Despite the fact of a sometimes self-imposed obscurity, he has had 
> almost ob¬sessional followers in this country over the years, 
> including myself. We had heard of a fiery, recluse-like figure who 
> regarded his days in music as finished many years ago, and 
> consequently it was a surprise when he suddenly popped up in Europe.
> I was lucky enough to be at Nice when he made his debut. It was half 
> way through a set by Joe Newman, James Moody and Kai Winding, when a 
> tall, patriarchal figure with a long grey beard appeared at the back 
> of the stage and began unpacking a guitar. There was a tentative 
> ripple of applause from an audience that wasn't quite sure who he was. 
> Slim looked up in pleased sur¬prise, for he had obviously not expected 
> recognition. He took over the session — there isn't any way in which 
> he can stay in the background — and the resultant erup¬tion of 
> hysteria in the audience was the forerunner of the reception almost 
> every time he played.
> At the end of that first set I met him as he came off the stage and 
> was able to see the surprised delight in his face, not just at the 
> reception, but at the implication that it meant a new start to his 
> career in Europe.
> You might expect a clown off-stage, too, but you would be 
> disappointed. Slim is a fairly serious man, very friendly but 
> uncommunicative. Comments have to be drawn from him with patience, and 
> he answers most questions with `That was good fun,' or a variant on 
> it. He's unused to providing the information a writer might want from 
> him and things which might be of importance to us appear trivial to 
> him and he has a poor memory of them.
> His act is extrovert and as such he has to dominate anyone else who 
> shares a stage with him. In some cases this produced glum faces 
> amongst some of the great musicians who backed him — this was entirely 
> under¬standable, but unavoidable. It was not the case with Kai Winding 
> though, he of the polished and immaculate image, who could have been 
> expected to be least suited to the Voutmaster's insanity. Soon 
> embroiled in the labyrinth of Chicken Rhythm he was drawn along by 
> Slim's magnetism and responded superbly. He didn't have much choice so 
> these were his first public vocals.
> Slim's repertoire is geared so that any professional musician can pick 
> up the threads as he goes along. `Now we are going to play some 
> special arrangements which we'll put together as we come to them,' was 
> Slim's description.
> He agreed to be interviewed the next morning, but wanted to sunbathe, 
> so we arranged to talk on the beach at Nice and it was there, seated 
> on the pebbles amongst the topless beauties, that he told me:
> `I was born in Detroit. I'm not sure of the date, but I think it was 
> January 4, 1916. Everybody in my family used to make music of some 
> kind, and there was always a guitar lying around the house, but my 
> first instrument was the vibraphone, I really enjoyed that. I earned 
> the money to buy my vibes by driving a delivery van and by making 
> shoes — I was a professional shoe-maker. Eventually I was good enough 
> to earn money playing in Detroit and then, I don't know how old I was, 
> and I can't remember years, I went to New York. I'd been there a year 
> or so when I made my first recording. This was as a singer with 
> Frankie Newton's band. I sang on two of the four titles, There's No 
> Two Ways About It and `Cause My Baby Says It's So. Frankie was a 
> beautiful player, and there's some wailing by Pete Brown and Ed Hall 
> on those sides, too. Soon after that I met Slam Stewart at a club 
> called Jock's Place, and we began working together, stayed together 
> until 1942 when I went into the army. We had our first and biggest hit 
> with Flat Fleet Floogie in 1938 (the public though it was Flat Foot 
> Floogie so we changed it to that and eventually we became so 
> identified with the hit that we changed the name of the band from Slim 
> And Slam to Slim Gaillard And His Flat Foot Floogie Boys). Not so long 
> ago at the World's Fair in New York they buried a time capsule and 
> they included a copy of Flat Foot Floogie. I'm pleased about that. 
> It's nice to think that when the Martians find it in a thousand years 
> they'll start vouting. Slam and I made a lot of records after Floogie 
> started the rush. We had a good band, Slam was a virtuoso bassist, a 
> fact sometimes obscured by his humour. That band had a great tenor 
> player, Kenneth Hollan, who was a mail carrier by day and played with 
> us at night. I can't think why he wasn't better known. He had a big 
> sound and he used to swing like Chu Berry.
> `I've always been lucky with tenor players. I've used guys like Lucky 
> Thompson, Teddy Edwards, Ben Webster, Jack McVea, Buddy Tate, Lockjaw 
> — they're the best. Yes, I always chose all the musicians on our 
> recording dates, chose them because I liked them — Howard McGhee and 
> such like.
> `Our next hit was Tutti Frutti. It wasn't as big as Floogie but it 
> helped to get us regular broadcasts on WNEW in New York.
> `In 1942 Slam and I came out to Holly-wood to make the movie 
> `Hellzapoppin" with Olsen and Johnson. We had a band with Rex Stewart, 
> Sonny Greer, Buster Bailey and Vic Dickenson. We made a few movies out 
> there and we were both due to go into `Stormy Weather' with Fats 
> Waller and Benny Carter. Slam appeared in it, but I got called into 
> the army as filming began and that was the last I saw of Hollywood for 
> a year or so. But we liked the West Coast, Slam bought property out 
> there and was very comfortable. But eventually he got restless for New 
> York and when I came out of the army he had gone back, so we split 
> finally, because I was determined to stay out west.
> `Tiny Brown, who was a very big man, came in on bass to replace Slam. 
> In some ways his sense of humour accorded more with mine. Slam had a 
> very mellow sense of humour, but Tiny's had more bite and he could 
> improvise with it. The vout thing had started early on in New York 
> when we recorded Floogie and I just kept right on with it. As long as 
> you had a vivid imagina¬tion it grew by itself. I used to think of the 
> most impossible things and let my imagina¬tion run riot and one thing 
> led to another. The basis of it was making the impossible possible. 
> For instance, in B19, where the bomber is into a dive and we put it in 
> reverse, or in How High The Moon where they grew potatoes the size of 
> the Holly-wood Bowl on the moon. It didn't need too much imagination 
> to follow that it needed a bulldozer to peel them.
> `Anyway, when I came out of the army I went to work in Billy Berg's 
> club in Holly-wood with Tiny. The management decided that he should be 
> called 'Barn' because he was the successor to Slam and he `bammed' the 
> bass, or something. We worked a lot at Berg's, I was there for years, 
> and that's when I made those recordings for Beltone with Bird and 
> Dizzy. I had a record date for my quintet with Dodo Marmarosa, Jack 
> McVea, Barn and Zutty Singleton. At the time we were working opposite 
> Bird and Dizzy who were making their famous first trip out west, so 
> they came on the date, which was very good fun.
> `Those titles we recorded came out on so many labels afterwards that I 
> could never' keep track of them. I made so many recordings and 
> broadcasts during the forties, and a lot of them have been coming out 
> on albums lately. I get zero. You can write letters, call on the 
> companies, but nothing. They just take everything away from you and 
> you get no composer royalties or anything. (An honourable exception is 
> the Hep label which has reached a financial agreement with Slim — SV). 
> French Verve have just brought out an album with `Opera In Vout' and a 
> lot of the studio things I did for Norman Granz, and I get nothing for 
> it. I'll have to get in touch with Norman!
> `The `Opera In Vout' concert was a great one for me. We were just part 
> of it, because it was a typical Jazz At The Philharmonic concert with 
> I think Buck Clayton, Prez, Hawk and Charlie Parker. That opening on C 
> Jam Blues was actually a take off on a phrase that the Hampton band 
> was famous for at the time. I think Bam played piano on that one as 
> well as me. I don't think I played two instruments simultaneously that 
> night. Sometimes I used to play guitar and piano at the same time. You 
> can turn the volume up on the guitar and it'll play itself — you just 
> make the chords and hit the strings, feedback!
> `I like to pay different instruments, but of course these days the 
> main one is the guitar. I used to have some good sessions with Charlie 
> Christian, but I learned most from Bernard Addison in New York when he 
> was with Fletcher Henderson's orchestra. Eddie Durham played nice 
> guitar too, in the style that I liked with the down stroke. Sometimes 
> guitar players have an up and down stroke with the plectrum, but I 
> only do that when I'm doing funny things. Charlie Christian always 
> used the down stroke, never did go up and down. I developed that 
> style, too. Charlie would come up to 117th Street to the Cecil Hotel 
> and we would jam. There were regular sessions there. Dickie Wells used 
> to blow and Art Tatum came up a lot. When daylight came you'd get him 
> off the piano! I'd sit there and listen to him, because you learned a 
> lot from him. It really was a musical education. Apart from the jam 
> sessions I played guitar with him. We worked together in Pittsburgh, 
> although it wasn't in that tight trio style he had with Tiny Grimes. 
> Good fun. He was the champion. I've never known any-one achieve such 
> mastery of an instrument.
> `But the later days out on the West Coast were good, too. As I say I 
> worked for Billy Berg from when he first began. In fact originally he 
> began with a place in Beverly Hills called The Country and I had the 
> band there with Lester and Lee Young and Leo Watson.
> `From time to time I used to get lost. During the fifties I hung 
> around the West Coast and didn't work in music at all for about seven 
> years. I worked in lots of movies and TV shows and I never would play 
> music. They used to ask me but I told them I'd given up music 
> altogether. In fact I only really got back into music not too long ago 
> at Parnell's jazz spot up in Seattle, where I now live.
> `I got into movies quite casually. I used to go to a Hollywood 
> restaurant called Theodore's where all the top comics would come in 
> the morning for breakfast. Guys like Joey Bishop, Milton Berle, Danny 
> Thomas and Johnny Carson would meet there and tell each other their 
> jokes and I used to go to listen to them talk. One day, out of the 
> blue, a guy came up to me in Theodore's and asked if I'd go out to the 
> studio and read a script. I told him I wasn't an actor. "Would you do 
> me a favour and come to the studio?" "Well, OK, but I tell you now I'm 
> not an actor." So I read the script and the guy said "Right, you're 
> leaving tomorrow at five in the morning for Phoenix, Arizona." I went 
> out there and worked for about 12 days, and when I came back they had 
> another thing for me for Universal, `Marcus Welby, MD'. So I jumped 
> from MGM to Universal and then back to MGM and I kept bouncing from 
> one studio to another. More recently I was in `Love's Savage Fury' 
> with Raymond Burr and `Roots — The Second Generation'.
> `But I've been delighted with the reception I've had recently at some 
> of the American and now European festivals. So I might just stick with 
> the festival thing or do some more club work. After all, I've got 
> albums out in Sweden, England and France. Even if they don't bring me 
> any bread I suppose they let people get to know my work, and I might 
> as well pick up what I can on that.'
>
>
>
>
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