Gaillard, Slim

By: James Ross Moore

Source:

 American National Biography Online

Gaillard, Slim

jazz musician and composer, was born Bulee Gaillard probably in Santa Clara, Cuba (although a birth certificate shows Claiborne, Ala.), the son of Theophilus Rothschild, a ship’s steward, and Mary Gaillard. He apparently was always known by his mother’s name. Any formal education may have come in Pensacola, Florida, which Gaillard apparently left at age twelve in order to travel the world with his father. Gaillard—a lifelong embellisher of his own legend—later claimed that, en route, he was accidentally left on Crete and that he lived there for at least four years, taking up various occupations and learning to speak Greek. He subsequently traveled the Mediterranean as a ship’s cook, learning the languages, including Armenian and Arabic dialects, he later worked into his compositions, written as well as improvised.

In 1932 Gaillard surfaced in Detroit, where he lived with an Armenian family. During the next few years he worked for morticians, slaughterers, hatters, shoemakers, and gangsters. Crediting his redemption from a life of crime to a resourceful judge and a tough policeman, Gaillard took up boxing and music, learning vibraphone, guitar, and piano, an instrument from which he soon could coax music with the backs of his hands.

By the mid-1930s Gaillard was playing in small jazz groups in towns as far east as Pennsylvania. His first recording was as a singer with Frankie Newton’s band in New York City in 1937. He met Slam Stewart, a bassist whose specialty was humming—an octave higher—the tune he was bowing. They became a duo, appearing regularly on radio on the “Original Amateur Hour” (Slim occasionally tap dancing) and in breakfast shows at the Criterion Theater, where master of ceremonies Martin Block christened them Slim and Slam. Soon they were regulars on New York radio station WNEW.

Slim and Slam’s eccentric composition “Flat Foot Floogie” (originally either “Flat Fleet Floogie” or “Flat Foot Floosie”) became a hit in May 1938, when it was recorded by Benny Goodman’s swing band, then America’s favorite. Having recorded it themselves that January, Slim and Slam soon became famous. (Their version was buried in the 1939 New York World’s Fair time capsule.) The song surpassed contemporary nonsense novelties such as “Hold Tight” (“foodley yacky sacky, want some seafood, Mama”) largely because of its authentic jazz underpinning. Gaillard called it “mostly a riff with jive lyrics.” These lyrics stemmed from scat singing, the vocal attempt to mimic instrumental music. Gaillard’s subsequent variation on scat, a playful, multicultural, and highly personal language he called “vout,” became his trademark.

Slim and Slam’s partnership, which lasted until 1942, produced memorable odes to food such as “Tutti Frutti.” At the beginning of a nightclub set Gaillard might begin baking a cake in the kitchen and at the end invite everyone to eat it. On one occasion he stopped the music and joined the conversation taking place at a table of Greeks. Turning to the audience, he said, “It’s okay. We just talkin’ ’bout cheeseburgers.”

In 1941 Gaillard and Stewart moved to Hollywood and appeared in the film Hellzapoppin’, released the next year. They helped form the Lee and Lester Young and Slim and Slam Orchestra, whose shows were broadcast with Gaillard as the supremely “hip” master of ceremonies. In 1942 Gaillard appeared as a musician in the films Almost Married and Star Spangled Rhythm.

Drafted in 1942 or 1943, Gaillard served as a pilot in the South Pacific. Wounded, he suffered a nervous breakdown and was discharged in 1944. He returned to Los Angeles, replaced Stewart with “Bam” Brown, with whom he recorded “Dunkin’ Bagels,” and opened at Billy Berg’s club in Hollywood, where his affably entertaining form of jazz quickly made him popular. In 1945 Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, proponents of be-bop, appeared at Berg’s with Gaillard, recording “Slim’s Jam” and “Dizzy’s Boogie” with Slim introducing the solos.

It was during these years that Los Angeles newspapers, reporting on Gaillard’s romantic involvements among the film set, dubbed him “The Dark Gable.” Gaillard lived with many women in his lifetime and fathered at least four children. In 1946 “Cement Mixer (Put-ti, Put-ti),” another “vout” song, written with Lee Ricks, was America’s favorite for eight weeks; that same year Gaillard and Brown recorded the lengthy “Opera in Vout,” a jam session in jive, Gaillard’s Vout-o-Renee Dictionary was published, and he appeared in the film The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi. Gaillard became a radio regular, and his song “Laguna O Vouty” (1947) earned him the key to the city of Laguna Beach.

Between 1947 and 1949 Gaillard was often in New York, playing clubs such as Birdland. Also in those years he recorded “Yep Roc Heresay,” whose lyrics were an Armenian restaurant’s menu; “Laughin’ in Rhythm” (1951), which had no lyrics, just laughter; “Down by the Station” (1947), a hit children’s song that Gaillard later claimed caused the Reverend W. V. Awdrey to write a series of British children’s books about Thomas the Tank Engine (Awdrey firmly denied the claim).

In 1950 Gaillard moved to San Francisco, where he married Nettie Walker; they had one child. In 1952 the Gaillard Trio, which usually included drummer Zutty Singleton, made two short films. Gaillard appeared at San Francisco’s Say When club, where he met writer Jack Kerouac, a “good listener,” friend, and fellow cook. On the Road, Kerouac’s novel of the outsider “beat generation,” was published in 1957, with Gaillard and pianist George Shearing serving as symbols of the inner freedom that Kerouac believed jazzmen embodied. In it, Gaillard is described as a “tall, thin Negro with big sad eyes who’s always saying ‘Right-orooni.’ … Great eager crowds of young semi-intellectuals sat at his feet and listened to him on the piano, guitar and bongo drums.” Kerouac added, “He’ll join anybody, but he won’t guarantee to be there with you in spirit.” Kerouac’s comment seems to have prefigured one of Slim’s later reflections: “From time to time I used to get lost.”

Gaillard remained popular throughout the jazz boom of the 1950s, playing clubs and concerts throughout the United States and aiding the rise of Afro-Cuban jazz, but in 1959, divorced, he returned to Los Angeles. As rock music ascended, Gaillard’s popularity waned. He moved around the western states, working as a disc jockey, managing clubs, and buying and selling farms and businesses.

After a reunion with Stewart at the 1970 Monterey Jazz Festival, Gaillard dropped out of music, finding his way as an actor in nonmusical films and television series, such as “Roots: The Next Generation” (1978). Then, in 1982, Gaillard’s hand clapping was featured in a recording by his son-in-law, Marvin Gaye, and in the same year Gaillard’s son (with Frances Miller) Mark persuaded him to perform again in public. That September Gaillard reportedly caused “hysteria in the audience” at a jazz festival in Nice, France. Gaillard moved to London, and for the next nine years the white-bearded performer became, in the words of jazz critic Paul Bradshaw, a new generation’s embodiment of “the hipster and Fifty-second Street, a bebop Santa Claus.” In 1985 Gaillard married Angela Mary Gorman in London.

The Gaillard revival was an international phenomenon. His recordings were reissued in Europe and Asia, and he became a clothing model in Japan. British critics likened his humor to surreal, anarchic contemporaries such as Peter Sellers. Gaillard traveled to the United States, playing in jazz clubs while the British Broadcasting Corporation prepared a four-part television series (1989). A new song, “Easy to Put Together but Hard to Take Apart,” was recorded by the American rap group the Dream Warriors in 1990. At the time of his death in London an autobiography and a screenplay about his Birdland days remained incomplete.

A genuinely able pianist with a mellow, beguiling voice, a natural entertainer who sometimes played the vibraphone with swizzle sticks and coaxed tunes from snare drums, Slim Gaillard carved a career as a jazz cartoon character; his only rival as a humorous jazzman was Thomas “Fats” Waller. His verbal fantasies—“How High the Moon” conjured moon potatoes as large as the Hollywood Bowl, diggable only by bulldozers—outweighed his instrumental improvisations. His lyrics were often doggerel, but also (as on the night at Birdland when he created the impromptu “Billie Holiday, I Love You” in order to restore the haggard Billie Holiday’s confidence) typically playful, human, and kind.

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