Serious Fooling Around

Sheet music front cover—

Words and music by Slim Gaillard and Lee Ricks, 1946
American Academy of Music, Incorporated
1619 Broadway - New York City

A fine singer—as comes through even his silliest lyrics—Slim Gaillard was an accomplished multi-instrumentalist.

He also was an early experimenter with studio overdubbing, which let him record at least one number, "Genius" (aka, "Ride Slim Ride"), where he plays every instrument in a combo.

In the late 1930s he teamed with bassist Slam Stewart. Recording as Slim & Slam, the two had several hit records.

Songs incorporated a hipster lexicon, "vout," which Slim invented. The lingo is so out there, it seems a parody of hipster talk, and Slim continued to use it to the end of his career.

He had an excellent ear for languages, and was able to combine a smattering of words with convincing ad libbed sounds. One example, in "Spanish," is after the 1:50 mark here.

And this was supposed to have been inspired by Slim's boarding with—and being fed by—a woman of Middle Eastern ancestry. According to Wiki, his landlady was Armenian, and the entry cites several dishes, as well as Arabic phrases ("I'm broke!") in the lyrics to "Yep Roc Heresy."

A few minutes of a 1980s video ; Slim's interviewer is George Melly, an English musician, arts critic, and author.

Melly calls Slim "the possessor of a truly surreal, freewheeling imagination."

My own favorite example is how he turned a 1950s pop hit into this:

Everybody's wondering
How high the moon.
Does the moon ever wonder
How low you are?

That's only the intro; it gets seriously surreal after that.

A good sampling of typical hijinks, as well as musical chops, is here.

The TV show (c. early 60s) is not identified, but a segment combining jazz + comedy has to be from a Steve Allen show. Apparently, Oxydol and Westinghouse were sponsors, per Slim's ad lib lyrics.

Slim's "o-rooney" linguistic inventiveness was surely an influence on "Steverino," perhaps inspiring Allen's "Schmock-Schmock!" catch phrase coining.

About twenty years after that performance on the show, Gaillard recorded with Allen, as one of the quartet on "Steve Allen's Hip Fables" (1983).

These were re-tellings of children's stories, in "cool" jazz lingo. A track I've heard: "The Three Little Pigs," where each line of Allen's lyrics is followed by a melodious barrage of rolled "r"s, as Slim "translates" the story into his own version of Spanglish.

J. spotted this at a library sale:
According to this, tracks were recorded in 1951 and '52.

Some cover art detail:

Illustrator David Stone Martin included cats hanging out here:
With all the food references in Slim's lyrics, I took this for some kind of dish or cooking pot until J. set me straight: it's a trumpet mute.

Back cover portrait of the recording artist:

The song list even includes a seasonal note for April: