Customer Reviews

Laughing in Rhythm

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I'll confess to an ongoing amour with the proper box set. I can't believe something this cheap (let's face it...the price is incredible!) is consistently of such high quality. They look great, feel nice, are beautifully packaged, and include booklets (yes! tiny books) with great info on and pics of their subjects.

So what about Slim? Well this cat is jumpin'. He is high class and hilarious...what a great combination. And there's suprising variety through this invariably rhythmic set. Most tracks are upbeat and you could fill up the CD shuffler and dance to this all night. I just can't believe his name isn't as familiar to us as the likes of Louis Jordan.

I was a bit worried about all this vouting...this guy sounded like he could get really annoying...and he wouldn't be around so you could slap him in the face and tell him to snap out of it. But he only indulges in sporadic vouting binges and they are only occasionally obtrusive.

When I bought this I thought I'd probably select songs and boil it down in to one excellent CD I could love unconditionally. But this cat doesn't let you down...which has made for a least one very happy kitten.

Slim Gaillard is what you get when you combine slapstick humor with bebop jazz. Even Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie couldn't resist playing on his records-they appear on a few tracks on this great 4 CD box set.
Did I mention you get 30 tracks per disc making this the deal of the century? Such a deal! For the low price listed above you get at least 120 tracks of pure Slim brilliance. I have to warn you, though, his sense of humor is very non-PC but also not mean spirited, either. He lampoons every ethnic group under the sun including his own (in "African Jive" he runs down a soul food menu to a tribal African beat).
I also liked his enthusiasm for ethnic food, particularly Jewish delicacies:
Matzo Balls (sung Jimmy Durante style), Dunkin' Bagels ("splash! in the coffee"), and the classic Potato Chips ("crunch crunch I don't want no lunch").
Recommended tracks: Popity Pop, Atomic Cocktail, Dopey Joe, B-19, Palm Springs Jump, Little Red Riding Woods, Tee Say Malee, etc. I could go and on. Dunk some bagels and enjoy!

When you're young, it's quite fashionable to bemoan the lack of authentic individuals. When you grow older, you learn that you were correct. My Cherokee ancestors believe that adulthood begins at 51, and as I get closer to that age, I realize how right they are. Well, here's an individual for you. Slim Gaillard.

I have a four-CD set called LAUGHING IN RHYTHM. 1937 through 1952 from one of the great innovators in jazz. Musically creative, technically skillful, always soulful, lyrically hilarious, and perhaps an example of somebody under age 51 achieving adulthood. I can't stop listening to it. At home, in my MP3 player on the buses of China... Lemme get nuts here. If you ignore every other review I've ever written, note these three words. "Buy this one." It's like that, folks. Slim is da bomb.

I don't know how many times I've heard people embracing the myth that the great ones aren't appreciated until they're gone. Maybe that was true before the influence of the "mediascape"--that new geography particular to a new millennium--all but replaced human memory (which is now carried around in people's pockets on miniature Sandisk storage drives). I remembered Kerouac's reference to Slim Gaillard in "On the Road," and I came across an album of '78s by him in my attic. But for all practical purposes, he seems gone (and not in the old idiomatic sense of "a real gone cat"), all but erased from memory and from the public record. Thankfully, a few things survive--such as this 100-track box set on a British label.

No doubt the scholars and semiologists (like Henry Gates, Jr.) will find "coded language" and hidden meanings in lyrics decipherable only by a limited, targeted community. On the other hand, if tunes like "Flat Foot Floogie with the Floy Floy" mean nothing more than that, they've earned their keep--simply zany if not entertaining word play by Slim and his fellow "musical ecologists"--musicians who knew how to make the most of the spare resources available to them--and best of all--from tunes like "Chicken Rhythm" to "Tutti Frutti" to "Slim Slam Boogie"--each of the numbers invariably swings! (Reminding me of what a mechanical, jack-hammer travesty pop music has become in the hands of all the rappers of the last 2-3 decades.)

Besides Slim, there were other downright entertaining, even scintillating, pop-rebop-bebop slang-slinger-swinger singers who turned out disc after disc of the utmost diversionary pleasure. How can it be that no one (at least under the age of 80) remembers Louis Jordan? And moving up a level or two, what about the John Kirby Sextet not to mention "killer" big bands like Jimmy Lunceford's?

In short, I sometimes fear that our (or, my) ignorance of, or obliviousness toward, anything that is past-tense and non-political is robbing us of our collective identity as Americans if not human beings.

At least, the public's loss can easily be your gain. Of the 100 tunes on this disc the one that intrigues me the most is "Slim's Jam." After referring to the piano player as "Dodo" (could it be the great Dodo Marmarosa?), he acknowledges the appearance of "Charlie Yardbird" who, after complaining a bit about reed troubles, bites off a commanding solo on alto saxophone. Now who do you suppose that might be? And does the public even know the single musician who has always worn the crown of "greatest improvisor of all time"? (I don't have documentation, and no doubt someone has done the research on this number. The tone is certainly Charlie Parker's, but the solo, while undeniably professional, well-played, and in a spirited manner, does not strike me as worthy of the one and only--unless it's a very young Bird, prior to his leaving Kansas City or immediately after his coming to New York.)

It is incredible how much of his material would even for today be considered original and ahead of its time .
But yet at the same time having this childish and simple humor such as de-ranging known phrases and basically creating his own language out of it.
Slim is a one of a kind and should be remembered amongs the greats of jazz and witty music.