Slim’s Jam

October 1, 2012 • 3:07 am

If you’re a Charlie Parker aficionado, you may know this little-known recording. It’s a genuine jam session, and it swings. Made in 1945, as I recall, it features top-class jazz musicians and, as a treat, one of the few recordings of Charlie Parker’s voice. I’m working from memory here, but it may have been laid down in the famous recording session that produced the jazz milestone “Ko-Ko.”

“Slim’s Jam” is led by Slim Gaillard, who breaks up the music with his own form of hep talk called “Vout” (in another piece, watch him play piano with the back of his hand). From time to time Gaillard calls for bizarre comestibles.

The musicians include Zutty Singleton on drums, Dodo Marmarosa on piano, Jack McVea on tenor sax, and Dizzy Gillespie, who finishes it off with a trumpet flourish. But the honors go to Bird, who apparently had to borrow a shaved-off reed from McVea. Parker could blow with anything, though (his usual reeds were so stiff that other sax players couldn’t get sound from them).

Notice how McVea’s name is twisted, and how Charlie Parker is called, in Vout, “Charlie Yardbird-o-roonie”.  His nickname, “Bird,” supposedly came for Parker’s fondness for eating “yardbirds,” or chickens.

It’s a great jam, and shows what these guys were capable of improvising.

16 thoughts on “Slim’s Jam”

  2. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I heard a long time ago that the musicians were travelling and the driver swerved to attempt to hit a chicken. Charlie said something like “don’t hit that yardbird”, and got tagged with the nickname for his advocacy.

    I could have the story backwards — perhaps Charlie was the driver.

  3. There’s a classic comedic musical sketch that’s a variation on this theme. I want to say it’s by Tom Lehrer, but I’m not having any luck finding it. If not Tom, then somebody else from that era.

    …a little help…?

    b&

      1. No — but perhaps that wasn’t what you meant to link to?

        The one I have in mind follows the same basic format as the one above. A jazz band is vamping and a narrator starts to introduce the members, with each playing a measure or two by way of saying “hello.” Before long, he’s introduced dozens of different people, each on different and increasingly exotic instruments.

        b&

    2. The more I think about it, the more I think it was probably Spike Jones…but that’s not helping me any.

      Damnit! This is like the pirate’s steering wheel sticking out of his pants — it’s driving me nuts.

      b&

      1. It sounds to me like the British rock comedy group Bonzo Dog Band’s cut “The Intro and the Outro,” which was on their 1974 compilation album History of the Bonzos. In this, all the players get identified and play a riff. Some of those identified are quite unexpected.

        According to the Wikipedia entry ( Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band:

        “The record company only allowed two hours of studio time per track, so it was completed in a single take to allow for the far more complex “The Intro and the Outro” in which every member of the band was introduced and played a solo, starting with genuine band members,[5] before including such improbable members as John Wayne on xylophone, Adolf Hitler on vibes, and J. Arthur Rank on gong, Prime Minister Harold Wilson, The Wild Man of Borneo, Val Doonican, Horace Batchelor, and Lord Snooty and His Pals.”

  4. Slim’s one of my favs, the classic hepcat, but I had missed that he played with Parker! Wow! What a treat! Love your musical posts. Would love to get you to come to Virginia Tech, Jerry. Let me see if I can work on that. Would love to meet you.

  5. Been diggin’ this since I got Bob Brainen’s 2003 WFMU marathon premium.
    Hey, waiter, hurry up with that avacada seed soup!

  6. Keep posting this stuff Jerry, it’s gold! I was only born in the 70s but I grew up listening to (and later stealing) my dad’s jazz LPs. That and his natural history library (he was a science teacher) had an indelible effect on my entire life.

  9. Thanks for this post. I remember Slim Gaillard’s “Cement Mixer” from the LA-based Dr. Demento show. More recently, I found out that my brother-in-law down in Santa Monica used to hang out with Slim Gaillard’s son, and that somewhere stored away he (my brother-in-law) has a couple of tapes of Slim Gaillard’s private recordings. I’m seeing him tomorrow, I’ll remind him to look for these…

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