Celebrating Fats Waller, Cab Calloway, Slim Gaillard, Louis Jordan and hepcats
Last Sunday, Sept. 22, I had the pleasure of addressing a topic close to my heart in a lecture at Highfield Hall & Gardens in Falmouth, Massachusetts, sponsored by the Falmouth Jazz Festival. I speak of jive, that ebullient form of Swing that evolved in the '30s, carried on like gangbusters during the '40s and exists in various manifestations to this day. In my exegesis on jive, I spoke about those spirited, entertaining figures in jazz who played to the back row with wide smiles and a boatload of charisma while swinging their asses off.
I catalogued these merry jivesters in my 2001 book, Swing It! An Annotated History of Jive (Billboard Books). And that was strictly a labor of love, as I had been mesmerized by their fun-loving onstage hijinks since first encountering the otherwordly visage of Cab Calloway on tv when I was maybe 14-15 years old. Back then, I was a huge fan of classic comedies by the Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy and W.C. Fields. I'd stay up late on Friday nights, long after my parents had gone to sleep, to watch Groucho and his brothers in Duck Soup, A Day at the Races and Night at the Opera, or catch Stan & Ollie in Sons of the Desert, The Bohemian Girl and A Chump at Oxford, or watch Fields in It's a Gift, The Bank Dick and Man on the Flying Trapeze. On this particular late night of my jive epiphany, I tuned in to see Fields in International House, a 1933 Paramount Pictures release billed as "The Grand Hotel of comedy." A mixture of comedy and musical acts tied together by a slim plot line (in a large hotel in metropolitan Wuhu, China, inventor Dr. Wong is soliciting bids for the rights to his "radioscope," a kind of television) it featured many stars of the day, including the comedy team of George Burns and Gracie Allen, crooner Rudy Vallee, comedic foil Stewart Erwin, a young Bela Lugosi, a precocious Baby Rose Marie, who 30 years later would appear as Sally Rogers on The Dick Van Dyke Show, and an ever-frustrated Franklin Pangborn. At one point in the film, Dr. Wong shows investor Stewart Erwin his new invention, which broadcasts a performance by Cab Calloway and his Orchestra doing "Reefer Man." It was a revelation to me on many levels.
The tune opens with Cab's bass player seemingly in a trance, playing a frantic ostinato on his upright. When bandleader Cab inquires what's up with this cat, the band members respond as a chorus: "He's high." When Calloway inquires further, "What'd you mean he's high?" they explain: "He's full of weed." I wasn't quite sure then what it all meant then (though I would go on enjoy the benefits of marijuana a few years later). With that, Cab launched into "Reefer Man" while flaunting moves that set the template for Michael Jackson four decades later. And there was a kind of naughty magnetism about this cat that I found intriguing. As Al Quaglieri wrote in his liner notes to the 1994 Calloway compilation, Are You Hep to the Jive?: "That toothy, worldwise grin...that thin moustache...those lascivious eyes...that tangle of shiny black hair dangling carelessly over his forehead. Since time began, whenever parents warned their daughters about dangerous men, this was the very guy they meant."
And here's a clip from the 1935 Paramount Pictures short, Cab Calloway's Jitterbug Party, that finds him in his slickest form with his band from the Cotton Club in Harlem.
Cab became so popular in the early '30s that he broke through to the mainstream via the Fleisher Brothers (Max and Dave), creators of Betty Boop and Popeye cartoons. Dig how they incorporated Cab's slick moves (via rotoscoping) into this 1933 cartoon, Betty Boop in Snow-White, featuring Calloway singing a melancholy "St. James Infirmary" while marching behind her coffin carried by the seven dwarfs.
Though thinking back on it now, it may have been my father Bert Milkowski, a working class Milwaukee firefighter who loved Chet Atkins and Frank Sinatra equally, who actually gave me my first taste of jive. I was maybe six or seven then, and on certain Friday nights (if he had a few winning hands at poker down at the Checkerboard Tap or if he had won the daily double at the racetrack) he'd come home late at night, all giddy and a bit tipsy, proceed to wake me and my brother Tom up by emptying his pockets full of candy bars onto our shared bed before launching into a silly rendition of Fats Waller's "Hold Tight (Want Some Seafood, Mama)," making sure to exaggerate the “boo-rrrrreee-ack-a-zaki” part of the song with some comical rolling of the ‘r’ sound that always had me laughing out loud.
And check Waller's sly innuendo, flirtatious ways and dancing eyebrows, along with his outstanding stride piano playing, in this 1941 soundie of "Honeysuckle Rose."
Both Cab and Fats were contemporaries of the great Louis Armstrong, who pioneered just about everything to do with jazz, including jive. While Armstrong is credited with inventing scat singing in 1926 during his historic Hot Five session (the apochryphal story goes that Louis was recording "Heebies Jeebies" when suddenly his sheet music fell on the ground, leaving him to make up off-the-cuff gibberish vocals to fill time), he also helped usher in the transition of jazz as a strictly ensemble artform to more of a soloist's artform. And he also unashamedly played to the back row with a beaming smile so wide it earned him the nickname "Satchelmouth" (or Satchmo for short). An irrepressible international ambassador for jazz, Armstrong uplifted spirits wherever he traveled (he began spreading the word about hot jazz in 1932, when he made his first international tour, performing in Scotland and Northern England and appearing at the London Palladium). Of course, he had been wowing audiences with his natural charisma since 1929, when he appeared in the Hot Chocolates revue, which had its initial run at Connie's Inn in Harlem before moving downtown to the Hudson Theater on Broadway. It was in that show that Satchmo introduced "Ain't Misbehavin'," the Fats Waller-Andy Razaf tune that became his first big popular hit and helped make Hot Chocolates the hottest ticket in town. You can see his unfettered ebullience (along with his incomparable trumpet playing) in this 1933 clip from a concert abroad, in Copenhagen, Denmark.
While I credit Satch, Cab and Fats as being The Godfathers of Jive in my book, Swing It!, I include a whole list of other perhaps more obscure but no less ebullient characters like Slim Gaillard, Louis Jordan, Leo Scat Watson, Tiny Grimes and Harry “The Hipster” Gibson. Slim was a personal favorite of mine. Perhaps the most madcap humorist of the bunch, he concocted his own jive patois called "vout," which was a combination of foreign wrds and phrases with the nonsense suffixes "orooney" and "oreeney" added to just about every other word. He also incorporated bit of Cab's jitterbug jive phraseology like "all reet," "all root," "solid," "gate" and "killer diller" while introducing his silly songs like "Laughin' in Rhythm," "Sighing Boogie," "Cement Mixer (Put-Ti-Put-Ti)," "Potato Chips" and "Dunkin' Bagel." The following clips from 1946 feature slim on guitar, piano and vocals, accompanied by Bam Brown on bass and bizarre call-and-response vocals and Scatman Crothers (who would later have numerous roles on tv shows and feature films, including Sanford & Son and Stanley Kubrick's The Shining) on drums.
While Slim doubled on piano (which he often played upside down with his knuckles striking the ivories , his guitar playing was coming right out of the Charlie Christian school of swing, as evidenced on this uptempo instrumental track:
Here's Slim knuckling the piano on the Steve Allen Show from 1962:
And here he is in 1988 on NBC's Night Music (co-hosted by David Sanborn) performing his 1938 hit song, "Flat Foot Floogie (with a Floy Floy) exactly 50 years later.
One of the most popular jivesters to come out of the 1940s was Louis Jordan, also know as "King of the Jukeboxes" and "Mr. Personality." A consummate, effervescent entertaining who strung colloquial rhyming couples together as nimbly as today's rappers, Jordan was also one of the chief architects and prime progenitors of R&B and early rock 'n' roll. From 1942 to 1951, he had an astonishing 57 R&B chart hits (all on Decca) with his Tympany Five. He was particularly popular during World War II and recorded prolifically for the Armed Forces Radio Service, releasing records through their V-Disc program. He also recorded a number of soundies, or short films, to premiere new tunes at the cinema -- essentially the first music videos. Said Ray Charles, who was hugely influenced by Jordan, "He was a complete original. He was such a great showman with a sense of humor and an unforgettable tongue-in-cheek style that, after hearing him once, I couldn't forget him."
This soundie from 1943, the uptempo "Jumpin' at the Jubilee," also shows what a burner Jordan was on alto sax:
And this archival clip of "Beware Brother Beware" from 1946 (shown on Night Music in 1988) reveals Jordan's gift for gab:
One final favorite here is Cats and the Fiddle, a group I first encountered on record in 1976 when RCA/Bluebird released the compilation, I Miss You So. Fronted by guitarist-singer Austin Powell and featuring the great four-string guitarist Tiny Grimes in a later edition of the group, Cats and the Fiddle combined the harmony vocals of the Mills Brothers with an urgent sense of swing and allusions to indulging in marijuana (as on this 1938 soundie for their pot anthem, "Killing Jive"):
Tiny Grimes was one of the first electric guitarists to emulate Charlie Christian, as evidenced by this version of "Stomp Stomp" from 1939:
Grimes would go on to play in Art Tatum's trio during the WWII years and then feature Charlie Parker as a sideman in his first recordings as a leader from 1944 on the Savoy lablel. In 1948, he would form the early rock 'n' roll band The Rockin' Highlanders, whose gimmick was performing in kilts. Here they are in a recording of the boogie woogie flavored "Call of the Wild" from 1953:
In Swing It! An Annotated History of Jive, I include separate chapters on Bebop Jivesters like Dizzy Gillespie, Babs Gonzalez, Eddie Jefferson, Jon Hendricks and Lester Young (who came up with his own lexicon to rival that of Cab Calloway and Slim Gaillard) along with Nawlins Jive (Professor Longhair, Clarence "Frogman" Henry, Ernie K-Doe, Dr. John, Mr. Google Eyes), Women Jivesters (Ina Ray Hutton, Connie Boswell, Nellie Lutcher, Lavay Smith and others) and Retro Jivesters (Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, Brian Setzer Orchestra, Cherry Poppin' Daddies). At my recent Jive Talk at Highfield Hall in Falmouth, Mass., the audience seemed particuarly excited to watch clips of the Cab-influenced Ina Ray Hutton in action from 1935:
The late Tim Hauser, of Manhattan Transfer fame, wrote in the foreward to my jive tome: “The charm of Swing It! is that it’s written by someone who genuinely loves the whole jive experience. And he has researchd it throughly. Swing It! unfolds upon you as though someone was unrolling a beautiful Persian carpet. And what a ride! From Louis Armstrong right up to Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, all the cats and kitties are struttin’ their stuff. So dig the stories and play the music of the cats and chicks to whom Bill’s hipping you. Do this long enough and you will eventually ‘get it.’ And when you do, it will add to the beauty of your life.”
More feedback from distinguished jazz scribe Gary Giddins: “Anyone who has wondered who put the Benzedrine in Mrs. Murphy’s Ovaltine or mulled over the rhetorical value of the suffix “Rooney” or yearned for the wacky dust or pleaded with Richard to open the damn door (and who has not?) will find Bill Milkowski’s Swing It! a companion to 20th century music’s zaniest alternate world.”
You can pick up on what I was putting down by going to the BOOKS section of this website. Signed copies by the author (that's me) are available for a nonimal price. You dig?
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