dude was a master of bullshitsu so take what he said with a mountain range of salt. He was hanging around The Purple Ganga-affiliated Detroit music scene when growing up and then moved to New York to go pro and soon enough he hooked up with Slam Stewart and they started a duo Slim and Slam which combined combo jazz with oldschool vaudeville flashiness and hokum gimmicks. They had a good run but parted ways during WW2. After that Slim bounced around for a while until folks like Parker, Gillespie and Davis started to gain mainstream momentum and Gaillard was branded a novelty act because jazz is a serious artform that can’t be goofy. Not that it means much now and Slim got his due eventually and legacy continued - Frank Zappa really appreciated Slim and his opus operatum and you can hear his tricks in many Frank’s works. Same with Beefheart.

Gaillard is something of an outlier in music history because for much of his career he represented a kind of lost world - his act was heavily influenced by vaudeville and he came after the big band era but before the bebop so his works weren’t falling into either category but instead of fading away he continued to work and doing his thing and later in life he finally got more recognition and a couple of retrospective comps in the Chronological Classics series. I’m itching at writing an article about the guy and i’m currently stuck at Detroit’s racial segregation and the cultural environment it produced during the late 1910s, throughout 1920s up to 1930s. And that’s only Slim’s childhood. There’s also New York and its stuff and so on. I guess it will be years before i get to his conlang.

that song was older than much of the audience. kinda funny how Gaillard’s vaudevillian jazz stuff just doesn’t sound like its coming from what is basically jazz’s prehistory.