My 50-Year Infatuation with Jumpin' Jive

Resurrecting jazz’s by-gone entertainers, from Fats Waller and Cab Calloway to Slim Gaillard, Louis Jordan, Cats & The Fiddle and Tiny Grimes & His Rockin' Highlanders

Next week, on Sunday, Sept. 22, I will be addressing a long-held passion of mine in a lecture at Highfield Hall & Gardens in Falmouth, Massachusetts. From 4 to 6 pm on that Sunday, in a program sponsored by the Falmouth Jazz Festival, I will present my own historical exegesis on jive and jivesters; that is to say, those spirited, entertaining figures in jazz from the 1920s to the present who played to the back row while swinging their asses off. They never failed to put smiles on our faces while communicating in syncopated rhythms and a kind of underground code that was eminently hip (or “hep,” as Cab Calloway would call it). I documented these ebullient characters in a book I wrote in 2001 called Swing It! An Annotated History of Jive. Gathering up jive-related anecdotes on cats like Cab, Fats Waller, Slim Gaillard, Louis Jordan, Leo Scat Watson, Tiny Grimes and Harry “The Hipster” Gibson, while also reliving their music in the process, was strictly a labor of love for me.

As the late Tim Hauser, of Manhattan Transfer fame, wrote in the Foreward to that 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.”

And the late Bob Porter weighed in with: “Coded language has been a part of American black music since the beginning. Swing It! gets the argot of the key artists exactly right. Bill Milkowski is truly hip to the jive.”

So what put me on this course?

Thinking back, it was probably my firefighter father, Bert Milkowski, who unwittingly introduced me to jive. He had a habit of coming home in a giddy mood some Friday nights, particularly after several winning hands of poker at the Checkerboard Tap or hitting the Daily Double at Arlington Park. He’d come in my bedroom and wake me and my brother Tom up by unloading pockets full of candy bars onto our bed that he had picked up on his way home. Invariably, he would launch into a chorus of Fats Waller’s “Hold Tight (Want Some Seafood, Mama”). And he’d always emphasize the “boo-rrrrreee-ack-a-zaki” with some exaggerated comical rolling of the ‘r’ sound that had me laughing out loud. I was maybe six, seven years old then.

At some point in junior high, I developed an obsession for old movies, particularly the comedies of Laurel & Hardy, W.C. Fields and the Marx Brothers. I remember staying up late one night to watch International House, a 1933 pre-code Paramount Pictures film starring Fields. I tuned in for him, but came away with a newfound appreciation for Cab Calloway, whose charismatic jive-laden performance of “Reefer Man” was a revelation to me on many levels. Shortly after, on another late-night tv adventure, I caught The Big Broadcast of 1932 starring a very young Bing Crosby. This Paramount film featured two numbers by Cab, his anthemic “Minnie the Moocher” and the more provocative “Kicking the Gong Around” (concerning the popular ‘30s practice of doing cocaine). Cab’s hepcat performance in that movie (which included a duet

between guitarist Eddie Lang and Crosby on his hit song, “Please,” as well as performances by the Mills Brothers and the Boswell Sisters) revealed fluid acrobatic dance moves that pre-dated Michael Jackson by five decades; so hip/hep, in fact, that they were incorporated into a Betty Boop cartoon of the day.

I became further initiated into the cult of jive during the summer of 1975 when MCA Records released the 2-LP set, The Best of Louis Jordan, a collection of his Decca hits recorded between 1936 and 1955. This was the motherlode of jive, exposing me for the first time to such classic good-time numbers as “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie,” “Saturday Night Fish Fry,” “Beans and Cornbread,” “I Want You to Be My Baby” (with rapid-fire lyrics written by a young Jon Hendricks), “Ain’t Nobody Here But Us Chickens,” “Caledonia” and what just might be the first-ever rap tune, “Beware Brother Beware.”

The following summer, RCA/Bluebird added to my jive education by releasing the 2-LP set, I Miss You So, a compilation of tunes from the late ‘30s-early ‘40s jive band Cats & The Fiddle. This eminently hep string group fronted by singer Austin Powell and featuring Ernie Price on tipple, Chuck Barksdale on bass and Tiny Grimes on guitar was clearly coming out of the Mills Brothers, in terms of tight vocal harmonies. But there was the added attraction here of unfettered scatting by Powell (on tunes like “Killin’ Jive,” “Swing the Scales” and “That’s On, Jack, That’s On”) and surging, Charlie Christian-influenced solos by Grimes (“Stomp Stomp,” “Blue Skies”).

This hepcat overload would eventually lead me to perhaps the most audacious figure in the history of jive, Slim Gaillard. Now, this cat was something else! Not only did he play piano with the back of his hands, letting his knuckles dance over the ivories, he also played a driving, swinging guitar, a la Charlie Christian. And he invented a whole lexicon of expressions (not unlike Cab Calloway had done, actually codifying it in his 1936 book, Hepster’s Dictionary):

Gaillard was noted for his comedic vocalese singing and word play in his own constructed language he called Vout. In addition to English, he spoke five languages (Spanish, German, Greek, Arabic, and Armenian) with varying degrees of fluency, incorporating some of those tongues into his fluid vocalese. Gaillard rose to prominence in the late 1930s after forming the act Slim & Slam (with bassist-singer Slam Stewart) and scoring hits on tunes like “Flat Foot Floogie (with a Floy Floy)” and “Cement Mixer (Put-Ti-Put-Ti)." Another favorite of mine was Slim’s “Dunkin’ Bagel.” To this day, I can think of no other song in the entire jazz repertoire that so cleverly incorporates the words “matzoh balls,” “pickled herring” and “gefitle fish.” (Note: the clip below features Bam Brown on bass and insane vocals, and Scatman Crothers — decades later to appear in The Shining — on drums).

On Dec. 27, 1945, Gaillard jammed on the West Coast at Billy Berg’s club in Hollywood with bebop pioneers Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, along with tenor saxophonist Jack McVea, pianist Dodo Marmarosa, bassist Bam Brown and drummer Zutty Singleton. It was all documented on the track “Slim’s Jam”:

Forty-three years later, Gaillard appeared on a 1988 broadcast of Night Music, the popular Sunday night show co-hosted by alte alto saxophonist David Sanborn. For that show, he reached back into his bag of tricks and pulled out a solid rendition of his 1938 hit, “Flat Foot Floogie” (accompanied by Hiram Bullock on guitar and Marcus Miller on upright bass!)

There are so many other offramps on the highway of jive. Some lead to Leo “Scat” Watson, who led his Spirits of Rhythm in the 1930s. Others lead Stuff Smith, Babs Gonzalez, Joe Carroll, Amos Milburn, Hot Lips Paige and Jonah Jones. More recently, the Swedish-born trombonist-singer-bag piper and jivestress Gunhild Carling is carrying on that jive tradition pioneered by her predecessors Ina Ray Hutton, Ella Mae Morse and Una Mae Carlisle. Her most recent release is Jazz Is My Lifestyle, but you just have to catch her live to get the full effect. She’s part of playful, fun-loving and ultimately swinging continuum that flows directly from the godfathers of jive — Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller, Cab Calloway. And I like it.