Revisiting Cab, Fats, Slim & Mr. Jordan

A recent Zoom lecture had me reclaiming my own history with All That Jive

This Saturday afternoon I was invited by Cathy Burns of the Royal Palm Beach Branch library in Florida to do an Author’s Talk on the subject of “Satch, Fats, Cab And All That Jive!” This naturally had me dipping back into my 2001 book, Swing It! An Annotated History of Jive, which documented my journey into the music, from pioneers like Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway, Fats Waller (The Godfathers of Jive) to those hepcats who gained mainstream popularity in the 1940s like Louis Jordan, Slim Gaillard, The Cats & The Fiddle, to Bebop Jivesters like Dizzy Gillespie, Babs Gonzalez, Eddie Jefferson, Joe Carroll and Jon Hendricks and the myriad other artist/entertainers who carried on with mirth and in the spirit of letting the good times roll.

In my book on jive, which included chapters on The White Connection (The Rhythm Boys, Harry “The Hipster” Gibson, Mezz Mezzrow), along with Women Jivesters (Ina Ray Hutton, Connee Boswell, Nellie Lutcher, Una Mae Carlisle and Annie Ross), N’awlins Jivesters (Professor Longhair, Huey “Piano” Smith, Ernie K-Doe, Mr. Google Eyes and Clarence “Frogman” Henry) and Retro Jivesters (late ‘90s bands like Royal Crown Revue, the Brian Setzer Orchestra, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, Cherry Poppin’ Daddies and Ray Gelato & His Giants of Jive), I stated my objective in the premise, dated August 2000:

“Too ‘jazzy’ for rock scribes, too ‘silly’ for jazz scribes, these jovial gentlemen of jumpin’ jive are saluted in this Jive Companion. Their contributions — spreading joy, putting smiles on faces, and keeping feet a-pattin; with their infectious joir de vivre — should not be forgotten.”

Of course, their exaggerated jive antics, sense of fun and tendency to play to the back row flew in the face of the more serious-minded jazz of Miles Davis’ late ‘50s quintet, where he would often turn his back to the audience while on stage (a gesture more about him focusing intently on the music and the band than intended as a sign of rudeness or disrespect towards the audience).

My own conversion to these ebullient entertainers happened gradually. I guess it began in the early ‘60s with my father, Bert Milkowski, who would on occasion come home in the wee hours, slightly inebriated, pockets stuffed with candy bars for his children and wearing a big, good natured grin (a clear sign that he had either won several hands of poker at the Checkboard Top earlier that evening or he hit the Daily Double at Aqueduct Park earlier that afternoon). My father’s after-hours arrival would invariably wake us up, and he would often come into our bedroom (me and my older brother Tom) and empty his pockets, raining candy bars on our bed in the process, before breaking into a chorus of Fats Waller’s “Hold Tight”:

This was my introduction to jive.

By my early teens, I began staying up late at night, after my parents went to sleep, in order to catch the subversive comedies of the Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields and others on late night tv. It was in the 1993 Fields movie, International House, that I caught my first glimpse of Cab Calloway in all his jive glory, singing “Reefer Man.” I would later see him perform “Minnie the Moocher” and “Kickin’ the Gong Around” (a song about doing cocaine in Chinatown) in the Bing Crosby vehicle, The Big Broadcast of 1932.

Later on I saw Cab strutting and prancing manically in his zoot suit on “Geechy Joe” from the 1943 movie Stormy Weather:

By 1976, the country’s Bicentennial year, I experienced a significant escalation in my jive education, for two reasons: RCA had come out with a Cats & The Fiddle compilation, I Miss You So, followed shortly thereafter by MCA Records releasing a Louis Jordan compilation. Here’s how I described my encounter with The Cats & The Fiddle on the radio that Bicentennial Summer in my book Swing It!:

“I was driving home late one night in 1976 during my college years in Milwaukee when the lightning bolt struck. It traveled through my car radio, into my ear and down to the very marrow of my bones. And it touched off a forest fire in my soul that hasn’t let up to this day. What I heard that fateful Bicentennial summer night really blew my wig:

Greetings, gate. Am I late?

Can I take the next eight?

Solid, Pops, don’t hesitate.

That’s on, Jack, that’s on.

“Gate? Solid? Pops? Jack? What was all this?,” I thought while navigating my way bleary-eyed through the darkness back home. At once puzzled and fascinated by the secret code of it all, I was also swept up by the spirit of camaraderie and playfulness that the four jovial gentlemen exuded through the airwaves. After a few more verses of cadence and rhyme, they launched into some acrobatic scat choruses that sent shivers up my spine. My ears burned, my foot patted involuntarily, I practically fell to the floor with my teeth chattering. It was my baptism in jive.

After that scintillating roller-coaster ride of scat and swing came to a jarring halt, the overnight disc jockey made the announcement: “That was The Cats & The Fiddle with ‘That’s On, Jack, That’s On.’ And I’ll be playing a lot more from this one in the coming hour…’cause I really dig what these cats are puttin’ down.”

I sat in that car for the next hour or so, parked inside my parents’ garabe, patiently awaiting the next barrage of jive from The Cats & The Fiddle. The payoff was a sizzling “Stomp Stomp,” a swinging rendition of “Blue Skies” and Tiny Grimes’ upbeat anthem “One Is Never Too Old to Swing.”

The next day I went hunting for that Bluebird vinyl release. Pictured on the cover were four Cats in matching herringbone suits, smiling and playing their instruments with acrobatic aplomb. One Cat was straddling the neck of his bass, riding it like a jockey and slapping the strings behind him like Angel Cordero applying the whip to a thoroughbred’s rear end down the homestretch at the Kentucky Derby. A second Cat straddled the body of the reclining bass like a backseat passenger on this horse, smiling as he chunked away on a four-string tenor guitar. Cat number three plucked his guitar under a raised leg while the tipple player strummed his ax behind his head, flashing a mischious grin. I was floored by the sheer appeal of that picture. It instantly conveyed an unashamedly ebullient spirit of showmanship along with a suggestion of some serious hotshot technique. These four Cats were to swing music what the Harlem Globetrotters were to basketball.

The contents of this compelling package delivered on that promise with insanely inspired scatting, humorous lyrics, and hepcat repartee. And being all caught up in the counterculture of college life at the time, I took particular delight in the pot anthem, “Killin’ Jive.” And it was all underscored by that surging, irrrepressible force of swing. The whole uplifting vibe of that carefree good-time music was completely at odds with the caustic onslaught of punk music, which was taking hold across the States that Bicentennial summer. But I was down with these Cats. And their reissue twofer served as my own personal Rosetta Stone of Jive.

Later that summer of ‘76, I got ahold of an MCA greatest hits twofer on Louis Jordan, who I would later come to regard as The Grand High Exalted Mystic Rule of Jive. It was my introduction to Jordan’s Tympany Five and such joyful, infectiously down-home jump blues numbers as “Caldonia,” “Let the Good Times Roll,” “Beans and Cornbread,” “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie,” and the proto-rap showcase, “Saturday Night Fish Fry.” And frontman Jordan blew his saxophone (alto and tenor) with blast furnace intensity on those number. (Indeed, powerhouse blues guitarist Freddie King had mentioned in interviews that the sound he was going for on his ax was inspired by the direct, piercing attack of Mr. Jordan’s alto). But it was in that same spirit of giddy fun and good times that I had first picked up on with The Cats & The Fiddle. The very nature of Jordan’s larger-than-life personality (despite his relatively small stature) really grabbed me, making me a fan for life.

And with that initial shot of The Cats & The Fiddle, along with a potent chaser of Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five, I was hooked on jive. And my insatiable habit would inevitably lead me to the harder stuff — Slim & Slam, Leo “Scat” Watson & The Spirits of Rhythm, Stuff Smith and His Onyx Club Boys and the totally insane and irrepressible showman and boogie woogie piano maestro Harry “The Hipster” Gibson.

My own pilgrimage in jive culminates in the publication of this book. My primary point of interest here is in those figures who have historially falled through the cracks — the outrageous, outlandish entertainers over time who got their joyful message acorss with generous doses of unrelenting swing. Because of this unfortunate bias against musicians who are also entertainers, several significant jivesters have never gotten their due, certainly not with jazz critics. They are part of a rather significant missing link, one that has never been discussed comprehensively in any one format.

As the pre-eminent jazz critic Whitney Balliet put it in a 1980 New Yorker profile on pianist-singer-jivestres Nellie Lutcher: “Somewhere she fell under the sway of a highly specialized group of musicians who were a compound of jazz and comedy, of improvisation and clowning. They were generally pianists, guitarists or bassists who sang novelty songs and used a variety of comic devices — Bronx cheers, growls, sighs, basso profound, falsetto, roars. They sang scat style and they made up their own languages and sang them. They were expert, swinging musicians who had discovered early in their careers that their comic gifts outpaced their improvisational skills.”

All Reet!

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Doing this Author’s Talk, via Zoom, allowed me to dip back into this wonderful world of jive in preparation for the gig as I immersed myself in the music of Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller, Cab Calloway, Slim Gaillard, Louis Jordan, The Cats & The Fiddle, Harry “The Hipster” Gibson, Ina Ray Hutton and others. What’s more, I was able to check out numerous vintage YouTube clips of these jivesters in action — something that was not possible when my Swing It! book came out in 2001 (the official creation date of YouTube was February 14, 2005).

So revel with me now in this fount of jive:

This one is from Slim Gaillard’s solo appearance on The Steve Allen Show in 1962:

Here’s one from 1936 by Ina Ray Hutton and her Melodears:

The insanely excitable Harry “The Hipster” Gibson in a 1944 ‘soundie’:

Here’s young hepcat Dizzy Gillespie (with a young Milt Jackson and Dexter Gordon):

Here’s Fats Waller doing two songs from 1941:

And here’s the Nat King Cole Trio (featuring the great guitarist Oscar Moore) doing three jive tunes from 1946:

I go into great detail about all of these ebullient characters (and many more) in my book, Swing It! An Annotated History of Jive, which is available through my website (billmilkowski.com under the BOOKS tab). Check it out! Signed copies are available.