Let’s talk about Slim Gaillard for a second…

Through no virtue of my own, I met this guy in about 1988. He played a gig in a theatre I worked in, and he was… brain bending. Which is obvious when you realise that that is twenty years ago and more and I actually remember it. I am not one of those people who can do that. I can barely remember last week.

I remember Gaillard playing the whole gig and then, at the end, turning his hands over and crossing them, and playing the last of the songs at the piano using his knuckles. Yeah. Not that thing where you lie on your back and play with your hands over your head. With his knuckles, which is a whole ‘nother level of impossible – consider, your hands are mirrored in that position – you have to use your little finger for the notes your thumb should play.

Gaillard was a master – a stream of consciousness improv artist and a very special kind of musician, the kind who can play with music and take it into a place which involves a live audience and makes them shout out loud with admiration, who also makes them feel part of the music.

Wikipedia talks about his broad appeal, and well, okay, yes, he absolutely had that. He appears in On The Road, which is cool. You can find him on YouTube. But the guys who worked with him told me, as we cleaned up after the gig, that his best stuff was the stuff he did for non-white audiences in places whites would, at that time, not go. He did shows in a mix of English and the various language of the black US population at the time, and he did it as jazz in its real sense, a music of revolution and cultural self-definition. Just a whisper of that here, maybe.

And here he is playing with his knuckles, in case you didn’t believe me – although by the time I saw it, he was much older, and played whole songs that way.

So, I don’t know what all that’s important on a Wednesday morning. It just is. Go buy some Gaillard, if you can find it, and see what I’m talking about.