Start with the obvious: Slim Gaillard is funny. Songs like "Flat Foot Floogie" and "Cement Mixer, Putti Putti" sound like nonsense because they are nonsense, at least on the surface. But underneath the goofing around is a guy who could play guitar left-handed and right-handed depending on which way he picked it up, who could solo on piano with the backs of his hands, and who built an entire vocabulary — "Vout" — out of scat syllables that other musicians started using like it was a real dialect. It kind of was.

He came up in the late 1930s paired with bassist Slam Stewart as Slim and Slam, and that's where "Flat Foot Floogie" happened, a hit big enough that it followed him around for the rest of his life whether he wanted it to or not. The joke of the song was the point — Gaillard understood that jazz audiences in the swing era wanted a good time, and he gave it to them without dumbing down what he was actually playing underneath the jive talk.

What gets lost sometimes is how seriously the actual players took him. Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker showed up for the session that became "Slim's Jam," a recording where bebop's two biggest names are essentially playing straight man to Gaillard's shtick, laughing along with him instead of at him. That tells you something — this wasn't a novelty act tolerated by real musicians, it was a guy real musicians wanted to be around.

Gaillard never fit neatly into any jazz lineage because he wasn't trying to advance a style, he was trying to entertain a room, and he was good enough at his instruments that the entertainment never felt cheap. If you come to him expecting Charlie Parker-level harmonic depth you'll be disappointed. If you come expecting a good time with real chops holding it together, he delivers every time.