SLIM MAN (aka SLIM MANICOTTI)

2018! It’s been a good year so far for the Slim Man!

He just won Best Jazz Vocalist at the Coachella Music Awards! Third year in a row. Threepeat!

How did Mr. Man arrive at this point? What’s the skinny on Slim Man?

It’s a long story. Settle in, Slim People…

When he was 5 years old, Slim Man’s dad showed him a movie. That film was The Five Pennies, and when Young Slim Boy saw Louis Armstrong play the trumpet and sing, he told his Dad, ”That’s what I want to do.”

Slim Man studied trumpet for the next 9 years, and also taught himself how to play piano and guitar. After studying classical piano, composition, and harmony at Peabody Institute of Music in Baltimore, MD, Slim Man got signed as a songwriter to Motown Records. He’s had songs recorded by the Temptations, Angela Bofill, Carl Anderson, and other artists.

Slim Man also recorded a CD for Motown, which gave birth to his signature style–a unique blend of jazz, soul, and pop..

Slim Man went on to form the band BootCamp,who had two of the first 100 videos ever played on MTV. Those videos catapulted BootCamp into a successful concert career, performing with The Tubes, TheB-52s, Squeeze, Split Enz, Johnny Winter, and tons of others.

After BootCamp broke up, Slim Man organized and hosted a nationwide talent contest sponsored by Marlboro. It was during this contest that he got the nickname Slim Man. Slim’s big discovery during the talent contest was in Tulsa, Oklahoma, at a honky tonk called Tulsa City Limits.

The guy who won the contest that night was named Ronnie Dunn, who went on to win the national finals in Nashville, and later hooked up with Kix Brooks to form the multiple Grammy award-winning country music duo, Brooks and Dunn.

Slim Man then started writing songs for Brian Jack, a singer from a band called Child’s Play. The 12-song CD that Mr. Man wrote and produced landed Brian Jack a management contract with Dee Anthony (Frampton, J. Geils, Basia) and a recording contract with Epic Records, but the record company decided to cut Slim Man out of the deal.

Undaunted, Mr. Man went back into the studio, re-recorded some of the songs, and released his debut CD End of the Rainbow. This CD made many Top Ten lists for the year, and inspired JD Considine (Rolling Stone) to write…

“A near-perfect example of how jazz and soul can be combined as pop.”

That started the ball rolling, and it hasn’t stopped since. Slim Man has released 12 CDs; the latest is called “Young at Heart”. It’s a collection of Rat-Packin’, toe-tappin’ swinging songs from the 60s that sound like Vegas at the height of coolness.

In the late 1990s, Slim Man started another band, Bona Fide, an instrumental group whose combination of funk and jazz brought forth the Number One single “XRay Hip”. Bona Fide received the Best New Artist Award at the Smooth Jazz Awards. They’ve released 4 CDs, the latest produced by Marc Antoine.

Not content with just writing music, Slim Man has written screenplays, the latest of which, Marlboro Men, is currently being pitched around Hollywood.

Slim Man recently released a cookbook, Slim Man Cooks, which features 52 recipes of his own creation, and 52 funny stories about growing up Slim. There are links in the cookbook to more than 50 cooking videos.

And we thought we’d close with this…Slim Man sang for Pope John Paul II at the Vatican on Christmas Day, 1999.