by Moe Zilla

Created on: February 19, 2008

"The Nutty Squirrels" were a remarkable novelty act in the late 1950s. Jazzmen Don Elliott and Alexander "Sascha" Burland" saw the success of "Alvin and the Chipmunks," and launched a noble mission: to use the same gimmick - speeded-up voices - to popularize jazz.

It was surprisingly good music. The two sang elaborate scat solos, then converted them to "squirrel-speed" tempos for the final recordings. They were backed by a full jazz orchestra - not just bass, drums, and saxophone, but even violins and flutes. This created an even more dramatic effect when the orchestra would pull back for the squirrel-voiced solos, the high voices delivering fully realized jazz performance. On several tracks they were even accompanied by jazz legend Cannonball Adderley.

Their breakthrough success came with a single called "Uh-Oh (Part 2)," which cracked into the top ten on the singles chart (and eventually launched a short-lived TV show). The light-hearted tone of the funny voices was complimented by the song's nonsense lyrics - a jazzy, descending romp through the words "Uh oh, uh oh, uh oh....Julia." (only interrupted by a startling scat solo filled with "doo wahs" in the middle). The band recorded three albums - though the master recordings of the first one were later lost in the mid-1960s.

The band struggled to find a path to success. Their second album, "Bird Watching," offered their breezy jazz for songs about birds - like "Bye Bye Blackbird" and "Flamingo" - promising to "bring humor back to jazz." Three years later they reunited one last time to cash in on the success of the Beatles in 1964. Abandoning jazz for pop, they sang five Beatles songs on their album, "A Hard Day's Night and Other Smashes" (which featured the two squirrels drawn onto a photograph of a young man in a Beatle haircut). Their high-pitched versions of "Do Wah Diddy Diddy" and Roy Orbison's "Pretty Woman" failed to find an audience, and the vocalists moved on to other projects. Don Elliott is credited with writing the soundtrack for the 1975 film "The Happy Hooker."

The band is now largely forgotten (Though their song "Salt Peanuts" appears on the "Iron Giant" and "Uh-Oh, Part I" was used in one of John Waters' films in the late 90s.) But that just makes these novelty recordings even more surprising, and fifty years later, they're still lots of fun.

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