KINGS OF 780*92 W198f Fdx' Fats Waller 66-08406 6757 MAL J977 - : 5 197S Fats Waller KINGS OF JAZZ Fats Waller A Per pet u a Boole A. S, BARNES AND COMPANY, INC. NEW YORK Copyright Cassell & Co. Ltd., 1960 Perpetua Edition 1961 A. S. Barnes and Company, Inc. 11 East 36th Street New York 16, New York Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 60-16824 All Rights Reserved Printed in the United States of America Fats Waller has always occupied a special place in my affections. He was, you see, the first American jazz musician I ever heard 'live'. The event took place in the spring of 1939, when I was living in London on the top floor of a rather grimy house near King's Cross station. By day I attended a foreign travel class at Thomas Cook's head office in Berkeley Street; when evening came I sat down in my little room and swotted up long lists of frontier towns or worked out the fastest route from Osnabriick to Istanbul. I was very serious in those days. Six months later, of course, all that my hard work Brought me was the sack those frontiers were never the same again. And so, looking back at that period of six or seven weeks, I often regret I didn't paint the town red, or at least a gentle pink, instead of mugging up all that useless information. One relaxation I did permit myself, however; that was a weekly visit to the No. 1 Rhythm Club, a highly decorous body which held its meetings at the First Avenue Hotel. The 1 hotel vanished during the blitz, but it stood not very far away from the Holborn Empire, then a flourishing music- hall with gaudy lights outside and the cream of British variety artists to be seen upon its stage. And it was at the Holborn Empire, I was amazed to see when I glanced at the posters outside one evening, that Fats Waller would be performing ! As both my money and time were short I could only go once to see the great man, and the occasion I chose was the first house on the Sat urday evening. With me went one of my class-mates, known to everybody as 'Buddy' because of his penchant for American clothes and habits. 'Buddy* professed to like jazz, but I suspected the extent of his commitment when, just about tea-time, he suggested we patronize a George Formby film instead. Our friendship was never quite the same again. Apart from the Mills Brothers, that wonderful vocal quartet which seemed to be everywhere in London that spring, I cannot for the life of me remember who else was on the programme. Certainly the top billing went to a comedian who could easily have been Max Miller. Fats came on either just before or just after the interval, greeted by vigorous applause from the faithful few, dotted here and there among the audience. IVe never kept a diary for more than three weeks, and I rarely keep any record of my reactions to plays or concerts, so my twenty-year- old memory has grown a bit pale and frayed. But I do 2 remember that Fats played Honeysuckle Rose, accompanied by a pit orchestra that butchered the tune monstrously, and that he also played and sang Two Sleepy People and Flat Foot Floogie. At the time I was thrilled, overwhelmed, full of a high and noble ecstasy. And that makes it even more sad that my memories of the occasion only recall what Fats looked like, not how he sounded. He wore and I can see it even now the shiniest evening suit IVe ever seen. I was glad, later on, to discover that a gossip columnist in the Melody Maker had been as taken aback by it as I was. Then there was the girth, the breadth of the man. He was, I now realize, nothing like the figure of a man that Jimmy Rushing is, lacking that 'fearful symmetry*, but at the time his bulk was a marvel to me. How could such a clumsy-looking man, I wondered (and sometimes still do), produce such exquisite, such delicate music? I loved everything, even the bits of byplay: the way Fats sat down very daintily upon the piano stool, then peered round coyly and asked himself, *Is you all on, Fats?'; the glare he gave his right hand as it rattled off a familiar phrase, the way he shouted 6 Come out of that, will you!* Fats Waller's act can have lasted no more than fifteen minutes. It ended to polite clapping except, of course, for the frenzied, loyal few and then the jugglers came on, or it may have been Wee Georgia Wood or Wilson, Keppel and Betty. 'Buddy' seemed to be unmoved; he thought a Fats was *all right' but had enjoyed the comedian even more. For me, however, it was seeing Waller plain that mattered. And in its way, I suppose, the experience was a little like first dipping into Chapman's Homer. Within a couple of months I was to sit a bare eight yards away from Coleman Hawkins for two rapturous hours; in the years that followed I was to see Louis and Duke and Count and Earl. But these post-war glimpses of jazz royalty have never quite lived up to that rich, fulfilling moment when the numbers changed at the side of the stage, a spotlight swung to the curtain's left-hand edge, and Fats Waller bushy eyebrows puckered and twitching, rather like Robey's trucked and pranced and swaggered towards the piano. The performer I saw at. the Holborn Empire was the Fats Waller of legend, the gay, irreverent comedian at the piano, a symbol of good fellowship, a kind of latter-day Pickwick with a taste for whisky instead of claret and a decidedly bawdy sense of humour. But the personality which Fats paraded before the public was really a gross over-simplification of the man, as well as something of an obstruction to his work as an artist. To most Britons and Americans, Fats Waller was indeed he still is, sixteen years after his death a kind of overgrown baby, lambas ting the songs he sang, being uproarious, zestful, lovable, exactly the kind of practical anarchist we all envy in our 4 hearts. The fact that he was also one of the greatest of jazz pianists came, if indeed it occurred to most people at all, only as an afterthought. That Fats himself was aware of this has been emphasized by Gene Sedric, the fine tenor-saxophonist who worked with Waller from 1937 until the pianist's death. 'Nobody who was a personal fan of Waller ever forgot his playing,' Sedric has written, *but very few got a chance really to hear the finer things he could do on the piano. Through his recordings and pic ture success the public went for his jive and singing, which to the general public really overshadowed his ability as one of the world's greatest swing pianists. Many times we would be on the job and Waller playing great piano, modern stuff with technique and fine chords, and people would say, "Come on Fats, you're laying down, give us some jive". This at times would be a great drag to him; he would look at us and say, "You see these people, they won't let me play anything real fine, want to hear all that jive!" But it was the jive instead of fine playing that made him a wealthy man. He was a great comedian, but his only love was music. He loved to study and practise. I personally believe he would have been much happier had his jive not overshadowed his great musical ability,* 1 Fats Waller, in fact, was not only the prisoner of his personality, a man whose high spirits and gift for showman ship often obscured his brilliance as a musician, he was 1 The Jasx Record, March 1945. s also a victim of the wide-spread notion that fat men are always funny, a prejudice particularly strong in the world of entertainment. The idea that a fat man can be a sensitive, thoughtful artist still strikes some people as irresistibly comic. For them he must always be the stereo type found in music-hall jokes and on seaside postcards. That professional pessimist, Cyril Connolly, has written a sentence that may already have wormed its way into the dictionaries of quotations: 'Imprisoned in every fat man', observed Connolly, 4 a thin one is wildly signalling to be let out.' 1 To some extent that was even true of Fats Waller. Jeff Aldam, who got to know Waller very intimately dur ing his visits to Britain in 1938 and 1939, has pointed out that the pianist certainly had no love for his nickname. Those who had more than a passing acquaintance with him% writes Aldam, 'called him "Thomas" or more often just "Tom". I think that, for all his superabundant good humour, he was sensitive about his girth.* 2 The point I am making is that the conventional image of Fats Waller as a hard-drinking, fun-loving exhibitionist who happened to play the piano rather wonderfully, em bodies only one aspect of the man. He did drink too much, he was exuberant, he had no inhibitions about showing his feelings, he could as we all know perform miracles upon the piano. But he was also a much more complicated 1 The Unquiet Grave. Hamish Hamilton, 1945. a Jaxx Mufic, January 1944. 6 human being than all his bonhomie led audiences to suspect. 'America does strange things to its great artists,* wrote John Hammond in his programme notes for Fats Waller's Carnegie Hall concert in January 1942. 4 In any other place in the world Thomas Waller might have developed into a famous concert performer, for when he was eleven he was a gifted organist, pianist and composer. But Waller was not white, and the American concert field makes racial exceptions only for a few singers. Waller's great talent for the piano has never received the acknowledge ment that it deserves in this country. It was easier to exploit him as a buffoon and clown than as the artist he is.* Lake James P. Johnson, Duke Ellington, Earl Hines, Jelly Roll Morton and many other gifted Negro musicians, Waller became a jazz musician and an entertainer. For those were the days when the two roles were nearly syn onymous, the days when Sidney Bechet performed an ' instrumental *strip tease% taking his clarinet to pieces while he played it, and when George Brunies used his foot to operate the slide of his trombone. This helps to explain both the strength of Fats Waller's music its functional quality, its directness and exuberance and some of the compromises that the pianist had to make during his lifetime. For like his great mentor, James P. Johnson, Waller was at heart a frustrated man. Where Johnson Cached openly because he could find no audience for his serious compositions, 9 writes the American critic, 7 John Wilson, *WalIer*s desire to find acceptance as a ser ious musician was buried under a heavy coating of per vasive geniality.* 1 1 The Jaaa Maker*, edited by Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff. Peter Davies. 1957. Whether heredity plays any part in transmitting a talent, a sympathy for music, is still very debatable. But environ ment can and does. It did in the case of Fats Waller, Although his grandfather, Adolph Waller, had heen a well-known violinist in the southern states during the years which followed the Civil War, a much more important in fluence upon the boy's development was the fact that his mother, Adeline Locket Waller, possessed a good soprano voice and could play the piano and organ. She and her husband, Edward Martin Waller, had come north from Virginia in the 1890s and settled in New York, living first in Waverly Place, in a downtown area, then on 63rd Street, and finally on 134th Street. Both Adeline and Edward were deeply religious; in fact Edward, after working in a stable and as a trucker, became deacon and later on pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church on 40th Street (it subsequently moved to uptown Harlem), a church which is said to attract the largest Protestant congregation in the entire United States. The Wallers, however, were far from 9 prosperous and seldom had as much money as they needed. But then they were quite a large family; twelve children were born altogether, although six of these died while still in their infancy. Fats was born on 21 May 1904 and christened Thomas Wright Waller. He grew up in a home where a great deal of hymn singing and Bible reading went on but in which there was no piano; that was too expensive a luxury for the Wallers to afford. Ed Kirkeby, who acted as Fats Waller's manager during the late 1930s and early 1940s, has related that when Thomas was very young he was found 'running his fingers over the seats of two chairs which he had pushed together in the semblance of a keyboard and it turned out that a woman upstairs had allowed him to play her piano and aroused his curiosity'. 1 By the time he was five he could play the harmonium, and a year later, when his brother Robert brought a piano a Waters up right into the house, Thomas and his sisters Naomi and Edith were given music lessons. But Thomas, who had already listened to ragtime pianists accompanying the silent films and heard this formal but lilting music drifting out of Harlem cellar clubs, found this conventional ap proach too tiresome. He began to play by ear, and not until several years later did he learn to read music. By then this liking for ragtime had become apparent to his father, who condemned that style of playing as 'music from the Devil's 1 Melody Maker* 5 March 1955. 10 workshop*; his mother, however, was much more tolerant and continued to help and encourage hi throughout those early years. In addition to acting as organist in his father's church, Thomas played the piano and organ at school concerts (he was attending Public School 89 in those days) and was a member of the students' orchestra. For a time he even studied the violin and bass viol as well as these other instruments. Edgar Sampson, the well-known jazz arranger, was at school with Waller and has recalled how he would often inject a rhythmic note into his performances, in serting an off-beat here and there in the music. And already, it seems, he was clowning, amusing his class-mates by grimacing and winking as he played. Bulky and heavily built, even as a youth, Waller was fond of reading Nick Carter novels as well as books on musical theory, while to earn his spending money 75 cents a week he ran errands for a grocery store and pigs' feet stand. When he was eleven his father, who still hoped the boy would enter the church as a minister but who had meanwhile become proud of his son's musical accomplishments, took him to hear Paderewski perform at Carnegie Hall, an experience that only heightened Thomas's determination to become a professional musician. During the next few years, there fore, he studied music under Carl Bohm (as he was to do later on with Leopold Godowsky) while continuing to attend DeWitt Clinton High School. His musical studies 11 eventually began to clash with, school work, and when that happened Thomas naturally enough decided that music must come first. tf There wasn't any rhythm for me in algebra,* he declared some years afterwards. Thomas Waller left DeWitt Clinton High School in the spring of 1918. For a time he was employed in a jewel box factory, but he found the work there too dirty. Then he ran errands for Immerman's delicatessen, a store owned by two brothers, Connie and George Immerman, later the pro prietors of Connie's Inn, a famous Harlem nightclub. Quite close to the Waller home, however, stood the Lin coln Theatre, a cinema where films were shown to the accompaniment of music from a piano and pipe-organ, the latter a Wurlitzer Grand that had cost the management $10,000. Even while he was still at school, Thomas made a habit of sitting in the front row of this theatre, just behind the pianist, Maizie Mulling who allowed him to slide under the brass rail and to perch beside her on the piano-stool. Then, if she felt like taking a rest, the boy would play instead. Soon the organist was allowing him similar privi leges. He became so adept upon the Wurlitzer, in fact, that when the organist fell ill Thomas deputized for him at a wage of $23 a week. By a useful coincidence the job suddenly became vacant, so Thomas found himself in stalled as the Lincoln's regular organist, a position he held until the theatre changed hands several years later. It must have been around this time that Andy Razaf, who 12 was to write many of the lyrics for Waller's songs, caught his first glimpse of the young musician. (Razaf 's real name was Andreamentana Razafinkerifo. Although he himself had been born in Washington, he was actually the nephew of Ranavalona III, the African queen of Madagascar whom the French had deposed in the nineteenth century.) 'He was a chunky little lad', recalls Razaf, 'playing in an ama teur pianists' contest at the Roosevelt Theatre in Harlem, on the site where the Golden Gate ballroom stands today. He was maybe 15 years old, and he won the prize, playing a tune by his chief musical mentor, James P. Johnson's Carolina Shout.' 1 Waller almost certainly could not have made James P. Johnson's acquaintance by that time, but he must have heard that great pianist perform, or have listened to piano-rolls by him, and already been under his influence. Johnson, a man ten years older than Waller, was, after all, the leading member of the Eastern school of rag time players, a school that included such remarkable performers as Luckey Roberts and Willie 'The Lion' Smith. Waller, however, does not seem to have entered that musical circle until just after his mother's death, when he was introduced to most of those pianists by Russell Brooks, a friend and fellow musician. The death of his mother was undoubtedly one of the turning points in Thomas Waller's life, a loss from which he is said never to have completely recovered. Thomas had 1 Metronome, January 1944. 13 been the youngest of Adeline Waller's sons and her par ticular favourite, and for some days after her death he remained almost inconsolable. He left home and was found by Russell Brooks, sitting on the steps outside Brooks's house; for a time, in fact, he stayed with Brooks and his wife. A few weeks later, however, almost as if in reaction to his mother's death, Thomas married Edith Hatchett, a girl he had known for several years, and after the marriage ceremony was over he went to live with his wife's family on Brook Avenue. Meanwhile he continued to act as organist at the Lincoln .Theatre. It was there that Count Basic (known in those days, qtiite simply, as Bill Basic) first heard him. *From then on', says Basic, C I was a regular customer . . . sitting behind him all the time, fascinated by the ease with which his hands pounded the keys and his feet manipulated the pedals. He got used to seeing me, as though I were a part of the show. One day he asked me whether I played the organ. "No," I said, "but I'd give my right arm to learn." The next day he invited me to sit in the pit and start working the pedals. I sat on the floor watching his feet, and using my hands to imitate them. Then I sat beside him and he taught me. One afternoon he pretended to have some urgent business downstairs and asked me to wait for him. I started playing while he stood downstairs listening. After that I would come to early shows and he let me play accompaniment to the picture. Later I used to 14 follow him around wherever he played, listening and learning all the time'. 1 Soon after this friendship had sprung up, Waller left the Lincoln Theatre for a few weeks to tour with a vaudeville show, playing the accompaniments for an act called 'Liza and her Shufflin* Six'. It was while living in a Boston boarding house that Thomas composed a tune he called Boston Blues, and which he originally intended to be a setting of the popular bawdy-house lyric, The Boy In The Boat. Waller wanted to publish his composition right away, but he had to wait until 1925, when, with innocent lyrics written by Spencer Williams, it appeared under a new title Squeeze Me. When Waller left Liza and her Shufflin* Six, incidentally, he recommended that Bill Basic should take his place. 'It was*, recalls Basic, *my first trip on the road.' Back in New York once more, Thomas Waller began building up a small reputation, getting himself known as a pianist as well as an organist. Much of the credit for this must go to James P. Johnson. According to May Wright Johnson, the pianist's wife, *Right after James P. heard Fats Waller playing the pipe organ, he came home and told me, "I know I can teach that boy". Well, from then on it was one big headache for me. Fats was seventeen, and we lived on 140th Street, and Fats would bang on our piano till all hours of the night sometimes to two, three, four o'clock in the morning. I would say to him, "Now go on 1 Programme for Fats Waller Memorial Concert, 2 April 1944. 15 home or haven't you got a home ?" But he'd come every day and my hushand would teach. Of course, you kno\v the organ doesn't give you a left hand and that's "what James P. had to teach him. Then finally Fats got his first job it was at Leroy's Cabaret on 135th Street and Fifth Avenue, and I was working there then. Fats was afraid to perform and so I taught him to play for me. That's how he started.* 1 May Johnson's account of how Thomas Waller came to make his first appearance in New York cabaret is the gen erally accepted version. Ed Kirkeby, for instance, has related how Willie c The Lion' Smith got tired of playing at Leroy's and walked out, so the management approached James P. Johnson; he was too busy to take over the job himself, but recommended that Thomas Waller should be given a chance. Willie 'The Lion' Smith's own recollections, however, contained in a set of cheerful reminiscences he recorded in the summer and autumn of 1957, throw a slightly different light upon the role he played in tins sequence of events. 6 The first time I met Thomas Fats Waller,' says 'The Lion', 4 it was right after I came back from the Army. . . . There was a place called Leroy's inter nationally known cafe. I left a kid on my job who could only play in three keys. Naturally he thought he had the job tied down. But when I got back I found that yours 1 Hear Me TaOdn 1 To Ya edited by Nat Shapiro and Nat Hcntoff. Peter Davies, 1955. 16 truly, Thomas Fats Waller, was working there. Ha! Ha! So naturally I walked in one night with James P. He said, "I want you to hear Filthy play the piano !" I said, "Who do you mean Filthy ?" "Fats," he said. "You know Fats." I said, "Oh, certainly." He said, "Lion, he can play. I want you to hear him play the Carolina Shout" This was written by James P. I went in and listened to him play. After I heard him I shook my head. I said, "Watch out, Jimmy, he's got it." * It was after hearing Waller play, apparently, that 4 The Lion' decided the young pianist could join 'the Big Three Thomas Fats Waller, James P. and myself. *We had a monopoly on the house rent parties. . . . They used to charge one dollar admission pigs' feet, fried chicken, mashed potatoes. Next room there'd be a card game, next room a dice game that went on all night.' 1 During the years just after World War I Harlem ex perienced a big increase in population. This was caused by the general shift northward of Negroes in the southern states, the movement away from depressed rural areas towards the expanding industrial cities of the north and mid-west. In Chicago the same thing was taking place upon an even larger scale. Accommodation became short, nat urally enough, so rents soared high and stayed there. But many Harlemites found their answer to the excessive cost of living by throwing parlour socials, or rent parties 1 The Legend of Willie 'Tfce Lion 9 Smith. Grand Award 33-368, Top Rank RX3015. 17 panics for personal profit. A pianist could provide all the music needed, although a drummer was sometimes brought along too. James P. Johnson, Willie 'The Lion* Smith, Luckey Roberts and Thomas Waller were constantly in demand at these parties. Another pianist who moved around with this group for a time was Edward Kennedy Ellington (better known today as 'Duke' Ellington), who, accompanied by Sonny Greer and Otto Hardwicke, had left Washington for New York in 1922 but returned home again within the year. 'Fats used to follow Jimmy Johnson around', remembers Ellington, 'and the Lion used to say of him, "Yeah, a yearling, he's coming along. I guess he'll do all right." '* But Waller met Ellington again the fol lowing spring. After taking over Willie *The Lion' Smith's spot at The Capitol, a nightclub at 140th Street and Lenox Avenue, Waller began touring the burlesque theatre circuit with a band that included the clarinettist and alto- saxophonist Garvin Bushell. Eventually the show reached Washington. Ellington, who was still trying to organize a band, recalls how 'Sitting in my house, eating chickens by the pair, Fats told us that they [his band] were all going to quit; that we'd better come on up to New York and get the job/ 2 Ellington was cautious, however, and with good cause, for within a couple of weeks a telegram, arrived from New York saying that Waller and his musi cians had decided not to leave. 1 String, May 1940. * Ibid., June 1940. 18 The player-piano, that ponderous, many-pedalled con traption, belongs to past history as securely as bead cur tains, potted aspidistras and elastic-sided boots. Yet during the early 1920s these player-pianos (or pianolas as they were often called) could be found in the parlours of private homes as well as in saloons and dance-halls. And it was for the player-piano that Thomas Waller made his first recordings, if that term can be used to cover punching holes in a long paper roll. Once again the impetus had come from James P. Johnson. Johnson recommended Waller to the Q.R.S. company, with the result that one day in 1922 (the exact date will probably never be discovered) Waller sat down in the Q.R.S. studios and literally punched out a Clarence Williams tune, Gotta Cool My Doggies Now. This was followed, over a period of several years, by eighteen or nineteen more rolls, all labelled "Thomas Waller* and bearing a facsimile of his signature, for each of which the pianist received $100. Later on there were also a number of rolls labelled 'Fats Waller', yet actually cut with Waller's 19 full permission by another pianist, J. Laurence Cook. Although much of the suhtlety of Waller's playing, its individual timing and accenting, got lost in this rather clumsy mechanical process, it is interesting to hear some of those rolls played back today. A number have been trans ferred to discs, as a matter of fact, and issued on long- playing records ; for this rather tricky manoeuvre the player- piano was operated fittingly enough by J. Laurence Cook. Despite the muffled, slightly robot-like character of these performances, they do demonstrate the great in fluence that James P. Johnson's playing exerted upon the young pianist in those early days. Waller's first recordings for a gramophone company (Muscle Shoals Blues and Birmingham Blues) were made shortly afterwards, and during the next four years he acted as accompanist on a number of records by blues-singers Sara Martin, Alberta Hunter, Anna Jones, Hazel Meyers, Caroline Johnson, Alta Brown, Bertha Powell and Maude Mills. By the middle of the 1920s Waller had achieved his first published composition, Wild Cat Blues, a tune that was recorded by Clarence Williams's Blue Five, and had made his first broadcast from the stage of the Fox Terminal Theatre in Newark, New Jersey, sometime in 1923. Mean while he continued to double as a cinema organist and a cabaret pianist. The Lincoln Theatre was sold, but Waller moved across to the Lafayette, where he not only received a higher wage but found himself playing a much 20 larger organ. The casual way in which he seems to have taken his duties as accompanist to the silent films can best be demonstrated by repeating an anecdote which Don Redman tells. At the time this incident occurred Redman was playing alto-saxophone with Fletcher Henderson's orchestra, as well as writing many of its arrangements, and he had become very friendly with Thomas Waller, often dropping in to visit him during working hours at the Lafayette. On one occasion Redman sat beside Waller, chatting away animatedly, while a newsreel was being screened up above them. Thomas, he recalls, was playing Squeeze Me, his own tune and one that he performed whenever he got the chance. Suddenly Redman happened to glance up and saw, to his horror, that a funeral procession was making its way across the screen. 'Hey, Tom,* he whispered, 'they're showing a funeral. You shouldn't be playing that.' 'Why not?' exclaimed Waller, giving a diabolical grin and continuing to pound away at the keyboard. Then, beckoning to an usher, Waller handed hJTTi fifty cents and asked him to slip out and get a pint of gin. In 1925 Waller travelled up to Chicago to work with Erskine Tate's 'Little Symphony', an orchestra that played a mixture of jazz and light classics at the Vendome Theatre, a popular Chicago cinema. Another member of that band was Louis Armstrong. *That was in the days of the silent films,' Armstrong has written. *We used to play 21 for the films, and during the intermission we would play a big Overture and a Red Hot number afterwards. And folks, I'm telling you, we used to really romp.' 1 Waller's stay with the band produced at least one anecdote that has crept into jazz literature. In those days it was common practice for song-pluggers to take their new material round the theatres, passing it over to the musicians who would then proceed to play it at sight. During one particularly agonizing run-through of a new song by the Erskine Tate band, with the musicians sounding completely at sea, Waller suddenly stopped the music, and leaning down from the piano-stool he asked: 'Pardon me, boys but what key are you all strugglin' in down there?' The following year Waller returned to New York. First of all he toured in vaudeville (a popular legend asserts that for a time he acted as accompanist to Bessie Smith), then he got himself a manager George Raines. Raines introduced him to Bert Lews, "The Southern Syncopator*, who was then appearing at the Kentucky Club, and the pianist became a part of Lewis's act, swathing his head in a turban and being announced as *Ali Baba, the Egyptian Wonder'. By now, of course, Waller was not only playing for rent parties up in Harlem but also at downtown parties given by millionaires, people like Charles Schwab, Mrs. Harrison Williams and Otto Kahn. He was beginning, in fact, to be known outside Harlem and the narrow circle 1 Programme for Fats "Waller Memorial Concert. 22 of his fellow musicians. But despite the growth of his reputation, Waller remained as indeed he was to do throughout his whole life a remarkably uncommercial person. Often he would play at a private party in return for nothing more than a steady supply of whisky, a good cigar and the presence of a handful of people who really enjoyed his music. And it must have been around this period, in the middle of the 1920s, that people began calling him A Fats% for his figure had been growing plumper and plumper with the years. There were times, of course, when the 1920s were any thing but a gay decade for Thomas Waller. His marriage to Edith Hatchett had gone to pieces very (juickly, mainly because he was so seldom at home; in the end Edith kept their son, Thomas Wright, Jr., while Fats moved out of the house. But the situation still remained unsatisfactory, for Waller was as unreliable as he was generous. Once, for instance, when the pianist was playing with a trio up in Philadelphia, Edith found herself without any money at all and had to borrow from her family and her friends. Even when a settlement had been agreed upon things continued to go wrong as Waller frequently neglected to pay the alimony, with the result that for quite a number of years the pianist was constantly being chased by process servers, often having to disappear for several days at a time. Ed Kirkeby has told, 4 as gospel truth% of how a process server once caught up with Fats and forced him 23 to spend some days in jail, and yet how reluctant Fats was to leave those guarded premises. When some of his friends eventually arrived to bail him out, he explained that he was sharing a cell with a millionaire, who was daily stocking the place with all the pleasures of life including a piano, so there seemed little point in abandoning these amenities too hastily. Thomas Waller met Anita Rutherford in 1924. He fell in love with her and they got married, making their first home at the house of Anita's grandparents. The marriage turned out to be a very happy and successful one, but for the first few years Thomas and his wife were often very short of money, and Waller's attempts at raising funds often took a sadly uneconomical turn. Once, for instance, he offered to sell an entire folio of his manuscripts to the Q.R.S. company for as little as ten dollars, but luckily for him the proposal was rejected. On another occasion he tried to persuade Don Redman to buy every song he had for the same amount. Several years later he actually sold his rights in Airfl Misbehaviri*, Black and Blue, and seven teen other songs to a well-known music publisher for a total of $500. There was also the time when he spent an evening with Fletcher Henderson and a group of the musicians from Henderson's band and they all went into a hamburger bar. Fats quickly gobbled down nine ham burgers and then confessed that he had no money. His proposition was simple. If Fletcher would pay the bill, 24 Fats, in return, would present Tnm -with nine tunes. The bandleader accepted this offer, so Waller immediately sent out for manuscript paper and within a very short time had roughed out a set of tunes that included Top and Bottom (later called Henderson Stomp), Thundering Stomp (better known as Hot Mustard), Variety Stomp, St. Louis Shuffle and WTiiteman Stomp. Henderson, however, very properly insisted upon paying Fats ten dollars for each composition, instead of the hamburger which the pianist had demanded. But this practice of trying to rob himself was one that Waller kept up throughout a large part of his life; because of it a great many of his compositions have been published under the names of other men. Towards the end of the 1920s Fats Waller and Andy Razaf began working together as a song-writing partner ship, Waller composing the music and Razaf writing the lyrics. 'One of the first things we did as a team', recalls Razaf, 'was to cash in on a vogue for West Indian songs. As soon as we got broke all we had to do was grind out two or three West Indian numbers, take them up to Mills or some Broadway office and get a nice sum for them. Around that time there was a heavy demand for cabaret- type songs, with blue lyrics. We did hundreds of those. Sometimes Fats worked with other lyric-writers and composers; there was a bunch of us who pulled around together, including James P. Johnson, J. C. Johnson, Spencer Williams, and a kid named Bud Allen, who was 25 Fats's permanent sidekick, helping to keep him on time for dates, get Tn'm home and generally look out for him. The first big show score we wrote together was 'Keep Shufflin'; the hit songs were How Jazz Was Born and My Little Chocolate Bar. Then Connie and George Immerman sent for us to write a Connie's Inn show, and things really started humming/ 1 Keep Shufflin 9 was produced in 1928. In addition to the songs mentioned hy Andy Razaf it also contained Willow Tree one of Waller's most delightful melodies, Labour Day Parade, Everybody's Happy in Jimtown, and the show's theme tune, Keep Shuffliri*. Waller and James P. Johnson performed at two pianos ('the two best left-hands in the jazz business playing together' 2 ) and the pit orchestra included the trumpet-player, Jabbo Smith. The following year saw Waller and Razaf start work upon their score for Hot Chocolates^ a revue which opened at Connie's Inn and eventually doubled between that nightclub and the Hud son Theatre on 46th Street. Connie's Inn, of course, was located at the corner of 131st Street and Seventh Avenue, not just an ordinary corner but 'a whole atlas by itself the crossroad of the universe', to quote Mezz Mezzrow's ecstatic description. Next door stood the Lafayette Theatre while immediately outside the entrance was the legendary Tree of Hope, 'Harlem's Blarney Stone', that totem pole 1 Metronome, Jannary 1944. * Bexmie Paine in Jazz Journal, May 1952. 26 which gamblers would touch for luck on their way to a game of cards or dice. Hot Chocolates was staged by Leonard Harper, who produced most of the shows at Connie's Inn during the 1920s, and its cast included Louis Armstrong, Jazzlips Richardson, Jimmy Baskette, Eddie Green, Baby Cox, Thelma and Paul Morres, Edith Wilson, Margaret Simms and the Jubilee Singers. Mary Lou Williams, who arrived in New York from Kansas City around this time, remembers visiting Connie's Tnn during the rehearsals and noticing how casually Fats Waller worked. 'He sat,* she recalls, 'overflowing the piano stool, a jug of whisky within easy reach. Leonard Harper, the producer, said, "Have you anything written for this number, Fats?" and Fats would reply, "Yeah, go on ahead with the dance man." Then he composed his number while the girls were dancing.* 1 Mezz Mezzrow also met Waller for the first time while the pianist was working on tM score and he remem bers how Fats and Razaf would sit side by side on the stage, Razaf sometimes changing the lyrics but when he did so always singing the new version *in a very pleasant voice'. 'I asked Fats why they didn't take a part in the show as a team', writes Mezzrow, 'and Andy chimed in and said, "Yeah, Mezz, I've been telling him the same thing for a long time*" But Fats answered, "Mezz, you know* I am a musician and not an actor." ' 2 1 Hear Me Talki*? To Ya. 27 For Hot Chocolates Fats "Waller and Andy Razaf wrote a string of fine songs, including That Rhythm Man, What Did I Do To Be So Black And Blue, Dixie Cinderella, Can't We Get Together^ Sweet Savannah Sue and Say It With Your Feet. But the hit of the original show was Margaret Simms's performance of Ain't Misbehaving 'From the first time I heard it% writes Louis Armstrong, *that song used to "send me". I wood-shedded it until I could play all around it. . . . I believe that great song, and the chance I got to play it, did a lot to make me hetter known all over the country 9 . 1 Andy RazaPs account of how Ain't Misbehaviri* got written is revealing. *I remember one day going to Fats's house on 133rd Street 9 , he writes, 6 to finish up a number based on a little strain he'd thought up. The whole show was com plete, but they needed an extra number for a theme, and this had to be it. We worked on it for about 45 minutes and there it was Ain't Misbehaving^ Suitably enough, the melodic line of Ain't Misbehavin* sounds very suggestive of Louis Armstrong playing a blues chorus, but an even odder coincidence is that the tune popped up again several years later, in an almost identical form, as a theme in the first movement of Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony. After their success with Keep Shuffliri 9 and Hot Chocolates, Fats Waller and Andy Razaf worked on many shows to- 1 Swing That Music. Longmans, 1937. 2 Metronome, January 1944. 28 ' ? f V +> * **M gether not only for Connie's Inn But also for floor shows at the Everglades, the Silver Slipper and other New York nightclubs. But it was often very hard to tie Waller down to a job and Razaf sometimes bribed him to stay at the Razaf home in Asbury Park, New Jersey, by getting his mother to cook up some particularly tempting meals. It was at Asbury Park, incidentally, that another famous tune was composed, and once again in a typically off-hand way. * We were work ing on a show called "Loads of Coal' 9 for Connie,' recalls Razaf, 'and had just done half the chorus of a number when Fats remembered a date and announced: "I gotta go." I finished the verse and gave it to him later on the tele phone. The tune was Honeysuckle Rose. 71 At that single session, a session lasting just under two hours, the two men also composed another two songs Zonky and My Fate Is In Your Hands. 'Fats was the most prolific and fastest writer I ever knew, 9 says Razaf. 'He could set a melody to any lyric and he took great pains working on it, getting the exact mood and phrasing until the melody would just pour from his fingers. I used to say he could have set the tele phone book to music. He took great pride in doing an accurate, perfect job with every note in the right place, so much so that even if he finished a whole piano copy in half an hour, it could be sent right down to the printer's without any changes. . . . Fats and I had many hits together Concentratin^ , Gone, If It Ain't Love, My Fate Is In 29 Your Hands^ Aintcha Glad, Keepin* Out Of Mischief Now, Zonty, Blue Turning Grey Over You, How Can You Face Me but we never realized our ambition of getting a big break in Hollywood as a team.* 1 1 Metronome^ January 1944. 30 'The organ is the favourite instrument of Fats Waller's heart/ wrote Ashton Stevens, the music critic of the Chicago American, *the piano only of his stomach.* It was a true enough comment and one that Fats himself endorsed. *Well, I really love the organ,* he once said, C I can get so much more colour from it than the piano that it really sends me. . . . And next to a grand organ there's nothing finer than a magnificent symphony orchestra.' An organ was installed in the Wallers* apartments on Morningside Avenue and at 133rd Street ; later on after the pianist and his family had moved out to St. Alhans on Long Island a huilt-in Hammond electric organ stood alongside the Steinway grand piano. When Fats was working in Chicago, a local music store often sent along a Hammond organ for him to play up in his hotel room, and there he would sit playing spirituals, hymns and pieces by Bach and other classical composers as well as jazz. Tommy Brookins recalls going up to a hotel room in Chicago at five o'clock one morning and hearing Fats play the organ for over three hours, ending 31 up with, what Fats described as 'my favourite piece Abide With Me.' Another musician with memories of Waller's disconcerting habit of getting up at five or six in the morning to perform on the organ is Snub Mosely, the slide-trumpet player. 'He'd have an inspired moment*, says Mosely, 'and maybe play a little loud, you know? Sure enough the super in the building started raising hell and so Fats had to go out and buy himself a house.' 1 "What fascinated Fats Waller about the organ was its capacity to produce rich, colourful textures, as well as its sonority and depth of tone. These were qualities that, as far as the instrument would allow it, he also introduced into his piano playing. By far the most important character istics of the 'stride piano' style (sometimes called 'Harlem piano') which he and James P. Johnson created during the 1920s was the way it thickened the harmonies and extended the emotional scope of ragtime, giving that highly formal, rather brittle idiom something of the expressiveness to be found in the blues. But then it should never be forgotten that Waller started out as an organist, and that for a num ber of years he played the organ night after night at either the Lincoln or Lafayette theatres. What was more natural, therefore, that as soon as he began recording regularly under his own name he should choose to perform on the pipe-organ? In the autumn of 1926 he made two such recordings St. Louis Blues and Lenox Avenue Blues, and 1 Hear Me Tdkin* To Ya. 32 during the following year he actually recorded no fewer than twenty-five organ solos, although only about half of them were ever issued. One session for the Victor company found him playing versions of Rimsky-Korsakof s Flight of the Bumble Bee, Bach's Fugues in B Minor and D Minor, Liszt's Liebestraum, Moszkowski's Spanish Dance No. 1 and Rudolph FrimFs Spanish Days. None of these record ings has heen released, but it is believed that Waller first played each item in a legitimate fashion, then improvised upon it. And in addition to accompanying two singers Juanita Stinette Chappelle and Bert Howell upon the organ, he also played the instrument on some band re cordings with Thomas Morris's Hot Babies, blending very pi