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| The maniacal look is on- and off-brand. |
I didn’t dive too deep into stride piano - for instance, I didn’t even touch back to James P. Johnson, one of its originators - but I did take some notes on what typifies its sound. Most simply:
“Proper playing of stride jazz involves a subtle rhythmic tension between the left hand which is close to the established tempo, and the right hand, which is often slightly anticipatory.”
Next, a little more on the technical side:
“The left hand characteristically plays a four-beat pulse with a single bass note, octave, major seventh or major tenth interval on the first and third beats, and a chord on the second and fourth beats. Occasionally this pattern is reversed by placing the chord on the downbeat and bass notes on the upbeat. Unlike performers of the ragtime popularized by Scott Joplin, stride players' left hands span greater distances on the keyboard.”
That last note matters because, like a lot of American popular music, stride piano borrowed defining elements from ragtime - e.g., syncopation - and it started as the original form faded out of popular music. It had its pioneers - someone dubbed James P. Johnson the “Father of Stride” - but one of his pupils would out-strip him. And by some distance.
“Fats was the most relaxed man I ever saw in a studio, and so he made everybody else relaxed. After a balance had been taken, we'd just need one take to make a side, unless it was a kind of difficult number.”
- Gene Sedric, clarinetist and long-time collaborator
“Larger than life with his sheer size and magnetic personality, [Fats] Waller was known to enjoy alcohol and female attention in abundance.”
- A Biography biography
Between them, those two quotes contain most of what one needs to know about Fats Waller; prolific, profligate and beloved sums it up nicely. And, for once, Wikipedia gives the best, telling anecdote. Waller’s general popularity prompted a Broadway producer named Richard Kollmar to bring him into his 1943 production, Early to Bed. Though originally hired as a cast member, Kollmar asked Waller to write the music for the production when his (rather poor) first choice, Ferde Grofe, backed out. With 20 successful years in the business behind him (see below), Waller must have looked like a safe bet...but then this happened:
“Waller's double duty as composer and performer was short-lived. During a cash crisis and in an advanced state of intoxication, Waller threatened to leave the production unless Kollmar bought the rights to his Early to Bed music for $1,000. (This was typical of Waller, who often sold melodies for quick cash when in his cups.)”
1943 was very late in Fats Waller’s career, damn near the end, in fact, so let’s turn to what led to the end of his personal road.
Thomas Wright “Fats” Waller, born in 1904, was the son of the Reverend Edward Martin Waller, a pastor/truck driver based in Harlem, and his wife, Adeline Locket Waller. His mother encouraged Waller’s musical talents and inclinations, teaching him to play the church organ by the time most kids wrap up kindergarten and letting him take over playing during services four years later. His father held out hope that Waller would follow him as a faith leader, but Fats took what he learned in church to drop out of school and find work as an accompanist for silent movies. By age 15, he'd found steady work at Harlem’s Lincoln Theater, earning $23(or $32)/week in 1920s money. That difference in world-views probably explains why, when his mother passed in 1920 from a stroke brought on by diabetes, he opted to move out to live with his piano tutor, Russell Brooks. Brooks, as it turned out, knew some people in the local music scene - Willie Johnson and the “Father of Stride” James Johnson, among them. Seeing Waller’s talent, Johnson took the younger Waller under his wing and taught him stride piano.
Johnson was not wrong. Waller recorded his first 78 rpm by age 18 with “Muscle Shoal Blues” and “Birmingham Blues” (both for Okeh Records); just two years later, he published his first song: 1924’s “Squeeze Me.” Between that first published song and the day he stepped into his grave, Fats Waller would write/copyright over 400 songs - including some that he sold for “quick cash,” often to his regret. A fellow pianist named Oscar Levant called him “the Black Horowitz” after, Vladimir Samoylovich Horowitz, “considered 'one of the greatest pianists of all time'” (apparently). Waller became a hot enough ticket for Al Capone’s henchmen to kidnap him after a gig in Chicago and drive (the justifiably terrified) Waller to a Capone-run venue called the Hawthorne Inn to perform as the “surprise guest” at the infamous mobster’s birthday. How many people can say they got kidnapped by the Al Capone - and without a criminal motive?
And that’s the rest of Waller’s life in a very small nutshell: he wrote a lot of songs and performed them all over the country. While he mostly wrote/worked solo, he had a famous writing collaboration with a guy named Andy Razaf - including on best-known numbers like “Ain’t Misbehavin’” and “Honeysuckle Rose” - and he worked with a succession of groups that he fronted - e.g., Morris’ Hot Babes in 1927, Fats Waller’s Buddies in 1929 (another early inter-racial ensemble), McKinney’s Cotton Pickers the same year, plus his longest engagement with a group he called Fats Waller and his Rhythm. The latter was where he collaborated with Gene Cedric, Rudy Powell, Al Casey, Herman Autrey (or, later), Bill Coleman or John “Bugs” Hamilton. Waller boasted a powerfully long list of writing and performing credits: a minimum of 18 hits, with “A Little Bit Independent” as his biggest No. 1; a Cincinnati, Ohio-based radio show called the Fats Waller Club that ran between 1934-36; cameos in movies like Hooray for Love!, King of Burlesque (both in 1935), and, most famously, Stormy Weather (1943), where he nearly stole the show with his performance of "Ain't Misbehavin'"). On top of all that, he scored some famous plays for Broadway, including the sequel to Keep Shufflin’ (1928), Hot Chocolates (1929), and, as noted above, Early to Bed (1943), the first Broadway hit scored by a black composer and pitched to a majority white audience. Somewhere in all that, Waller married twice and had a couple kids, but the story of Fats Waller was largely one of his performances and all those songs he wrote.
The story skirts the dark side hereafter. Wikipedia buried Waller’s issues with drinking and impulsiveness under an avalanche of songs and collaborators. That tracks with most sources, who either mention it late or not at all, but, again, see the quote above about selling songs "while in his cups." Later anecdotes speak to bursts of impulsiveness, followed by bouts of regret. For instance, whether Waller actually wrote “I Can Give You Anything But Love, Baby” (1928 version, maybe the first) and (a song I know and love) “Sunny Side of the Street” or not, Waller told his son Maurice to never play the former anywhere he could hear it. He hated hearing the latter on the radio so much that he insisted people turn it off any time it played, something you can’t see him doing absent some connection to both songs.
All that brought Fats Waller to an early end, at age 39 - around the same time he wrapped up the film Stormy Weather and his time on Early to Bed. I don't have enough of the narrative to know when Kollmar fired him as too big a risk for an eight-show-a-week schedule and when Waller was all the way across the country performing at the Zanzibar Room in Santa Monica, California, but the latter was the place where he started to show signs of the pneumonia. He died in Kansas City, Missouri in 1943, in transit back to New York from LA. They returned his body back to Harlem for a funeral that was attended by 4,200 mourners, As Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. noted in his eulogy, Waller “always played to a packed house.”
About the Sampler
Now that I’m finally on the music, I have the space to report the other tragedy of Fats Waller’s career. In 1938, between his career’s middle age and the end of his life, Waller got an itch to out-grow, in Biography’s phrasing, “the comedic, irreverent persona that fans had come to expect from his broadcasts,” and composed an arrangement he called London Suite. I couldn’t find that on Spotify, but, for the record, I found it for this post. Call it a bonus track....
I bring that up for two reasons: 1) because “comedic, irreverent” is most of what you’ll find on the 25-song Fats Waller sampler I compiled, but, also, 2) because, in my opinion, what you hear on the sampler will make both make sense of his London Suite fit and make that “Black Horowitz” comment stand up. Waller gets a rare musical and tonal touch in everything he plays - i.e., you feel sad when he’s sad, you feel glad when he’s glad, etc.
And yet, the typical Fats Waller song doesn’t follow the modern template. The majority have a musical, vocals-free lead-in - some lasting a minute or more - that hasn’t been popular since…I’m guessing since his day, but they still sound more or less modern. While nearly all the songs are piano-heavy/led, there’s definite, jazz/ensemble-blues-inspired “throwing” between other instruments when they’re around, which is often. Rather than break down each song, I’d call all the following as playing the same vein, with the delicate “Night Wind” on the slow end and “This Joint Is Jumpin’” and the fast/regular/raucous end:
“Until the Real Thing Comes Along,” “Cross Patch,” “I’m Crazy ‘Bout My Baby,” “Let’s Pretend There’s a Moon,” “When Somebody Thinks You’re Wonderful,” “Sugar Rose,” “Lost Love,” "Believe It, Beloved,” “A Hopeless Love Affair,” “You Must Be Losing Your Mind,” “The Panic Is On,” “Honey Hush,” and “Two Sleepy People.”
All those are packed with some of the most progressive (which, here, means stuff that sounds like later popular music) sounds I’ve heard in anything from the 1920s, but also a robust selection of asides that reveal the “comedic, irreverent” of Fats Waller’s persona. Moreover, you can all but see the bones for the Big Band sound in most of those songs. Waller was a contemporary of most of those acts, but, based on everything I've read and seen, he never played in an ensemble big enough to qualify. Which, as it happens, puts him ahead of his time by a half decade at least.
I rounded out the sampler with some purely instrumental numbers, including one of his more delicate, luminescent numbers with “Jitterbug Waltz.” The rest sound like what they are, Fats Waller tunes, including “Valentine Stomp," "Carolina Shout,” “Smashin’ Thirds,” "Numb Fumblin’” and “Viper's Drag.”
Even more than the blues performers, Fats Waller strikes me as the most “modern” of artists I’ve studied so far. Had all the awards existed at the time, Waller would have been eligible for every part of an EGOT but the Emmy (the others: Grammy, Oscar” and Tony Awards). He was a multi-media figure and, because he did it as the concept developed, he arguably deserves credit as a pioneer. The more you listen to popular American music, the easier it becomes to recognize a bridge between past and present. Of all the artists I’ve heard thus far, Fats Waller spans the furthest.
Till the next one…
“Proper playing of stride jazz involves a subtle rhythmic tension between the left hand which is close to the established tempo, and the right hand, which is often slightly anticipatory.”
Next, a little more on the technical side:
“The left hand characteristically plays a four-beat pulse with a single bass note, octave, major seventh or major tenth interval on the first and third beats, and a chord on the second and fourth beats. Occasionally this pattern is reversed by placing the chord on the downbeat and bass notes on the upbeat. Unlike performers of the ragtime popularized by Scott Joplin, stride players' left hands span greater distances on the keyboard.”
That last note matters because, like a lot of American popular music, stride piano borrowed defining elements from ragtime - e.g., syncopation - and it started as the original form faded out of popular music. It had its pioneers - someone dubbed James P. Johnson the “Father of Stride” - but one of his pupils would out-strip him. And by some distance.
“Fats was the most relaxed man I ever saw in a studio, and so he made everybody else relaxed. After a balance had been taken, we'd just need one take to make a side, unless it was a kind of difficult number.”
- Gene Sedric, clarinetist and long-time collaborator
“Larger than life with his sheer size and magnetic personality, [Fats] Waller was known to enjoy alcohol and female attention in abundance.”
- A Biography biography
Between them, those two quotes contain most of what one needs to know about Fats Waller; prolific, profligate and beloved sums it up nicely. And, for once, Wikipedia gives the best, telling anecdote. Waller’s general popularity prompted a Broadway producer named Richard Kollmar to bring him into his 1943 production, Early to Bed. Though originally hired as a cast member, Kollmar asked Waller to write the music for the production when his (rather poor) first choice, Ferde Grofe, backed out. With 20 successful years in the business behind him (see below), Waller must have looked like a safe bet...but then this happened:
“Waller's double duty as composer and performer was short-lived. During a cash crisis and in an advanced state of intoxication, Waller threatened to leave the production unless Kollmar bought the rights to his Early to Bed music for $1,000. (This was typical of Waller, who often sold melodies for quick cash when in his cups.)”
1943 was very late in Fats Waller’s career, damn near the end, in fact, so let’s turn to what led to the end of his personal road.
Thomas Wright “Fats” Waller, born in 1904, was the son of the Reverend Edward Martin Waller, a pastor/truck driver based in Harlem, and his wife, Adeline Locket Waller. His mother encouraged Waller’s musical talents and inclinations, teaching him to play the church organ by the time most kids wrap up kindergarten and letting him take over playing during services four years later. His father held out hope that Waller would follow him as a faith leader, but Fats took what he learned in church to drop out of school and find work as an accompanist for silent movies. By age 15, he'd found steady work at Harlem’s Lincoln Theater, earning $23(or $32)/week in 1920s money. That difference in world-views probably explains why, when his mother passed in 1920 from a stroke brought on by diabetes, he opted to move out to live with his piano tutor, Russell Brooks. Brooks, as it turned out, knew some people in the local music scene - Willie Johnson and the “Father of Stride” James Johnson, among them. Seeing Waller’s talent, Johnson took the younger Waller under his wing and taught him stride piano.
Johnson was not wrong. Waller recorded his first 78 rpm by age 18 with “Muscle Shoal Blues” and “Birmingham Blues” (both for Okeh Records); just two years later, he published his first song: 1924’s “Squeeze Me.” Between that first published song and the day he stepped into his grave, Fats Waller would write/copyright over 400 songs - including some that he sold for “quick cash,” often to his regret. A fellow pianist named Oscar Levant called him “the Black Horowitz” after, Vladimir Samoylovich Horowitz, “considered 'one of the greatest pianists of all time'” (apparently). Waller became a hot enough ticket for Al Capone’s henchmen to kidnap him after a gig in Chicago and drive (the justifiably terrified) Waller to a Capone-run venue called the Hawthorne Inn to perform as the “surprise guest” at the infamous mobster’s birthday. How many people can say they got kidnapped by the Al Capone - and without a criminal motive?
And that’s the rest of Waller’s life in a very small nutshell: he wrote a lot of songs and performed them all over the country. While he mostly wrote/worked solo, he had a famous writing collaboration with a guy named Andy Razaf - including on best-known numbers like “Ain’t Misbehavin’” and “Honeysuckle Rose” - and he worked with a succession of groups that he fronted - e.g., Morris’ Hot Babes in 1927, Fats Waller’s Buddies in 1929 (another early inter-racial ensemble), McKinney’s Cotton Pickers the same year, plus his longest engagement with a group he called Fats Waller and his Rhythm. The latter was where he collaborated with Gene Cedric, Rudy Powell, Al Casey, Herman Autrey (or, later), Bill Coleman or John “Bugs” Hamilton. Waller boasted a powerfully long list of writing and performing credits: a minimum of 18 hits, with “A Little Bit Independent” as his biggest No. 1; a Cincinnati, Ohio-based radio show called the Fats Waller Club that ran between 1934-36; cameos in movies like Hooray for Love!, King of Burlesque (both in 1935), and, most famously, Stormy Weather (1943), where he nearly stole the show with his performance of "Ain't Misbehavin'"). On top of all that, he scored some famous plays for Broadway, including the sequel to Keep Shufflin’ (1928), Hot Chocolates (1929), and, as noted above, Early to Bed (1943), the first Broadway hit scored by a black composer and pitched to a majority white audience. Somewhere in all that, Waller married twice and had a couple kids, but the story of Fats Waller was largely one of his performances and all those songs he wrote.
The story skirts the dark side hereafter. Wikipedia buried Waller’s issues with drinking and impulsiveness under an avalanche of songs and collaborators. That tracks with most sources, who either mention it late or not at all, but, again, see the quote above about selling songs "while in his cups." Later anecdotes speak to bursts of impulsiveness, followed by bouts of regret. For instance, whether Waller actually wrote “I Can Give You Anything But Love, Baby” (1928 version, maybe the first) and (a song I know and love) “Sunny Side of the Street” or not, Waller told his son Maurice to never play the former anywhere he could hear it. He hated hearing the latter on the radio so much that he insisted people turn it off any time it played, something you can’t see him doing absent some connection to both songs.
All that brought Fats Waller to an early end, at age 39 - around the same time he wrapped up the film Stormy Weather and his time on Early to Bed. I don't have enough of the narrative to know when Kollmar fired him as too big a risk for an eight-show-a-week schedule and when Waller was all the way across the country performing at the Zanzibar Room in Santa Monica, California, but the latter was the place where he started to show signs of the pneumonia. He died in Kansas City, Missouri in 1943, in transit back to New York from LA. They returned his body back to Harlem for a funeral that was attended by 4,200 mourners, As Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. noted in his eulogy, Waller “always played to a packed house.”
About the Sampler
Now that I’m finally on the music, I have the space to report the other tragedy of Fats Waller’s career. In 1938, between his career’s middle age and the end of his life, Waller got an itch to out-grow, in Biography’s phrasing, “the comedic, irreverent persona that fans had come to expect from his broadcasts,” and composed an arrangement he called London Suite. I couldn’t find that on Spotify, but, for the record, I found it for this post. Call it a bonus track....
I bring that up for two reasons: 1) because “comedic, irreverent” is most of what you’ll find on the 25-song Fats Waller sampler I compiled, but, also, 2) because, in my opinion, what you hear on the sampler will make both make sense of his London Suite fit and make that “Black Horowitz” comment stand up. Waller gets a rare musical and tonal touch in everything he plays - i.e., you feel sad when he’s sad, you feel glad when he’s glad, etc.
And yet, the typical Fats Waller song doesn’t follow the modern template. The majority have a musical, vocals-free lead-in - some lasting a minute or more - that hasn’t been popular since…I’m guessing since his day, but they still sound more or less modern. While nearly all the songs are piano-heavy/led, there’s definite, jazz/ensemble-blues-inspired “throwing” between other instruments when they’re around, which is often. Rather than break down each song, I’d call all the following as playing the same vein, with the delicate “Night Wind” on the slow end and “This Joint Is Jumpin’” and the fast/regular/raucous end:
“Until the Real Thing Comes Along,” “Cross Patch,” “I’m Crazy ‘Bout My Baby,” “Let’s Pretend There’s a Moon,” “When Somebody Thinks You’re Wonderful,” “Sugar Rose,” “Lost Love,” "Believe It, Beloved,” “A Hopeless Love Affair,” “You Must Be Losing Your Mind,” “The Panic Is On,” “Honey Hush,” and “Two Sleepy People.”
All those are packed with some of the most progressive (which, here, means stuff that sounds like later popular music) sounds I’ve heard in anything from the 1920s, but also a robust selection of asides that reveal the “comedic, irreverent” of Fats Waller’s persona. Moreover, you can all but see the bones for the Big Band sound in most of those songs. Waller was a contemporary of most of those acts, but, based on everything I've read and seen, he never played in an ensemble big enough to qualify. Which, as it happens, puts him ahead of his time by a half decade at least.
I rounded out the sampler with some purely instrumental numbers, including one of his more delicate, luminescent numbers with “Jitterbug Waltz.” The rest sound like what they are, Fats Waller tunes, including “Valentine Stomp," "Carolina Shout,” “Smashin’ Thirds,” "Numb Fumblin’” and “Viper's Drag.”
Even more than the blues performers, Fats Waller strikes me as the most “modern” of artists I’ve studied so far. Had all the awards existed at the time, Waller would have been eligible for every part of an EGOT but the Emmy (the others: Grammy, Oscar” and Tony Awards). He was a multi-media figure and, because he did it as the concept developed, he arguably deserves credit as a pioneer. The more you listen to popular American music, the easier it becomes to recognize a bridge between past and present. Of all the artists I’ve heard thus far, Fats Waller spans the furthest.
Till the next one…
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