fats waller

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Mister Waller’s Regrets

Terry Teachout

Thomas Wright Waller, born in Harlem in 1904 and subsequently known to all the world as “Fats,” is one of the few great jazz musicians to have been widely popular with the public at large. He appeared often on radio, and the small-group recordings he made between 1934 and 1942 sold well—several were hits—and were heard frequently on jukeboxes. In addition, he wrote the music for such standards as “Ain’t Misbehavin’” and “Honeysuckle Rose,” and at the time of his death in 1943 he had a successful show on Broadway, Early to Bed. Though Hollywood was slower to catch on to his potential, Waller’s appearance with Lena Horne and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson in Stormy Weather (in which he performed “Ain’t Misbehavin’”) was favorably noticed, and he would surely have made more films had he not died shortly after Stormy Weather was released.1

Perhaps inevitably, Waller’s popularity caused some to doubt his musical seriousness—though it never led anyone to question his talent. As a pianist he was universally admired and immensely influential, and he left behind ample recorded evidence of his formidable gifts. He was no less accomplished as an organist, the first to play hard-swinging jazz on that cumbersome instrument. But what made Waller a celebrity was not his instrumental prowess but his singing, which he usually (though not always) played for laughs. Most of his hit records were of Tin Pan Alley ballads like “It’s a Sin to Tell a Lie” and “Until the Real Thing Comes Along,” whose sentimentalities he skewered with satirical asides.

That Waller was primarily known as a comedian and entertainer rather than as a musician is a continuing source of discomfort to many critics. Gunther Schuller spoke for them in his 1968 book Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development:

Waller was ultimately unable to reconcile the conflicts in his musical personality: a natural gift for effortless improvisation[,] . . . the opposing pull toward commercial and show-business success, and finally his unswerving respect and love for “classical” music. Deep down the latter undermined his convictions about his professional career as a pianist-singer-clown, and the clowning was in turn an attempt to conceal his inner confusion.2

This appraisal would be less convincing had it not been shared by Waller himself, who played Bach, Chopin, and Debussy privately for his own pleasure and studied with the legendary piano virtuoso Leopold Godowsky.3 He told numerous colleagues that he regretted the turn his career had taken, and he both admired and envied his friend George Gershwin for writing both popular songs and jazz-influenced concert works, something the less disciplined Waller was never able to do. His sole gesture to conventional musical respectability, a 1942 Carnegie Hall recital appearance, was a fiasco. By then he had become a full-fledged alcoholic—he was drunk on stage at the recital—and it was this, coupled with his chronic obesity, that led to his death from pneumonia at the untimely age of thirty-nine.

Fats Waller, then, died a disappointed man. But how disappointing is the body of work he left behind? Did he fail to live up to his creative potential, as Schuller and countless other critics have argued?

To appreciate the reservations of Waller’s critics, one must first consider his achievements as an instrumentalist.

The son of a lay preacher, Waller started out as a church and theater organist, and for the rest of his life he preferred the organ to the piano. “I can get so much more color from it than the piano that it really sends me,” he explained. Fortunately, the Victor studio in Camden, New Jersey, where he made many of his early recordings, was a converted church that housed a well-maintained pipe organ, and in the late 20’s he recorded a series of solos that reveal him to have been an imaginative, technically adept player capable of drawing a marvelously diverse array of tone colors from the instrument.4

Even so, it was as a pianist that Waller made his name. He played “stride” piano, a style that evolved out of ragtime, the musical idiom created at the end of the 19th century by Scott Joplin and other black composers. In classic ragtime, which is always written out, heavily syncopated right-hand melodies are superimposed atop “oom-pah” patterns played by the pianist’s left hand. Stride, by contrast, is a fully improvised style in which the right-hand melodies are more complex and wide-ranging and the left-hand accompaniments thicker in texture and less rhythmically regular. It is more technically challenging than ragtime—so much so that comparatively few pianists have mastered it.

Waller studied with James P. Johnson (1894-1955), a Harlem-based pianist and composer who was one of the originators of stride.5 The younger man’s huge hands (George Shearing recalled that shaking hands with Waller was like “grabbing a bunch of bananas”) were perfectly suited to its demands, and he quickly developed into one of New York’s top jazz pianists.

By 1929 his style was fully formed, and the solo recordings he made in that year of his own “Handful of Keys” and “Numb Fumblin’” are among his most fully realized achievements. The first is a bustling up-tempo showpiece à la Johnson, the second an easy-going twelve-bar blues whose airy textures epitomize Waller’s uniquely individual approach. “Keep the right hand always subservient to the melody,” he once told an interviewer. “Trying to do too much always detracts from the tune. . . . You got to hang onto the melody and never let it get boresome.” He lived by those words, with results aptly summed up by the poet and jazz critic Philip Larkin:

As a jazz pianist he stands between James P. Johnson, who taught him, and Art Tatum, who learned from him, but it is he who has the greatest variety of mood, from feather-light whimsicality to the solid springing tenths in the left hand that never let the rhythm falter for a moment.

Had Waller never sung a note, he would still be remembered for the recordings he made on piano and organ in the late 20’s, as well as for the popular songs he wrote in collaboration with the lyricist Andy Razaf. But he would not have become famous. Instead, he began to feature himself as a vocalist, and became one of the best-known black entertainers in America.

Waller appears to have started singing in public around 1929, first in cabarets, then on the radio. In 1931 he made his first recordings as a vocalist. Three years later, William Paley, the president of CBS, heard him at a New York party and gave him a spot on the network; the resulting exposure inspired Victor to sign him to an exclusive contract. Waller put together a six-piece band, billed as “Fats Waller and His Rhythm,” with which he recorded the latest Tin Pan Alley songs, most of them in informal but effective arrangements that featured his ebullient vocals and glistening piano solos. These records soon began to sell, and all at once Waller became—and remained—a hot property.

The Rhythm recordings were usually jazz of the purest kind. Although Waller’s regular accompanists were for the most part mere journeymen, they provided solid, swinging support for his wilder flights of verbal fancy. Sometimes he prefaced a song with a spoken introduction whose choice of words was deliberately askew: “My goodness, I feel so effervescent this morning. Everything’s so eulogizin’!” (“I’m Crazy ’Bout My Baby,” 1931). At other times he slipped his own sardonic interpolations into an otherwise cliché-ridden lyric: “If you break my heart I’ll break your jaw and then I’ll die” (“It’s a Sin to Tell a Lie,” 1936). On occasion he dispensed with tomfoolery and sang a ballad straight in his light, raspy baritone, invariably to wistful and engaging effect (“My Very Good Friend the Milkman,” 1935).

Beneath their zany surface, Waller’s vocals were the product of a highly creative musician who with endless ingenuity reshaped and paraphrased the melodies of the songs he sang. To hear him dally with a well-written tune like James P. Johnson’s “A Porter’s Love Song to a Chambermaid” (1934) or Harry Warren’s “Lulu’s Back in Town” (1935) is to hear a master improviser at work—arguably the first great jazz singer to follow Louis Armstrong, and one of the first to profit from Armstrong’s unprecedented example.6

But unlike Armstrong, who was almost always glad to do whatever his audiences asked of him, Waller came to resent the fact that his fame as a singer-comedian made it difficult for him to play the music he liked best. As Gene Sedric, one of his sidemen, would recall:

Many times we would be on the job and Waller [was] 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.”

In the studio, by contrast, Waller was freer to play as he liked. Of his many recorded instrumentals with the Rhythm, some feature him on electric organ, an instrument whose percussive qualities he found appealing. Over time, the group became more contemporary in its approach, and later, riff-based Waller compositions like “Yacht Club Swing” (1938) and “Pantin’ in the Panther Room” (1941, with Waller on electric organ) have a lightness of touch reminiscent of the then-popular John Kirby Sextet, a band he greatly admired.

In addition, Waller recorded three sets of instrumental solos in 1937, 1938, and 1941 that suggest even more clearly the stylistic directions in which he apparently longed to travel. From the lacy openwork filigree of his solo piano version of his own “Keepin’ Out of Mischief Now” (1937) to the whirling, toccata-like ostinato with which he launches his arrangement for organ of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” (recorded on a 1938 visit to London), it is evident that Waller’s musical ambitions extended well beyond the swing songs that delighted his fans.7

Would he have one day sought to emulate Gershwin, whose Rhapsody in Blue and Concerto in F he loved? It is possible, though his lack of compositional training would have presented a considerable obstacle. While he was a fluent and successful songwriter, his melodies, as Alec Wilder has pointed out, “are all made up of little pieces. . . . Each phrase is sustained by an imitation, or partial imitation, of the previous phrase. In a sense, he wrote like a barroom piano player.”

In any case, Waller’s notorious lack of self-discipline meant that large-scale projects were out of the question. Just as he habitually threw together his small-group recording sessions on the spot, so his only extended composition, the six-movement “London Suite” recorded in 1938, was little more than a series of loosely knit, semi-improvised character pieces of no particular structural originality or melodic distinction. About the debacle of his Carnegie Hall recital, at which he played “London Suite,” the critics were barely polite.8

Not only was Waller incapable of summoning up the initiative to do more serious work, but his producers at Victor increasingly encouraged him to record third-rate songs that were beyond even his ability to enliven with the sly asides that had made him a star.9 By that time, alcoholism was inexorably robbing him of his powers, and though he had hitherto been able to play well even when under the influence of what he blithely called “liquid ham and eggs,” he was audibly and embarrassingly the worse for wear on several of the V-Discs he recorded in September 1943, three months before his death.

Perhaps the harshest posthumous judgment to be rendered on Fats Waller came from the critic Max Harrison:

Waller’s is probably the saddest case of misspent talent which jazz on records can show. His output suggests he had all the gifts a jazzman needs except the tough, almost ruthless temperament usually necessary for the truest creative achievement.

If one goes only by the recordings Waller made in the last few years of his life, there is something to be said for this devastating appraisal. But even then, as can be heard in such performances as “Fats Waller’s Original E Flat Blues” (1940), “Pantin’ in the Panther Room,” and the explosive small-band version of “Ain’t Misbehavin’” recorded in 1943 for the soundtrack of Stormy Weather, he was still capable of rising to an occasion that inspired him. Before that time, and throughout the middle period of his career from the late 20’s to the late 30’s, Waller’s studio work was noteworthy for its consistently high quality.

To be sure, we cannot know whether Waller would have gone on to greater things had he possessed the iron determination found in greater artists. Nor does it matter. What he did (as opposed to what he might have done) was more than enough to earn him a place among the giants of jazz. Of the 675-odd recordings he made between 1922 and 1943, perhaps a third remain irresistibly listenable to this day, not merely for the brilliance of his playing but also for the scapegrace charm of his singing. Few jazz musicians have had a higher batting average.

As for the “serious” compositions Waller never got around to writing, I cannot imagine they would have been more memorable than the life-enhancing records of popular songs he made so casually and in such miraculous profusion, and to which it is impossible to listen without breaking out in the broadest of smiles. To these recordings we can return again and again for the same reasons we revisit a play like Noël Coward’s Hay Fever or a novel like P.G. Wodehouse’s The Mating Season. Their inspired craftsmanship and divine frivolity rarely fail to please. “He achieves his effect through the magical transfer of joie de vivre,” Joseph Epstein once wrote of H.L. Mencken. The same can be said of Fats Waller.

Terry Teachout, Commentary’s regular music critic and the drama critic of the Wall Street Journal, is at work on a biography of Louis Armstrong. He blogs about the arts at www.terryteachout.com.

1 Handful of Keys (Proper Records PROPERBOX 71, four CD’s), a budget-priced box set imported from England but easily available in the U.S., contains a well-chosen selection of 95 recorded performances by Waller. Except as indicated, it contains all the recordings mentioned in this article.

2 Schuller went so far as to omit Waller from the second volume of his critical history of jazz, The Swing Era: The Development of Jazz, 1930-1945 (1989). No less revealingly, Waller has yet to be the subject of a full-length primary-source biography, and only one extended analysis of his musical style, Paul S. Machlin’s excellent Stride: The Music of Fats Waller (1985), has been published to date. Also of interest is Alyn Shipton’s Fats Waller: The Cheerful Little Earful (1988, rev. 2002).

3 We have only Waller’s word for this—his name appears nowhere in the published literature on Godowsky—but there is no obvious reason why he should have made it up. Godowsky did not have a major American concert career and was for the most part known only to pianists and connoisseurs of virtuoso piano playing.

4 Handful of Keys contains one of the solo pipe-organ recordings Waller made in Camden, “Rusty Pail.” Two dozen of his early solo and ensemble organ recordings, including an especially beautiful version of “Beale Street Blues” from 1927, are on Fats Waller at the Organ: Vol. 3, 1926-1929 (EPM Musique 982222), an imported French CD.

5 In 1941 Waller paid homage to his mentor by recording “Carolina Shout,” Johnson’s best-known composition. The performance offers a dramatic demonstration of the difference in the two men’s styles: Johnson’s, in his 1922 recording of “Carolina Shout,” is precise and elegant, even dapper, while Waller’s is faster, more flamboyant, and a bit slapdash.

6 Armstrong returned the compliment: his 1929 performance of “Ain’t Misbehavin’” in the Broadway revue Hot Chocolates introduced him to white audiences, and he continued to sing and record Waller’s songs for the rest of his life.

7 “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” was last available on CD as part of Fats Waller in London (Disques Swing CDXP 6442), now out of print but occasionally available from used-CD dealers. It can also be heard in streaming audio at www.redhotjazz/fats.html. (A RealAudio player is needed to listen to this site, which also contains many of the other recordings mentioned in this piece.)

8 We Called It Music (1947, rev. 1962), the autobiography of the jazz guitarist Eddie Condon, contains a sympathetic but frank description of the concert (at which Condon also played), along with an amusing, equally frank account of one of Waller’s helter-skelter recording dates.

9 Among the unsavory ditties foisted on Waller by Victor in the 40’s were “Abercrombie Had a Zombie,” “Eep, Ipe, Wanna Piece of Pie,” “Little Curly Hair in a High Chair,” and “My Mommie Sent Me to the Store.”

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Commentary

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[Chuck Nessa]

He could have done something else.

[EKE BBB]

I prefer not to go thinking what he may have been or done. I just enjoy the wonderful music he gave us.

BTW: thanks for the article!

Edited April 18, 2006 by EKE BBB

[EKE BBB]

...

2 ...No less revealingly, Waller has yet to be the subject of a full-length primary-source biography, and only one extended analysis of his musical style, Paul S. Machlin’s excellent Stride: The Music of Fats Waller (1985), has been published to date...

And what about Laurie Wright´s bio-discography "Fats in Fact"?

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Where does it say jazz has to be serious?

Fats was a big influence on R&B. It seems to me that Louis Jordan's approach stems from that of Fats. And Rufus Thomas was, I suppose, the greatest of Fats' followers in more recent years. Nowadays, however, I hear very little that might be said to carry on the spirit of Fats.

MG

[Ken Dryden]

Waller fans should purchase Stephen Taylor's excellent book Fats on the Air: The Radio Broadcasts and Discography.

http://www.scarecrowpress.com/Catalog/Sing...data=0810856565

[JSngry]

I guess the lesson is that there's a difference between style and substance, and that the latter can turn up damn near anywhere if you're not blinded by considerations of the former.

[jazzbo]

One never knows, do one?

[AllenLowe]

Fats was great, and it's been a staple of revisionist history to say yes, his jive was serious and it's all great music. Still, we can't ignore what Teachout is saying, as there is plenty of truth likely to this, especially based on Fats's own expressions of frustration. One does wish he had lived longer and drunk less but, as one finds with many musicians with substance problems, at some point in their careers they tend to follow the path of least resistance; so it ain't necessarily "the business" or his "management" which is to blame; try managing an alcoholic someday and you'll know what I mean.

[Ken Dryden]

Frankly, I would like to hear more of Fats Waller's early recordings on pipe organ, as

they have generally been overlooked by reissue labels. The only one I have is Fats

at the Organ, Vol. 3.

Too bad that he didn't live another 3-4 decades.