Plenty Enough To Go Around
6--AGENDA-- MAY 1998
Plenty Enough To Go Around
The Music of Thomas 'Fats' Waller
by Arwulf Arwulf
"In truth, there is no confusion possible between the monotony born of a lack of variety and the unity which is a harmony of varieties, an ordering of the Many. 'Music, ' says the Chinese sage Seu-ma-tsen in his memoirs, 'is what unifies. ' This bond of unity is never achieved without searching and hardship. But the need to créate must clear away all obstacles." - Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music
Fats Waller's pipe organ i presence is something strangely primal. I like to play the records with the volume turned up as thunderstorms approach to rile the air and rearrange the soil, this enormous heart, lr-"with its antiquated pneumatic monster voice, chortling through the seasonal downpour. Something primal this way comes. In botany, a pneumatophore is a specialized structure developed from the root in certain plants which grow in swamps or marshes, serving as a respiratory organ. (Thank you, Webster's dictionary.) This is entirely in keeping with the Fats Waller pipe-organ-induced vision: Water and Wind elements meet the Earthy Fire of the Beale Street Blues. And there's even a "Sloppy Water Blues." I want for you to hear and see it too; early Jazz played on a pipe organ in a renovated church.
The purposeful perambulatory progress of the "Soothin' Syrup Stomp" seems to cali down all manner of stomps:"Hog Maw Stomp," "The Digah's Stomp," and "Stompin' the Bug." Get a load of the picket-fence sincerity behind Waller's treatment of W.C. Handy's beautiful opus, "Loveless Love." Buttonhole honesty of Spencer Williams' "I Ain't Got Nobody." We're talking sanctity and the blues, good people. Check this out for yourselves. Hopefully you will be able to take the time to listen in on Waller's multiple versions of Irving Berlin's "Waiting at the End of the Road." Here is a divine and righteous austerity. The cosmic elegance of Waller's own Harlem allegro, 'That's All." A study in immaculate ease.
Thomas "Fats" Waller was our very first Jazz organist. There was a guy by the name of Jesse Crawford who recorded pop songs on the instrument contemporaneously with Fats. But those were not Jazz records. They didn't swing. And Crawford clung tenaciously to the melody line. Fats Waller turned every melody into hermetic wonderment. He reinvented the 3 minute song, filling hundreds of 10-inch 78 rpm records with the Pan-African alchemy of Jazz.
Thomas Waller, the son of a minister, grew up operating a harmonium, accompanying his parents on the streets of Harlem. The new music called Jazz was soon busting out all around him. One day he caught heil from his dad for playing "the devil's music" on the church organ. So he took himself to the movie house, a place which Edward Waller considered a "den of iniquity." Seated in the orchestra pit, Fats would accompany silent films and newsreels, sometimes using piano but most excitingly the big theater organ. One day he was jamming away on a bluesy stomp in response to the enthusiastic encouragement of his friends in the audience. Glancing up at the screen, Fats suddenly realized he was providing the soundtrack for stoic footage of a state funeral ! Whoops.
By 1926, the Victor recording people had set up their equipment inside the Trinity Church in Camden, New Jersey. First there were the organ solos. Then they started having Waller sit in with Fletcher Henderson's full-sized orchestra. This was among the very first true big bands - one which set the stage for the successes of Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman. Henderson's 1926 recording of Mel Stitzel's "The Chant" contains a banjo solo backed by Waller's pipe organ! I cannot recall ever hearing these two instruments sounding together in this way. (Charles Ives might have tried this combination.) The effect is very very strange. Almost surreal.
When Fats recorded with cornettist Thomas Morris and his Seven Hot Babies in 1927, he would alternate between piano and organ, switching back and forth many times during a given song. Probably my favorite title from these sessions is the delightful "Please Take Me Out Of Jail." In 1928, Fats made a handful of beautiful sides with James P. Johnson, Garvin Bushell and Jabbo Smith. Calling themselves "The Louisiana Sugar Babes," this interesting little ensemble combined piano, pipe organ, comet, alto sax, oboe and bassoon. I cannot recommend this stuff highly enough. It is an early example of Jazz as chamber music. Quite a contrast to the 1929 "Fats Waller and his Buddies" sessions, which mainly consist of piano-driven hot Jazz blowouts.
In 1934, Fats Waller and his Rhythm, an intimate five or six piece swing band, began to appear on the Victor Bluebird label. Again, piano predominates, but when the organ appears it is in a misty romantic lament entitled "Night Wind." Very sentimental but completely infused with some serious blues. Soon Fats was utilizing the newly developed Hammond Organ, and had it hauled with him wherever he went. Upon touring England and parts of Continental Europe, he had several opportunities to play upon the mighty and majestic church and theatre organs of the Old World. Most meaningful for him was the access which was granted him to the grand old organ of the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris.
Fats never forgot his churchified roots, and often referred to the organ as "the God Box." His last sessions included the organ backing a big band on Waller's masterpiece the "Jitterbug Waltz." In September of 1943 Waller waxed a whole gang of sides for the armed forces V-Disc label, pressed on newly developed light-weight 'unbreakable' 12-inch records which wcre shipped to the soldiers overseas during the second world war. About half of these feature the organ. The artist chatters happily and speaks directly to the troops, very personable. By the end of December 1943 Fats Waller was dead from partying too much and not getting enough rest. He was 39 years old.
My introduction to the music of Thomas Waller took place during the autumn of 1975. I was given a long-playing phonograph record full a piano solos from 1929 and "Rhythm" sides daling from 1937. The name of the record was "Smashing Thirds" - a title from one of those piano solos. It was one of many volumes in RCA Victor's "Vintage" series, among the best Jazz reissuing efforts of the 1 960s. Waller talked to everybody: the listener, the musicians, and the piano or organ keys themselves. At his best he could be disarmingly funny or shaman-serious.
The effect upon my central nervous system was dramatic, instantaneous, and permanent. I have never recovered from that record! Within two years of my first dose of Harlem Stride Piano, I was sitting in on other people's radio shows, playing the music really loudly and telling everyone I met about Fats Waller. Over the past twenty years I've established a tradition of airing Fats Waller in depth all throughout the month of May, which is Fats Waller Month, as far as I'm concerned. (He was born May 21st, 1904.) Currently, my Sunday Best show on WEMU (89.1 FM) features Fats Waller, together with his piano mentors James P. Johnson and Willie "The Lion" Smith, every Sunday morning in the month of May, right after the 10 am news. There will be plenty enough piano to go around, but you'd better believe I'm not afraid to play those organ records either.