Jazz Life and Times: Fats Waller

Armful’.

INTRODUCTION

There have been more books devoted to the life and works of Fats Waller than to almost any other figure in the history of jazz. What need is there, then, for another one?

The biographies of Waller so far published include Charles Fox’s excellent short life, from 1960, Ed Kirkeby, Duncan Scheidt and Sinclair Traill’s, from 1966, and two books dating from 1977, the first by Waller’s son Maurice and Anthony Calabrese, the second by Joel Vance. Each has added to the tissue of information available about Waller, but in the late 1980s, with much new discographical information available, with almost all Waller’s prolific recorded output having been issued and with new critical attention being paid to Waller’s musical work (notably in Paul Machlin’s Stride), the time is right to look again at the life of this giant of jazz history.

This book takes something of a revisionist stance about dates and events hitherto incorporated into the Waller legend. Notably, the events examined in this way are the first vaudeville tour, mid-twenties visits to Chicago, the musical theatre shows, Fats’s period in prison in late 1928 and the formation of the first big band. If the text concentrates a little less than has been customary on the anecdotes of Waller’s larger-than-life career, and a little more on people, places, events and the professionalism which Waller brought to most aspects of his music making, it is because to those already familiar with Waller, or those coming to him for the first time, such an examination will help place him firmly in the context of his life and times. As well as being the leading stride pianist of his generation (although one who, jazz critics have largely felt, failed to live up to his full potential) Waller may not yet have been considered sufficiently as the master songwriter, show composer and brilliant recording and broadcasting artist that he was.

If all this seems somewhat serious, at the same time it is important to remember the overwhelming sense of humour that Waller brought to much of what he did. It is a rare talent to make an audience laugh aloud at an aside on a gramophone record. That Fats could manage this feat often, and that his irrepressible bonhomie has stood the test of the forty-five years that have passed since his death, is a tribute to his rarest quality of all – the ability to communicate his enormous talent and personality to every listener. When his records are played today on breakfast-time radio, he can make one face the day with a smile and his own philosophical outlook: ‘Well, All right, then!’

The pictures in this book come principally from the Max Jones Collection, Jazz Music Books, the Melody Maker, the author’s collection and, in alphabetical order: Dave Bennett, Buck Clayton, Teresa Chilton, Nancy Miller Elliott, and Caroline Richmond. The illustrations are reproduced by permission. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and the author and publishers apologise to anyone whose name may have been inadvertently omitted from this list.

Fats in the early 1920s.

CHAPTER 1

EARLY LIFE IN HARLEM

Stand at the crossroads of Fifth Avenue and 135th Street in Harlem today, and you will see about you all the trappings of a fairly prosperous suburb. On one corner, the Chase Manhattan Bank; opposite, a small row of shops. On the north-eastern corner, the tall apartment blocks of 2225 Fifth Avenue rise solidly over the neighbourhood. This crossroads is at the very centre of Harlem, nowadays a predominantly black district of Manhattan, and bounded on the south by Central Park, on the north by 155th Street, and stretching across from St. Nicholas Avenue over to the East River.

Much of Harlem today is depressed and squalid. Blackened shells of empty buildings wait for the real-estate sharks or the redevelopers to move in. The street life is full of the contrasts that make up the patchwork of New York City. On one corner the swaying, dangerous shadows of the crack dealers making their nefarious deals at dusk. On another the cheerful lights of a family restaurant where a party of four can eat their fill of soul food, chitlins and collard greens for less than the cost of a cocktail at the smartest downtown nightspots. Soul music and disco sounds swell from open doorways, and the streets are alive with the endless twenty-four hour bustle of all Manhattan.

You could pass by in a bus, a taxi, or a car, and find the experience profoundly depressing. Where now is the glamour of the Cotton Club? The Lafayette? The Lincoln? The first largely torn down, the last two now converted to churches. The shadows of the Alhambra Theater, and the block where the doors have closed for the last time on Smalls Paradise make it seem as if Harlem’s glories, its legends, have vanished for good. Even the too-perfect shining houses of ‘Strivers Row’ on 139th Street, the monument to the endeavours of the black community, seem little more than a token reminder of Harlem’s past.

As with any community, the vicissitudes of time and fashion cannot completely harm it. The strength of the old Harlem was in its people – the black population which adopted this once prosperous northern suburb and made it its own. Go into one of the small bars or diners in the little group of shops on 135th Street, and it is there, in the soul and spirit of the people, that you will find what remains of Harlem’s history.

The buildings that stand on this crossroads at the centre of Harlem cover the site of Leroy’s, the legendary nightspot where Willie ‘the Lion’ Smith held sway at the piano, and where the young Fats Waller played his first cabaret job. Although the buildings have gone, the memories have not. The pianist Sammy Price lives right across the street. ‘Fats Waller? He had soul a plenty, technique in large proportions. Rhythm was really his business, and his singing voice was tops. He did pretty good on the organ too!’

You may meet other friends of Fats. Stanley Shepherd, for instance, the younger brother of Fats’s chauffeur Buster, hangs out in the bars there. ‘Yeah, Fats! He used to pay us kids just to do a little sand dance on the street corners as he came home … he was kicks.’ And just like the old anecdote about Waller’s memorial service where sadness changed to mirth as one after another of the funny stories about his rich and varied life tumbled out, everyone in the bar gathers around Stanley and joins in with his or her memories of Waller and the old days in Harlem.

Fats Waller was an outsize man in almost all respects. Five feet, eleven inches tall, he is reputed to have weighed 285 pounds at the time of his death. His New York Times obituary marvelled at his digital dexterity, given the size of his plump fingers. He was unquestionably the greatest of the Harlem jazz pianists and had a talent as pianist and organist in direct proportion to his physical stature. In addition, Fats had an outsize personality. He was generous, funny, vulgar, and in many ways selfish, but in everything that he did he was larger than life. Stories of the kind that flowed in the 135th Street bar tell of his gargantuan appetites. He womanized, he ate vast meals, and perhaps most noticeably he drank huge quantities of alcohol. The stories may exaggerate, but one after another they tell of the gin on the piano, the bottles of scotch in the recording studio, the ‘liquid ham and eggs’. When Fats’s third son Ronald was asked at school what his father did, the boy thought there was nothing strange about his entirely truthful reply, ‘He drinks gin’.

But if Fats displayed larger-than-life appetites, and went through much of his life unruffled by a daily alcoholic intake that would have killed most normal people in a few days; if he was thoughtless in the treatment of his first wife and son whilst

profligate in his generosity to the poor and to underprivileged children; if he was capable of shouting vulgar jokes over keyboard accompaniments that were dazzling in their virtuosity, nevertheless Fats Waller was a man loved by millions. To those who knew him and those who did not, this maverick, complicated personality and musical genius commands fierce loyalty and affection, even today.

The author and Sammy Price at the junction of 5th Avenue and 135th St near the site of Leroy’s.

Like his contemporary Louis Armstrong, Fats was one of the first of the great jazzmen to break through to a wider public, and to become a popular entertainer of international stature. And just like Louis, Fats was a mass of apparent contradictions. At one level, he was a serious contemplative keyboard player and composer, whose prodigious natural gifts were enhanced by the rigorous training of classical study on the one hand and Harlem nightlife on the other. As well as being the composer of a string of popular hits, Fats was remembered as a craftsman among songwriters, perfecting each note of a written copy so that it was precise and exact for the printer. But he was also legendary for reneging on contracts, a man whom promoters wouldn’t touch twice after seeing him jump into his car before the show, shouting to his chauffeur, ‘Buster! Holland Tunnel’, and disappearing in a cloud of dust for New York. A master of the emergent art of radio broadcasting, Fats occasionally overstepped the bounds of taste or humour. Perhaps nothing underlines the contradictions more perfectly than the story that even when seated at his favourite and most serious instrument, the organ, he was frequently ticked off for disposing of empty gin bottles into the pipework.

So why has his work survived? And why has he commanded so much love and affection through the years?

Partly, the reason is an extraordinary recorded legacy. For his period, Fats was a prolific phonograph artist, and his records have seldom been unavailable since his death in 1943. For the rest, some of the reasons may be found in the story of his life and times, and his mastery of jazz, the musical theatre and the recording studio.

It was 1920 when Waller first came to Leroy’s, at the suggestion of his mentor James P. Johnson. Johnson was the ‘dean’ of the school of brilliant pianists known as the Harlem ‘stride’ players. Most of these men had been born in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, and had served their apprenticeship as what they perceived as being ragtime players. Ragtime was a piano style that grew up in the 1880s and largely centred around the towns of the Midwest, St. Louis, Indianapolis and New Sedalia, where such luminaries as Scott Joplin, Louis Chauvin, May Aufderheide and James Scott held sway. Picked up by the ‘Eastern’ ragtimers, among whom was the young pianist and composer Eubie Blake, the style made its way to New York and was taken up by Johnson, the Lion, and Luckey Roberts as well as some less well-known figures: Abba Labba, Lippy Boyette, Willie Gant, Jack the Bear, ‘Beetle’ Henderson, Corky Williams, Bob Hawkins, Joe Turner and Russell Brooks.

The Joint is Jumpin’: a 1941 film recreation of a rent party. Fats, gin in hand, gets up from the piano.

As late as 1917, James P. Johnson was making piano rolls of pure ragtime compositions, but during World War I, as the focus of black cabaret and club life moved uptown from the 53rd Street area known as the ‘Jungles’ to the very centre of Harlem, the stride piano style crystallized into something recognizable in its own right. The oompah left hand of ragtime became more complex and varied, the patterns less regular, and the intricate right-hand parts became more difficult too. Just as the ragtime pianists of the Midwest had taken one another on at competitive ‘cutting contests’ to determine the most virtuoso or bravura performers, the stride players of New York developed a fierce competitive rivalry. This became adopted into the traditions of the style. Musicians had not only to play a written composition brilliantly, as the ragtimers did, note for note, but had to be equally competent to improvise their own variations in the same style, and to do so in a manner that would outplay any possible competition. The celebrated players found great success and fortune in the cabarets of Harlem, and also at a unique institution that grew up there as a consequence of the intensity of black housing – the rent party.

To understand the rent party fully, it is important to realize that Harlem was originally developed as a prosperous white suburb of New York City. Its big avenues, Seventh and Lenox, were the consequence of a generous town-planning policy that encouraged wide boulevards with plenty of trees and two carriageways to be built. In the original area to be developed, around the turn of the century, spacious housing was erected, designed for people who wanted to live away from the main business areas but have easy access to them, via the elevated railroad to 129th Street.

To capitalize on the boom, the first years of this century saw widespead building, infilling the area between Harlem and downtown Manhattan, and extending northwards. Property developers and real-estate men pushed the price of land and buildings higher and higher, until around 1904 the bottom fell out of the market. Desperate realtors, anxious to recoup their investment, turned to the black community to buy up the property, and the result was a fifteen-year influx of black people to the area, first as owners, but later renting sections of the large new developments at a density never envisaged by the original planners. George Hoefer, the biographer of Willie ‘the Lion’ Smith, estimated that by 1920, 300,000 people were in housing built for 60,000.

Of course, squeezed up maybe five to a room, people still managed somehow to fall behind with the rent. To make money quickly and get out of trouble, the rent party was developed. The principle was simple – a charge was made at the door of an apartment for admission to a party at which everyone had a good time. A piano, and the best pianists in the area, were provided by way of entertainment, and at the end, not only had most of the neighbourhood enjoyed themselves, but the shortfall in the rent had been made up in admission charges. As time went by, these events were sometimes promoted for their own sake as purely commercial ventures, and they provided a source