Sunday, January 9, 2000

FATS WALLER: Man, music larger than life

By LAURA STEWART
NEWS-JOURNAL FINE ARTS WRITER

DAYTONA BEACH — Thomas "Fats" Waller is big, but nowhere bigger right now than at SMT Downtown. That's where rehearsals are under way, and where the Seaside Music Theater's musical revue of great hits by Fats, "Ain't Misbehavin,'" opens Friday.

Of course, Fats was big right from the start. Born in New York's Greenwich Village in 1904, at the height of the Ragtime craze, he moved as a boy to Harlem. And there, when he was just in his teens, the singer/songwriter/actor first hit his stride.

He was huge," said Gary Cadwallader, SMT's director of education and the one who researched Waller's life, music and legend for the revue that runs through Feb. 6 at SMT Downtown. "That's not just because he was physically enormous, though at 5 feet 10 1/2 inches tall and 285 pounds, he certainly was that. His whole family father, mother, everyone was huge.

"But Fats was gargantuan mostly because of his music," he said. When I began researching seriously early last November, I was amazed I had heard of Ain't Misbehavin,'' but I had no idea how major Fats was. I hadn't realized that he had written and performed so much when I looked on amazon.com, I found a list of recordings that goes on forever."

There are songs like the ones in Ain't Misbehavin,'" a show that began 22 years ago as a cabaret revue at the off-Broadway Manhattan Theater Club and became an instant, award-heavy hit when it opened on Broadway, on May 9, 1978. There are also standards Honeysuckle Rose" of 1929; "Keepin' Out of Mischief Now" from 1932; "The Joint is Jumpin,'" 1938. There also are songs written by others and recorded by Waller, from "I'm Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter" from 1933 and "Two Sleepy People," from 1938.

That wasn't all that surprised Cadwallader, and that has him still fascinated enough by Waller to continue learning about him most recently in "Fats Waller," the 1977 biography by son Maurice, with Anthony Calabrese. "That's not due back at the library until Jan. 11, and I think I'll finish it in time," Cadwallader said. "It's amazing we know those songs, but we may not realize that Fats wrote scores for all-black revues like Tan Topics" and "Junior Blackbird" in the mid-'20s and for such Broadway shows as "Hot Chocolate" in 1929 and "Early to Bed" in 1943.

"He didn't perform on Broadway, but he did appear in movies `King of Burlesque,' with Alice Faye; `Hooray for Love,' with Ann Sothern; and `Stormy Weather,' with Lena Horne and Cab Calloway, in 1943," said Cadwallader. That same year, while appearing in Hollywood's Zanzibar Room, Waller became ill and decided to return to New York. He died on the Santa Fe Chief on the way home, when he was 39.

His life was brief, but Waller packed a lot of living into his few years and was central to the musical evolution that led from gospel and blues to ragtime, stride and boogie-woogie to swing, rock and, eventually, hip-hop. Some of his songs were tossed off for Tin Pan Alley publishers to help him with alimony payments and others were performed for European audiences, especially in London and Paris, where Fats was revered even more than in his native country, Cadwallader said.

Then there was the personal life, which was just as prodigious as Waller's life on stage and at the piano. He had grown up in a religious home, and he studied classical piano technique and played the organ at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. But he was drawn to sounds that his father called "music from the devil's workshop," and by the time he was 16 Waller had left the family home.

He taught himself to play stride piano, fitting his fingers into the depressed keys on a player piano that was cranking out stride music in the style of James P. Johnson, who later became his teacher. And soon Fats was in show business accompanying silent films at a neighborhood theater and playing at uptown all-night parties and writing and singing his own songs, in a Harlem full of music, poetry, art and theater.

It was heady business, at a heady time. The Harlem Renaissance was in full swing all around Fats literally, as he was so often at the heart of whatever was happening. He appeared on a radio station that was heard throughout the country and, in 1932, formed his own band, Rhythm. With his group, he toured nationally and overseas, played jazz at Carnegie Hall, appeared in feature films and also made short movies that set the stage for today's music videos, said Cadwallader.

His success was stunning, all the more so because it was achieved so quickly and because while some of his songs became classics, many of the 500 or so he wrote didn't survive. Fats' face is frozen in his characteristic beaming smile, his eyebrows peaked mischievously, as a cultural icon; his music, however, became part of history and evolved into sounds that are hot today.

Fats was always big, and the revival that began off Broadway in 1977 continues with the all-black SMT cast this week, as Cadwallader's study guides are handed out in classrooms throughout the area and the curtain rises on the latest version of "Ain't Misbehavin.'" He had known the original show was a huge hit, Cadwallader said, but it was still amazing to learn just how huge Fats himself was and is. Maybe his teacher, Johnson, summed it up years ago. "Some little people have music in them, but Fats, he was all music, and you know how big he was."

In the end, though, Waller's music and Waller probably are most on target when it comes to explaining the phenomenon that "Ain't Misbehavin'" celebrates. Even now, it's easy to imagine Fats beaming and winking and saying, as he famously did, "One never knows, do one?"