Word: waller
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...most people, those are the lyrics of a 1935 Fats Waller song, Spreadin' Rhythm Around. But to audiences at Broadway's Longacre Theater, they are official marching orders, a direct command from the feet to the brain. Not since Fats was tapping the keys back in speakeasy days has old Manhattan had such a good high-hattin' time as it does in Ain 't Misbehavin', a musical collection of 30 songs Waller composed or helped to make famous. To put it mildly, Ain't Misbehavin ' is behaving wildly. Three days after it opened...
Though they seem to have been singing Fats' songs all their lives, most of the performers knew little about him. When they began rehearsals, they watched old Waller film clips to get in the proper mood. Maltby, the son of Music Arranger Richard Maltby, knew nothing of Fats before his friend and associate director Murray Horwitz suggested building a show around Waller's work. They both soon discovered, as Maltby told TIME'S Janice Castro, that "nobody wedded comedy and music the way Fats did. He is always playing little jokes on the side...
When he signed his first recording contract in the '20s, Thomas ("Fats") Waller demanded an unusual rider: there had to be a fresh bottle of gin on his piano when he arrived in the morning and another to take home when he left in the afternoon. But then there was nothing usual about Fats. "He was a man of gargantuan appetites and talent," says Murray Horwitz, Ain't Misbehavin's associate director. "He was 100%. When he was with you, he didn't hold anything back. Everything he had was yours, his heart and whatever else...
...father was a pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, the establishment that Adam Clayton Powell Jr. later made famous. He started playing the harmonium when he was six, and his proud father took him to Carnegie Hall to hear Paderewski, hoping that Fats would become a classical pianist. Waller had other ideas, however, and when he was in his teens, he fell under the tutelage of Willie ("the Lion...
...humor and an inimitable, natural ease. The songs he composed had the same ebullience. "There isn't a dead bar in his music," says Richard Maltby Jr. "Every one has a joke in it. He wrote the wittiest songs I've ever heard." Besides the title song, Waller's hits include Honeysuckle Rose, I've Got a Feeling I'm Falling, The Joint Is Jumpin 'and Lookin' Good but Feelin...