S03E02 – Fats Waller, Harlem, 1904

Ero giovane e forte, avevo quasi 20 anni e sapevo che il mondo era mio, avevo la chiara impressione che stesse per accadere e tutto era li affinché lo potessi prendere.

Harlem, 1904

A truck parked in the driveway of a church, an anarchist and authoritarian father, a pastor who considers jazz the devil’s music, and a mother who is a musician, devoted to the church and to her husband but with a secret passion for jazz music—or rather, for that music they did not yet know was called jazz. And finally, Harlem, New York, the United States. Contradiction.

It is 1904. Harlem is a peripheral neighborhood of New York, beyond Central Park, north of the city’s nerve center, in a great metropolis on the frontier of the New World. It is the neighborhood of Italians, Eastern European Jews, and the Irish. Mafia, smuggling, illegal gambling dens, and prostitution are the main tourist attractions.

Developers—the real estate speculators of wealthy white families—are beginning to realize the failure of a large-scale gentrification project, as we would call it today. They had thought they could push mafiosi and “potato-eaters,” as they called the Irish, even farther out, and build grand buildings for the white bourgeoisie, buying land cheaply, constructing, and reselling luxury apartments. But supply far exceeds demand, and so Harlem awakens filled with beautiful, empty buildings.

A considerable number of white residents find themselves with expensive apartments in a neighborhood that falls short of expectations—one where they would not want to raise children or start a business. Yet it is also a neighborhood where entire nights of perdition unfold, among brothels, nightclubs, opium dens, speakeasies, and everything that bourgeois public morality denounces by day and indulges in by night.

It is within this extreme contradiction that Thomas Wright Waller is born, on May 21, 1904.

It is a very important name: Thomas Wright, a Methodist pastor and founder of the Zion Methodist Church, was a key figure in the foundation of the African American community in North America. An early abolitionist, he preached freedom against slavery through the Bible and founded a church-community that supported the many formerly enslaved African Americans who had fled from the South.

In Harlem, the Methodist Episcopal Church offered free schools to the children of African Americans and stood at the heart of the freedom movements that have shaped the social history of the United States over the past century.

Thomas is the seventh of eleven children.

“Ah, Thomas was a strange character. His father was, his mother too. That was a family full of dark sides and incredible lights. Edward was a Baptist pastor; he had his own church but didn’t get along with many people. So to make ends meet he worked as a truck driver. Have you ever seen a truck-driver pastor? Neither had I. He was a revolutionary, he believed in the self-determination of the African American people, but he hated the music African Americans played—he called it the devil’s music. So he always told his son Thomas Wright, named after the famous Thomas Wright, that if he wanted to play music he could, but as long as he was alive he would only be allowed to play sacred music and classical music. The devil’s music, no.”

The Wallers do not have a piano at home, and Thomas practices mainly on the organ at his father’s church. Everything he knows he learns from his mother, who teaches him how to read music, harmony, and everything he needs to know to play sacred music—hymns and gospel. The pact is clear: “study the music needed for the services,” nothing more.

He is ten years old and regularly plays gospel music, accompanies the psalms, and enjoys playing during church services. But that forbidden music… well, perhaps precisely because it is forbidden…

The neighbor has a piano; he is a quiet fellow and a close friend of Thomas’s mother. When the father is away driving his truck, it is on that piano that Thomas begins to move his fingers through the forbidden music, with his mother’s complicity.

How many times have you heard, “Ma’am, your son, your daughter is smart, but they don’t apply themselves”? A countless number of times in so many stories about people who went on to do great things. It was the same for Fats, as they called him at school. He attends occasionally, prefers to play music, and is even starting to earn a little money.

On 135th Street at the corner of Lenox Avenue, they are looking for a resident organist. Maria Downs, a former actress of Cuban descent, has recently taken over the Lincoln Theatre. She is expanding it, and it will soon become an 800-seat cinema-theatre, featuring silent films and a program of shows from the vaudeville circuit—a circuit of variety shows and African American performers. Fats auditions and is immediately accepted. It is his first experience outside his father’s church.

“The boy was very promising. He had an incredible ear. Yes, at first he played a lot of gospel, but it didn’t take him long to open up to other styles. He also had a great sense of humor. Ah, certain silent films with his music became absolutely hilarious. The Lincoln was a cornerstone for Harlem’s African American community; everyone went there, and great artists passed through. I imagine those must have been very enlightening encounters for Fats.”

“I was young and strong, nearly twenty, and I knew the world was mine; I had the clear impression that something was about to happen, and everything was there for me to take.” This is what Langston Hughes wrote in a collection of poems published in 1926 during his time living in Harlem.

Being sixteen in Harlem in 1920 meant being in one of the most explosive, contradictory, and culturally vibrant places in the United States. It was a time when Harlem was becoming the world capital of African American culture, right in the years leading up to the Harlem Renaissance—a cultural and social rebirth in which Fats was poised to play a leading role.

In November 1920, an event of devastating magnitude shakes Fats’s life. His mother, long ill with diabetes, dies suddenly. They say that when a parent dies, it is like dying for the first time and then being reborn. For Fats, this is exactly how it feels. The loss of his mother upends every balance; Fats no longer has any filters, as if his very being has no boundaries, as if he no longer owes anything to anyone—he dies inside.

The relationship with his father, worn down by years of restrictions, impositions, and lies, erupts. It erupts when Fats tells him that he no longer wants to play in church, that he will not become a minister of God, that he will not be a pastor. He wants to play jazz—and his mother would have agreed. His father literally throws him out of the house, effectively disowning him, as we would say today.

And thankfully so, because it is here that Edward Wright Waller, silent-film organist and church musician, dies once and for all to give birth to Fats Waller, jazz pianist.

“The boy was pretty shaken when he showed up at my door. He came to my piano lessons sometimes. Yes, I knew his father wasn’t supposed to know and all that… well, I don’t judge—music doesn’t judge. He told me his mother had died and that his father wanted him out of the house. I said, ‘So? What do you want from me, boy?’ And he said, ‘A couch and a piano.’”

Russell Brooks doesn’t just give Fats Waller a roof over his head. Russell isn’t a famous pianist; he doesn’t perform much, but he has many students and knows a lot of people. It is at Russell’s home that Fats meets pianist James P. Johnson for the first time. Johnson is one of the five or six pianists who go around claiming to have invented jazz. You might say, “He wasn’t the first.” True—and he wouldn’t be the last. Jazz had been “invented” at least a hundred times, as even Jelly Roll Morton had written on his business card. Johnson invented jazz every night and would challenge another pianist, Willie “The Lion” Smith. Both were inventing jazz, both did it every night, and both claimed to have invented Fats Waller as well.

Willie would say:

“Fats Waller? When I met him, he wasn’t even born yet—he was just a potential. He followed me everywhere. He played well, had an innate desire for jazz, but above all, for irreverence. I think he played jazz to annoy someone, maybe his father… who knows. Anyway, it was me who encouraged him to make more of that clownish face he had, to pull faces and make expressions. He was a showman, had magnetic eyes, was hilarious—a natural entertainer.”

Johnson said the same thing:

“I met the boy when he was just a fixture at old Russell’s house. The crazy thing was that he could get out of bed at any hour and play with skill—no warming up needed—as if he were completely alert. And then he had this rejection of morality; anything irreverent or that could annoy people, especially white folks, amused him. He followed me everywhere, and it was I who insisted that he also work on his showman persona.”

And so, Fats Waller—son of a thousand fathers, biological, putative, artistic—became a star of Harlem. He cared about nothing but music. He drank excessively and fed off the energy of the audience. People flocked to hear him because an evening with him was at once a concert of great jazz and a show full of comedy and sarcasm. He also carried this underlying irreverence, this desire to challenge public morality, to go against the system, to say what, depending on the context, could not be said.

“Fats wrote this song, *All That Meat and No Potatoes*. He had a crush on a musician, a singer whose name I’ll never tell you. She was… well, I can’t say what she was, but I *can* tell you what she wasn’t. She didn’t fit the magazine standards, that’s for sure. And thankfully, I’d add. Anyway, all that meat and no… well, that was the point. Writing a song like that, talking about a woman’s breasts, drove the white folks crazy. You should have seen their faces when they heard it… oh, public morality, the self-righteous would pull some faces… and Fats would laugh. That was exactly why he wrote it. When I, his agent, said, ‘Hey Fats, the radio will censor this,’ he replied, ‘Don’t worry, Ed, I wrote it *exactly* to piss off censorious morality.’”

Fats really played everywhere. Wherever there was a piano and a potential audience, he was there. He often played at rent parties—parties people organized in their apartments, originally built for the white bourgeoisie but now home to African American families. These were crowded parties, full of people, alcohol, and often marijuana. Tenants would recruit musicians, inviting them to play in exchange for a little money and guaranteed fun.

These parties attracted not only friends but friends of friends, and friends of friends of friends, all paying a few dollars at the door. It was a way to make extra money and cover the rent. For Fats, it was a godsend—a ready audience to test new compositions and jokes, rivers of alcohol, and guaranteed entertainment until morning.

One evening, Fats is enjoying a break between sets. He has a week-long engagement at the Sherman House Hotel, three sets a night played in the lounge next to the restaurant. He’s standing on the sidewalk in front of the entrance, his left hand hiding a flask of whiskey, which he sips between puffs of a cigar. The Sherman is in the Loop neighborhood, in the heart of Chicago, at the corner of two busy streets, crowded with both pedestrians and cars.

Suddenly, a car stops in front of him. Two men get out; one points a gun at him and pushes him into the car. Fats is confused—is it a robbery? A kidnapping? The police? The two men, plus a third driving, say nothing as the car leaves Chicago. Fats fears the worst.

The car screeches to a halt outside the Hawthorne Inn, a club in Cicero, about half an hour from Chicago. Fats Waller has no idea he’s about to experience perhaps the most incredible moment of his life. The man with the gun pushes him into the hotel club, packed with people. As he enters, a man stands and begins to applaud—and the whole room follows. It’s Al Capone, the most powerful mob boss of his time. Pushed from behind, Fats passes in front of Capone and sits at the piano. The man with the gun says, “Play.”

He had just released his version of *Ain’t Misbehavin’*, and only a few months earlier, *Handful of Keys* as a piano solo. His music impressed Capone, who was famous for being a huge fan of jazz, particularly stride piano, the style Waller mastered. That club belonged to Al Capone—actually, the whole hotel did—and it was his birthday. He had decided that Fats Waller would be his birthday present, which is why he had him brought there.

The party lasted three days. Waller could eat and drink whatever he wanted, champagne flowed freely, he was constantly surrounded by beautiful women, and he could play as much as he liked and rest as much as he liked—so long as he played and entertained. After the initial scare, Fats began to enjoy himself. He drank, sobered up, drank again, and fully embraced the chaos and excitement of the celebration.

“Well, of course we called the police—we thought he was dead! Musicians disappearing? Sure, that could happen, but Waller wasn’t one of them. After three days, though, a car dropped him off, drunk, on the sidewalk. He couldn’t stand. We ran out to him—his pockets were full of money, and next to him was an unopened case of champagne.”

The influence Fats Waller had on jazz and the piano is profound and decisive. Not only because of his extraordinary virtuosity, but also because he consolidated and in part defined the language of stride piano. The left hand, leaping (or “striding”) between the bass on the first and third beats of each measure and the chords on the second and fourth, while the right hand plays melodies, improvisations, and brilliant virtuoso runs, became the trademark sound of Harlem in those years. This is a style Fats learned from Willie “The Lion” Smith and James P. Johnson—and he developed it in a forceful, unmistakable way.

Thanks to impeccable timing, a natural bounce, and a rhythmic drive perfectly suited for dancing, Fats brought the piano to the heart of the swing aesthetic, influencing drummers, arrangers, and pianists such as Art Tatum, Count Basie, Teddy Wilson, and Oscar Peterson.

His unique way of combining virtuosity and theatricality, his innate showmanship, his style of singing, and his ability to turn concert moments into hilarious comedies made him a reference point for many who came after him, from Nat King Cole to Ray Charles.

Even today, at swing nights around the world, his pieces are still played and danced to—*Ain’t Misbehavin’*, *Honeysuckle Rose*, *Squeeze Me*.

Fats’s life was intense—a life of excess and constant touring. He traveled relentlessly between the East and West coasts, performing concerts every night for years, never stopping. He was as voracious at the table as he was at the bar and on stage.

On December 15, 1943, he boarded a train in New York that was supposed to take him to the West Coast in a few days. He was tired; his doctor had diagnosed him with a suspected pneumonia, and his friends urged him not to travel, to rest. He never reached his destination. He died at 39, leaving behind what the newspapers of the time would describe as a gaping void.

On the day of his funeral, it is said that 4,200 people tried to enter the Abyssinian Baptist Church on 138th Street, the most important and influential church in Harlem. As he had wished, he was cremated, and his ashes were scattered from an airplane over the skies of Harlem.

Now Fats is there, in the wood of some tree, on a rooftop, in the soil of the parks, in the Harlem he helped shape.

Reverend Edward Waller was right—his son would never become a musician of the devil’s music, a jazz pianist. Fats would become a devilishly good jazz musician, perhaps *the* jazz pianist of his time.

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Il podcast è scritto da Guido Maria Bianchini e Marta Leoni.
Voci di Guido Maria Bianchini e Laura Magni.
Sigla e montaggi di Guido Maria Bianchini.