Harlem's Sultan of Stride

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 he might talk you into."

Born in Manhattan in 1904, Fats grew up in Harlem, where his 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")

Smith and James P. Johnson, two masters of "stride piano," in which the left hand carries the beat and the right hand takes the melody, By the time he was in his early 20s, Fats, who at 250 Ibs.plus had already earned his nickname, was well known among musicians; before he was 30, he was on nationwide radio. He developed a style all his own, and his music was marked by a constant vitality, good 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' Bad.

Many of the 500 or so songs Fats wrote have been lost. Waller himself could not always remember his compositions, and he would sometimes give away the rights to a song for as little as taxi fare. The world rights to Ain't Misbehavin' went for less than $500.

Though Waller was a national figure when, in 1943, he died of pneumonia at the age of 39, he was almost forgotten until Maltby revived his music.

"It's criminal," says Maltby, "but a lot of Waller's music is simply gone. The music publishers don't have it, and nobody knows if it exists anywhere." To assemble their show, Maltby and Horwitz unearthed 75 songs.

Maurice Waller, one of Fats' three sons, came up with four or five that no one could remember hearing. The success of Ain't Misbehavin ', Maltby hopes, may bring a few more out of albums and attics. And that, for all those new Waller fans crowding in to see the show, may be the biggest treat of all.

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