Arts
It don't come from Fats
Benny Green
Ain't MisbehavinIFIer Majesty's Theatre) In 1944 the HMV Record company issued a performance by Thomas 'Fats' Waller called 'When Somebody Thinks You're Wonderful'. The record appeared on a brown label and there was an immediate howl of aesthetic outrage from members of rhythm clubs, amateur bands and all the rest of those jazzlovers for whom the appearance of a new Fats Waller record constituted a great event. The HMV brown label was reserved for lesser dance bands, nondescript popular singers and 'novelty' acts, while all its jazz artists appeared on the more costly scarlet label. All Waller's previous wartime issues had appeared on the red label, and this sudden switch of policy hinted at demotion. It seemed disgraceful that the great Thomas Fats should be reduced from the royal scarlet, and the sin was compounded by the fact that the demotion had been performed in the victim's absence, as it were; Waller had died in the previous December. The brown label was all very well for the insipidities of Glenn Miller, but that Fats should be shuffled off into the same category seemed an unspeakable outrage. It turned out to be nothing of the kind. The next Waller issue sported the scarlet once more. The incident of the brown label had been a mere error of judgment by some underling wrestling with the hopeless problem of deciding if Thomas Fats was 'Jazz' or 'Novelty', the fact that he was both evidently having escaped notice.
The identical problem has attended the efforts of those responsible for Ain't Misbehavin', a musical revue featuring five artists and a small band of the type which the management fondly imagines that Thomas Fats enjoyed working with, and based on music either sung, played or written by Waller. It becomes obvious after five minutes that so far as the true nature of Waller's art is concerned, the show's devisers were not able to make up their minds, and perhaps had no minds to make up. The mood of the piece wavers between exces sive mugging and magnified mannerism of execution on the one hand and, on the other, occasional dutiful hints that some where behind all the slapstick there was a great musician to be disclosed. That the show not only fails to disclose 'him but actually takes some trouble to camouflage him was only to be expected, and I doubt if many theatre-goers will come away disappointed: he who has never hoped can never despair. Taking the show on its own level, which is that of Waller the happy clown calculating his own sloppiness down to the last wink against a background of a Harlem scintillating with toothsome smiles, it is a mildly entertaining, unpretentious evening of syncopated songs, an evening of plastic jazz for those audiences who don't really care much for that sort of thing, with the bowdlerising of the authentic jazz spirit calculated to a nicety. At one point, two men in the company, the serpentine sharp cat Andre de Shields and the Fats figure Evan Bell invite the audience to chant the title of 'Fat and Greasy',, and there is revealed the indomitable rhythmic irresolu tion of the British, who clap blissfully on the first and third beats instead of on the second and the fourth, the ability to understand the essential primacy of the second and fourth beats in a bar being the litmus test by which every jazz performer assesses the nature of his audience. I suppose it was inevitable that trifles like 'Fat and Greasy' should dominate in a show of this kind, but there are far too many of them. The devisers, Horwitz and Maltby, indulge in much twaddle in their programme note about the inac cessibility of most of Waller's music; such sentimentalising is a ridiculous impertinence in the face of the omission of the best Waller ballad of all, 'Blue Turning Grey Over You'.
But to be frank, omissions of that kind don't much matter, because in any case the cast would have been wildly incapable of doing justice to them. This is not to mock the five performers, who expend enormous amounts of energy and some artifice. But Waller's best material demands genius of a certain very specialised kind. The contrary argument — and it has been presented to me a dozen times since the show opened — is that Ain't Misbehavintis a stage show, not a jazz recital, and to apply the standards of one to the nature of the other is patently immoral. Perfectly true, except there are several junctures at which Horwitz and Maltby have drawn attention to the gulf by papering it over. What is one to say of 'Handful of Keys', a fast piano exercise written by Waller in 1933 and now metamorphosed into a song whose lyrics 'explain' Stride piano style? The sheer awfulness of this moment can hardly be conveyed without breaching the libel laws, but it is as well to remember that the greatest jazz pianist of all time, Art Tatum, once said, 'I come from Fats. And that's quite a place to come from.' What would Tatum have made of 'Handful of Keys' in its present defaced condition?
Nobody versed in jazz culture can forgive any of this, and it is asking too much to expect him to do so. One example among many is the rendering of 'I've Got a Feeling I'm Falling' by the show's fat lady, Annie Joe Edwards, who performs it adequately enough. But such a song demands more than adequacy, and to appreciate that fact is to appreciate the nature of what Waller the composer was doing. 'I've Got a Feeling I'm Falling' is a harmonic pattern, a sort of musical algebraic equation, a message in musical code which requires to be deciphered before we can have the remotest idea of the scope of Waller's mind. In the famous 1956 Louis Armstrong recording the map of Waller's harmonic sequence is transmuted into a brilliant landscape by Armstrong's art; only then does the listener perceive the enigma of Waller, who split his life between the composition of such pearls and what might best be defined as mucking about. No doubt it is grossly unfair to go to a West End show and invoke gods like Armstrong. And I would never have dreamed of doing so had not Horwitz and Maltby invoked a god like Waller.
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