Search - Fats Waller :: Fats Waller 1926-1927

The Best Fats Waller Disc

06/14/2002

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This is the best Waller disc ever. The sound is excellent; the performances superb. It features very rare and unusual tracks of Waller playing quite a good pipe organ at the Lenox Avenue Baptist Church in Camden, New Jersey. The first two tracks--the classic standard "St. Louis Blues," and "Church Organ Blues"--have the strange ambiance of Tod Browning's "Freaks." The next half dozen tracks cheerfully lead up to the wonderful standard "Sugar" for solo organ. I could gladly wake up to this track every day! Waller's solo realization is followed by the great duo coverage with the incomparable Alberta Hunter: it doesn't get any better than this! "Beale Street Blues" gets the same treatment, followed by "I'm Goin' to See My Ma." Three tracks of Dixieland style jazz follow with Waller on organ, accompanied by clarinet, trombone, and drums. The last tracks find Waller on piano accompanying the little known Maude Mills in four bluesy songs in the Bessie Smith vein--which address and represent early 20th-century Afro-American cultural sensibilities. "Black Snake Blues," for example, recalls the almost contemporaneous "Black Snake Moan" of Blind Lemmon Jefferson and Leadbelly. This is the disc to get and to give!"