The father of jazz organ playing and the undisputed master of hot pipe organ jazz is Fats Waller. The son of a Harlem Baptist preacher, Waller learned the pipe organ early in life before taking up the piano. By his late teens he was making a living as a musician, playing at rent parties and accompanying silent films on theatre organs. By his mid twenties, he had started a career as a Broadway composer and was in demand for recording sessions.
It's fun to imagine sitting in the senior Waller's Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, listening to a teen aged Thomas playing stride piano style on the church organ. Had it not been for the march of recording technology and Victor's acquisition of a recording studio that had once been a church, imagining might be all we could do. Fortunately, the replacement of acoustical recording by electric recording in 1925 made it technically feasible to record pipe organs, and the presence of the Esley instrument in the former Trinity Baptist Church on North 5th Street gave us an organ to record, and we now have a unique historical record of some mighty hot jazz on the pipe organ.
These first recordings were made at Victor's Camden studios in May, 1927 and again in December when a group billed as Thomas Waller with Morris's Hot Babies made a number of recordings featuring Morris on the trumpet and the twenty-three year old Waller on the piano and organ. My absolute favorite takes from those sessions are the "Fats Waller Stomp," and "Red Hot Dan."
The "Fats Waller Stomp" was recorded on May 20th, and starts right off with a pipe organ segway with the ensemble joining in after a few bars. This is a real swinging—though episodic—piece with a number of remarkable interludes including Morris crazily flicking the valves of his trumpet like he was trying to get out a jazz version of The Flight of the Bumblebee.
"Red Hot Dan" is interesting for the first recorded vocal by Fats, and that he starts out playing the piano, switching to the organ half way through the take. The group on this cut was Waller, piano and pipe organ, Morris, coronet, Jimmy Archey, trombone; Bobbie Leecan, guitar, and Eddie King, drums. About two minutes into the take, Leecan starts a guitar solo backed up by Waller with some rhythmic chords on the piano. After a bit the chords abruptly stop and seven seconds later the pipe organ kicks in and we have what must be the first and probably one of the only examples of a pipe organ and acoustic guitar jazz duo. The rest of the band then joins in for a raucous and rousing finale.
Though the vocal on "Red Hot Dan" was scat singing, Waller went on to be a popular pianist and vocalist, recording scores of 78s for RCA in the 1930s. Although RCA made Waller sing a lot of overly commercial dreck, he left us with some true masterpieces including an amazing piano solo of "Vipers Drag" and, true to his pioneering spirit, the first commercial recording featuring a Hammond Organ.
If you'd like to hear the "Fats Waller Stomp" or "Red Hot Dan," click on over to Red Hot Jazz and have at it. Almost all of Waller's recordings are available there via streaming audio. Happy toe tapping! Also, if you'd like to read more about the history of jazz organ, visit The Jazz Organ: A Brief History.
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