Fats Waller: Your Feet's Too Big

Here is the Harlem rent party side of Fats Waller. Full-bodied stride piano is mixed in with singing, shtick and comedy, but jazz is the key ingredient, the glue that holds everything together. Waller imitates some heavy, feet's-too-big footsteps for the keyboard intro, and Gene Sedric takes a hot and sweet clarinet solo at the midpoint, but most of this track is Waller's fast and loose delivery of a novelty song transformed into an iconic moment in American music. A taste of New Orleans counterpoint closes the proceedings. Well, it's not really the close, since Waller caps it off with a final bit of monologue: "Your pedal extremities really are obnoxious. One never knows, do one?"