Yeah, All Rise: A Joyful Elegy for Fats Waller is a tribute to the great stride pianist, but in Jason Moran's hands, it's not what one would expect. This album isn't full of stride piano, but it is full of Fats Waller's larger persona as a performer. Waller mixed jokes and comic routines, and did whatever he could to connect with his audience in his act, and if his piano playing was the hinge, it sat on a door that opened straight to the dancefloor. This album had its beginnings when Moran was commissioned by the N.Y.C. performing arts venue Harlem Stage Gatehouse to create a tribute to Waller as part of its Harlem Jazz Shrines series. Moran came up with a unique combination of piano, vocal jazz, and dance that used Waller's signature songs as springboards. Collaborating with singer Meshell Ndegeocello, wearing a large papier-mâché mask of Waller's head created for him by Haitian artist Didier Civil, and adding interpretive dancers, Moran called his conceptual tribute The Fats Waller Dance Party, and All Rise is the studio-recorded rendition of the project. It's a stunning mix of piano jazz with moody, winsome late-night vocals, and it has plenty of get-up-and-go when it's time for it. If it doesn't sound much like Waller, one could imagine Waller would love it, and his signature songs are well represented, including "Ain't Misbehavin'," which Ndegeocello sings with a wistfully sultry edge, "The Joint Is Jumpin'," which is just that, a joyous and yet graceful romp, and a ethereal take on "Ain't Nobody's Business," which in Moran and Ndegeocello's hands becomes a dark, moody, and elegantly defiant statement in modal jazz. This set manages to be reverent to Waller's original recordings, but since facsimile was never the goal, it also manages to create a completely new veneer for them, and the end result is a marvelous tribute that still retains its own shape and coherency. - Steve Leggett
Contemporary makeovers of the hits of classic-jazz legends can make you want to run for cover, but this celebration of the 1930s swing legacy of Thomas “Fats” Waller comes from a credible source: the incisive mind and cutting-edge methods of award-winning Texas pianist Jason Moran. He has already shown his class in this territory with a startling reappraisal of the music of Thelonious Monk. Waller was a big-time pop singer as well as a piano virtuoso, so Moran hit on the inspired idea of giving R&B, soul and jazz star Meshell Ndegeocello a central vocal role. She stirs a gripping emotional ambiguity of fraught whispers and neo-soul defiance into this eerily visionary set, veering between swing-jazzy horn hooks, edgy sax lines (avantist Steve Lehman makes a brief appearance), heavy funk drumming, and Moran’s blazing fusions of stride-piano stomping and free-improv. Ain’t Misbehavin’ thus emerges as a stealthily vaporous song over clumpy percussion; Lulu’s Back in Town joins swing, Monk and Cecil Taylor; Ain’t Nobody’s Business is a pure, privately intoned incantation; and the usually frantic Jitterbug Waltz is dreamy and slow. Some Waller devotees will recoil, but this is a respectful tribute from a remarkable modern-music mind. - John Fordham / theguardian.com
Tracks
01. Put Your Hands on It (Jason Moran)
02. Ain't Misbehavin' (Harry Brooks/Andy Razaf/Fats Waller)
03. Yacht Club Swing (Herman Autrey/j.C. Johnson/Fats Waller)
04. Lulu's Back in Town (Al Dubin/Harry Warren)
05. Two Sleepy People (Hoagy Carmichael/Frank Loesser)
06. The Joint Is Jumpin' (J.C. Johnson/Andy Razaf/Fats Waller)
07. Honeysuckle Rose (Andy Razaf/Fats Waller)
08. Ain't Nobody's Business (Porter Grainger/Evewrett Robbins)
09. Fats Elegy (Jason Moran)
10. Handful of Keys (Fats Waller)
11. Jitterbug Waltz (Fats Waller)
12. Sheik of Araby/I Found a New Baby (Palmer/Smith/Snyder/Wheeler/Williams)
LERON THOMAS trumpet, vocals
JOSH ROSEMAN trombone
STEPHEN LEHMAN sax
JASON MORAN piano, organ
TARUS MATEEN bass
CHARLES HAYNES drums, vocals
NASHEET WAITS drums
MESHELL NDEGECE cello
LISA E. HARRIS vocals
Recorded at Brooklyn Recording, Brooklyn, NY
Blue Note - 0602537534296