FATS WALLER AINT MISBEHAVIN

Like Hallmark's 1996 Fats Waller "best-of" collection, this label's Ain't Misbehavin' is a jumbled mass of Waller material, although tune for tune the selections are slightly stronger than on the earlier release. These recordings, made between 1929 and 1940, include solo essays on piano and pipe organ, two gutsy little jams from 1929 featuring the first band to make records as Fats Waller & His Buddies, and a rowdy rendition of Slim Gaillard's "Flat Foot Floogie" recorded in London by Fats Waller & His Continental Rhythm in 1938. Tossing Waller's Buddies' recording of "Harlem Fuss" into the middle of a batch of songs whipped off by his Rhythm band during the 1930s rather muddies the palette and smears the distinction between the Prohibition-era intensity of the hastily assembled Buddies and the more routine proceedings of Waller's Rhythm, a group that settled into a pattern of Bluebird record production that would only cease with the union-imposed recording ban of 1942. This is a good album to have around unl