Have a Little Dream on Me

So talented a musician and entertainer was Fats (his boundless energy and spontaneous wit seemed never-ending) that one tends to overlook the fact that he had something in excess of 300 compositions to his credit, many of them set to lyrics by his lifelong friend Andy Razaf. He studied piano under some of the finest classical teachers around at the time and although he was influenced by such jazz and ragtime greats as Willie "The Lion" Smith and "Lucky" Roberts, there is no doubt that the man who had the greatest effect upon his piano-playing was James P. Johnson, who taught him the rudiments of the well-known Harlem "stride" piano and remained his revered friend and colleague to the end. & #10; Numerous writers have claimed that Fats could take the most paltry popular song of the day and magically transform it into a veritable classic of jazz, and no matter how many accolades have been poured upon his sheer genius (and there is no other word for it) and I personally subscribe wholeheartedly to every one, let us not lose sight of the fact that Fats worked in an era when "pop" was still music and however trite the tune, even the worst had some potential in the right hands, and there can be no doubting, Fats' were the best.