One of next year’s most eagerly anticipated albums has got to be Jason Moran’s deconstructionist Fats Waller Dance Party (Blue Note). If the Bandwagon pianist’s earlier inspired take on Thelonious Monk’s landmark 1959 concert at Town Hall in tandem with the photographs of W. Eugene Smith and multimedia projections is anything to go by, our impressions of Waller, who died 70 years ago on 15 December, and his music could well be radically altered and reassessed. In the meantime here are 10 nuggets of Wallerian lore to act as a reminder of a jazzman whose career could well have been summarised by just two words from the title of a song of his he became synonymous with: ain't misbehavin’

10 Thomas Wright “Fats” Waller had 11 siblings (source: Baltimore Afro-American 30 June 1928).
9 As a 19-year-old Fats Waller broadcast his music for the first time in 1923. His radio career would last just 20 years.
8 Fats Waller’s “big break” occurred at a party given by George Gershwin in 1934.
7 Waller was later a pupil of stride master James P Johnson but began to study piano at the age of nine (Baltimore Afro-American 30 June 1928).
6 Waller was a pioneer of syncopating on a full-sized church organ in the late-1920s, and he recorded on organ for HMV in 1938.

5 Waller wrote scores for the Broadway musicals Keep Shufflin’, Hot Chocolates, and Early to Bed. 
4 In October 1922 Waller made his recording debut as a soloist with 'Muscle Shoals Blues' and ‘Binningham Blues’. 
3 Waller formed his sextet the Rhythm in 1934. 
2 Waller was taken ill during a return visit to the West Coast as a solo pianist at the Zanzibar Room in Hollywood and died of pneumonia while travelling back to New York by train with his manager.
1 Waller was inducted into the Nesuhi Ertegun hall of fame in Jazz@Lincoln Center in 2005.

Fats Waller top and Jason Moran right photo: Blue Note