Fats and more ......

That's me, somewhere in the 1960s, playing the piano - trying to imitate the boogie woogie masters (like Albert Ammons and Meade Lux Lewis) or playing stride ( like Fats Waller, James P. or Eubie Blake). The old masters would have smiled.

Fats Waller was my first idol. Together with Hans van der Veer I collected all RCA Black & White""The Complete Fats Waller Recordings". We started to make a Fats Waller discography, unknown that Laurie Wright should publish his ""Fats" in Fact" in 1992. Thanks to the fact that Hans van der Veer worked at Philips in Eindhoven ( The Netherlands) he could buy cheap reel-to-reel tapes for my Akai taperecorder, and due to the fact he earned some money he could buy most of the Black & Whites and tape it for me. So my first "complete" collection was the Fats Waller musical heritage.

Nice detail: Some years ago I found the two RCA Fats Waller Memorial LP sets at a reasonable price at a record fair and bought both boxes. In the 1970s these boxes were inaccesible for me - now I have it !! (although I have the music in the boxes already on cassettes and CDs).

Record collectors are weird !!