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Fats Domino

5K views 30 replies 14 participants last post by  John Laughter 
#1 ·
#5 ·
Thanks for posting, John, I didn't know. Some of the best rock and roll ever and he used sax players! Saw him live at the club I was playing at in Va. Beach in 1964. There stood Lee Allen and Herb Hardesty 10' in front of me I didn't know of Herb at that time but will never forget him, because he had his name engraved on the bell of his horn! Not 'Herb', but Herbert.:) The horns were not miked but you could hear Lee Allen across the street in the hotel! Saw Fats a couple more times over the years and he always put on a great show. One of the last of the real performers who poured his heart out into the music every show. Sleep, Fats, and dream of the good old days.
 
#9 ·
Fats is such a huge part of music history, and he loved the tenor saxophone. It was a real honour for me to be in that section for a while, along with Lee Allen and Herb Hardesty. Four tenors and a baritone, lovely.

The horns were not miked but you could hear Lee Allen across the street in the hotel!
When I was with him in 1991, the horns were not miked when we were playing clubs )just a mic for the soloist. Even at large venues, there were a couple of general pics for the section but we all stood about ten feet back. Lee's sound was staggering, a real section leader and master soloist.
 
#7 ·
Just heart about his dead on the Dutch TV, very sad news. :(

I'm glad I've seen him live here in NL at the North Sea Jazz Festival. Love his kind of music and the way he featured the saxophone in his bands.

Glad we still have his records and other registrations of the great music he made during his career.





 
#8 ·
Thanks for posting, John, I didn't know.
Kind of hits home to those of us who started to play sax in the mid 50's. He featured a sax solo or sax section on just about all of his hits along with Little Richard, James Brown, Johnny & the Hurricanes, The Champs, Bill Doggett, Billy Vaughn and many more.

Those of us who played in the local garage bands back in the day will always be glad we grew up in that era. The inspiration to practice was on every jukebox, radio station and T.V. And if bands wanted to get hired for the good gigs they usually had to have at least one sax, and even better if we had a horn section. Many of us older players owe a lot of thanks to the early Rock & Roll and R&B musicians for featuring many awesome sax players.

Fats Domino's music will live on!
 
#10 ·
definitely one of the greatest American originals for sure. A great band leader as well as innovator/performer/singer in his own inimitable way as well. Very personal nice recollections Pete and 1saxman. He's joined them all pretty much now going pretty close to Chuck Berry's passing too.
 
#11 ·
It's hard for me to write about Fats Domino. I knew he had been in poor shape for some time (dementia), but I loved the fact that he was still around, along with the other originators of rock 'n' roll - Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis. Then we lost Chuck a few months ago. Little Richard and Jerry Lee are still with us.

Fats loved horns and always used a lot of them. I didn't know until many years later who those players were, but they became my heroes - Lee Allen, Herb Hardesty. Fats' music was one reason that I wanted to be a sax player when I was a kid. I heard those sax solos which had so much soul and I knew I wanted to do that.

And Dave Bartholomew, trumpet player, was key to the Fats sound and songwriting. "Blue Monday' written by Dave Bartholomew and first recorded by Smiley Lewis, is a perfect song. Fats' version had so much soul and rocked so well, it was irresistible to me. But there are so many other great tunes, and they all rocked and swung. You could feel Fats' joy in all of them.

I've always loved New Orleans R & B. Fats' driving piano sound was the basis for a lot of that music.

My band does a version of "Hello Josephine." Most of the audiences we play to are probably too young to have heard the original. But it gets 'em out on the dance floor every time.

I knew this was coming eventually, as it will come for all of us, but it's still a loss. I'm grateful to Fats for all the music he's given me. I will still listen to him. In fact I have 2 hours of his greatest hits on right now.

"I'm ready, I'm willing, and I'm able to rock and roll all night."
 
#14 ·
Here's an amazing statistic. Fats sold more records than Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Buddy Holly… combined!! The only artist who sold more records than Fats Domino in that era was (you guessed it) Elvis Presley. That should give some idea of the man's popularity and influence. Yet, he isn't mentioned nearly as much as these other artists.
 
#15 ·
Just spending some time on YouTube listening to the stuff of Fats and found this one of him with Elvis (never listened to it before):



Fats only plays piano in 'Blueberry Hill' and Elvis sings, but the piano playing knocked me out. Not complex, but exactly the right feel and Blues licks.

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Also visited today a small concert in Hoofddorp (NL) of the Dixieland band of the trombone player in my Big Band. They featured Fats with a version of 'Blueberry Hill', the crowd loved it. I was wondering during the song in how many places his music would be played today.

Fats is still everywhere in the World, the good man is gone but his music goes on forever. :)
 
#19 ·
One of my gigs is a '50s show - I got an email with some 'new' songs on it and one of them was 'I'm Walkin''. Great solo on it. In all the time I've been playing pop music I don't think any of the bands have played any Fats on a regular basis - maybe a request now and then. Kind of pointless without a damn good piano man.
 
#20 ·
1saxman, are you learning the tenor solo in I'm walkin' by ear from the record?

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Today I took a day off from my regular job to play 4 matches of Three Cushion Billiards for the Dutch ranking tournaments (I'm a semi-professional player). They had fantastic music in the background during the matches, lot's of Fats numbers and other early Rock & Roll tunes passed during the day. For me as Billiards player a disaster, because my mind was more with the next upcoming tenor solo in another Fats tune than with my own achievements! So for me a bad day as Billiards player (I didn't qualify for the main pro tournament), but a wonderful day as amateur tenor player and lover of the music of Fats and other early R&R giants. :)

Like I wrote before: the man is still present everywhere you come!
 
#21 ·
'1saxman, are you learning the tenor solo in I'm walkin' by ear from the record?'

Yes, as usual. I've heard it so many times all I have to do is get all the licks in order and get the inflections/nuances. They're doing in in Ab and I need practice in that key so it'll be good. :)
 
#22 ·
Yes, as usual. I've heard it so many times all I have to do is get all the licks in order and get the inflections/nuances. They're doing in in Ab and I need practice in that key so it'll be good. :)
That sounds like the best way, good luck with the learning process!
 
#23 ·
It won't be any problem. One time I opened my mouth and talked the band I was in into doing King Curtis's version of 'I Was Made To Love Her'. Now that got my attention. 'Divide and conquer' is the rule on something more involved/difficult so I determined it consisted of four-bar phrases, like a lot of music. I drew a graphical representation of the series of eight-bar lines separated into four-bar phrases, writing in only the notes at the start of each. So not only did I have to learn that, I had to learn how to actually play a lot of it including hitting reliable G3s and being able to hold one for four bars at high volume. Plus, there were other altissimo notes I hadn't used much that I had to work on as well as how to play the song with the side Bb held down for the most part. It all came together and we opened with that monster many times.
How would you like to have that looking you in the face right off the bat at the beginning of the job?:) So you can see this little ride in 'I'm Walkin' is not going to be any trouble. In order to do it, you have to be able to fill up the horn with air to make the lower register speak.
 
#25 ·
Just for the moment I'm going to be a contrarian. I love the 2 sax solos in the original recording. I could see playing along with those solos to get the feel and phrasing and some of the licks and note choices. But the idea of playing the solos note-for-note bothers me. I assume those solos were at least partly, if not largely, improvised. I would be bored playing those solos exactly as recorded. It seems to me that the point of the solos is to express yourself in that idiom by improvising solos that are in the style but not exact replicas. Playing the recorded solos note-for-note with the same timing and rhythm seems to me to take the spontaneity and the feeling out of them. This is not to diss the idea of learning the solos exactly as recorded. I'm expressing my personal preference. YMMV. Play on ...
 
#26 ·
Lee Allen once told me the reason I got the gig with Fats is because I played in the style and knew the solos as opposed to to going to far out, which one or two of the horn players sometimes did when they got bored.

Lee would not necessarily play the jambalaya solo note for note, but probably did it the way he would in the studio, i.e. base it off the same ideas and gradually hone it. The usual format was to play the tune with solo like the record, but on a good night the solo would come back at the end and fats would "cut the soloist loose" and the solo would then develop. He was very good at knowing the audience, when to do that or just bang through the set without too much variation form the version people knew. But was great at "reading the audience". Lee respected him enormously, saying he had "motherwit", i.e. a sort of intuition about people and performing. Not everyone had the same respect though.
 
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