SOUND PROJECTIONS
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
SPRING, 2017
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
SPRING, 2017
VOLUME FOUR NUMBER TWO
JOHN COLTRANE
Featuring the Musics and Aesthetic Visions of:
EARTH WIND AND FIRE
(May 20-May 26)
JACK DEJOHNETTE
(May 27-June 2)
ALBERT AYLER
(June 3-June 9)
VI REDD
(June 10-June 16)
LIGHTNIN’ HOPKINS
(June 17-June 23)
JULIAN “CANNONBALL” ADDERLEY
(June 24-June 30)
JAMES NEWTON
(July 1-July 7)
ART TATUM
(July 8-July 14)
SONNY CLARK
(July 15-July 21)
JASON MORAN
(July 22-July 28)
SONNY STITT
(July 29-August 4)
BUD POWELL
(August 5-August 11)
http://www.allmusic.com/artist/art-tatum-mn0000505770/biography
ART TATUM
(1909-1956)
Artist Biography by Scott Yanow
https://musicians.allaboutjazz.com/arttatum
ART TATUM
Art Tatum was born in Toledo, Ohio and despite being blind in one eye and only partially sighted in the other he became arguably the greatest jazz piano player who ever lived.
While in New York he established his reputation in “cutting contests” with other top pianists, which he never lost, overwhelming both Fats Waller and James P. Johnson during his first visit to the Big Apple. He spent the next few years playing in Cleveland, Chicago, New York and Los Angeles and even England in 1938. During this time he established himself as a major figure in jazz circles. In the early 1940s Tatum formed an extremely popular trio with bassist Slam Stewart and guitarist Tiny Grimes. He spent much of the next decade touring North America. In 1953 Tatum signed by producer Norman Granz and recorded extensively both as a soloist and in small groups with Benny Carter, Buddy DeFranco, Roy Eldridge, Lionel Hampton, Ben Webster, Harry Sweets Edison and others. His incredible talent allowed him to be extremely productive during this time. Ray Spencer in his biography, noted that Tatum was constantly “refining and honing down after each performance until an ideal version remained needing no further adjustments”. This allowed him to achieve a remarkable work rate. For example, his solo sessions for Granz were mostly completed in two days. That is a total of 69 tracks and all but three of them needed only one take. Sadly, on Nov. 5, 1956 his prodigious output was cut short when he died of uremia, however his artistic influence has been strong and long-lasting.
The starting point of Art Tatum's style was Fats Waller's stride. As Tatum once said, “Fats, that's where I come out of and, man, that's quite a place to come from”. From this beginning he went on to create and superbly original and creative style of playing piano. His left-handed figures where similar to stride but he was really known for the way that he explored harmonic complexities and unusual chord progressions. When improvising, Tatum would often insert totally new chord sequences (occasionally with a chord on each beat) into one or two measures. He also developed the habit of quoting from other melodies, something that became a standard practice among modern jazz musicians. What really set Tatum apart was his amazing technical abilities which combined with his willingness to explore the imagined limitations of the orthodox keyboard which produced astonishing rhythmic and harmonic complexities. It is claimed that he could identify the dominant note in a flushing toilet.
Perhaps the greatest tribute to the excellence of Art Tatum lies in the opinions of his peers. He has influenced many musicians including Bud Powell, Herbie Hancock, and even non-pianists such as Charlie Parker and John Coltrane. Many would say that he inspired the bebop revolution in jazz. When Oscar Peterson first heard him play he thought it was two people and he considered Tatum the best jazz instrumentalist of all time. Legend has it that classical pianist Vladimir Horowitz was so awed by Tatum's wizardry that it brought him to tears; he also is to have said that it was fortunate for classical pianists that Tatum did not choose to pursue a classical career.
Fittingly, his strongest support comes from one of his early influences, Fats Waller. One time in 1938 Tatum dropped in to hear Waller play at a club. By way of introduction Waller told the audience, “I just play the piano, but God is in the house tonight.”
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6434701
Columbia Records/Getty Images
Fifty years ago Sunday, the jazz musician Art Tatum died. He's
been called one of the piano geniuses of all time, in any genre. Yet his
legacy is often overlooked.
It's hard to summon enough superlatives for Tatum's piano playing: his harmonic invention, his technical virtuosity, his rhythmic daring. The great stride pianist Fats Waller famously announced one night when Tatum walked into the club where Waller was playing, "I only play the piano, but tonight God is in the house."
The musical prodigy was born in Toledo, Ohio, to a mechanic and a domestic who worked in white homes. Legally blind and largely self-taught, Tatum memorized entire piano rolls, and absorbed music from the radio and the Victrola. He emerged in the 1930s as a fully formed musician whose improvisational skill quickly became legend.
There had never before been anyone like Art Tatum.
"Tatum's playing was unworldly, unreal, because his standard was so high," says Dick Hyman, a Florida-based pianist and composer who is considered a great performer of early piano jazz.
"Tatum's harmonies to begin with were beyond what anybody was doing at the time... really beyond what anybody's done since," Hyman says.
The highly regarded jazz critic and author Gary Giddins listens to lots and lots of jazz. But he says he plays certain artists more often than others.
Tatum on 'Shadow Classics' Oct. 18, 2006
https://jazztimes.com/features/art-tatum-no-greater-art/
Tatum had two main modes—the flashy, kaleidoscopic style he used on the job, and the straight-ahead jazz style, which emerges in fragments from his few after-hours recordings and from some of the recordings made with his various trios (piano, guitar, and bass), which seemed to galvanize him. (Tatum did not have an easy time playing with other instruments; he tended to compete with them, then overrun them.) He offered the first style to the public, which accepted it with awe, and he used the second to delight himself and his peers….”
"Out of this world," Milton said. We were persuaded to go to the club where this pianist was working.
The setting was not impressive; it was in an alley, in the middle of Toledo's Bohemian section. I 'm not sure if the year was 1926 or 1927, but I am sure that my first impression of Art Tatum was a lasting one. As a matter of fact, the experience was almost traumatic for me, and for a brief spell afterward, I toyed with the idea of giving up my horn and returning to school.
Looking back, I can see why Tatum had this effect on me. Not only did he play all that piano, but, by doing so, he also reminded me of how inadequately I was filling Louis Armstrong's chair with the Henderson band.
To a man, we were astonished, gassed, and just couldn't believe our eyes and ears. How could this nearly blind young fellow extract so much beauty out of an old beat-up upright piano that looked like a relic from the Civil War? Our drummer, Kaiser Marshall, turned to Henderson and said it for all of us:
"Well, it just goes to show you can't judge a book by its cover. There's a beat-up old piano, and that kid makes it sound like a Steinway. Go ahead, Smack, let's see you sit down to that box. I bet it won't come out the same."
Fletcher just shrugged his shoulders and answered philosophically, "I am pretty sure that we are in the presence of one of the greatest talents that you or I will ever hear. So don't try to be funny."
It was probably at Val's that Paul Whiteman "discovered" him a year or so later, when Art was 19, and took him to New York to be featured with the Whiteman band. But insecurity and homesickness combined to make him miserable, and after a short time, he fled back to Toledo. This is a good example of a man being at the crossroads and taking the wrong turn.
The admiration was reciprocated. The story goes that Fats, the cheerful little earful, was in great form while appearing in the Panther Room of the Sherman Hotel in Chicago. Fats was in orbit that night, slaying the crowd, singing and wiggling his behind to his hit "Honeysuckle Rose."
I did not witness this scene, but so many people have related the incident that I am inclined to believe it. At any rate, before Tatum did much playing in New York, he spent a period of time with vocalist Adelaide Hall as part of a two-piano team, the other accompanist being Joe Turner (the pianist). Miss Hall, then big in the profession, took them with her on a European tour.
An only child, Tatum was born in Toledo on Oct. 13, 1910. He came into the world with milk cataracts in both eyes, which impaired his sight to the point of almost total blindness. After 13 operations, the doctors were able to restore a considerable amount of vision in one eye. Then Tatum had a great misfortune; he was assaulted by a holdup man, who, in the scuffle, hit Tatum in the good eye with a blackjack. The carefully restored vision was gone forever, and Tatum was left with the ability to see only large objects or smaller ones held very close to his "good" eye.
He continued playing piano by ear, and he could play anything he heard. Curiously, there was once a counterpart of Tatum in a slave known as Blind Tom. Tom earned a fortune for his master, performing before amazed audiences the most difficult music of his time after a single hearing. But Tom couldn't improvise; he lacked the added gift that was Tatum's.
His mother, recognizing that he had an unusual ear, gave him four years of formal training in the classics. Then the day came when the teacher called it halt to the studies, saying, "That's as far as I can teach you. Now, you teach me."
Tatum carried his perception to the nth degree, Eddie Beal, one of Art's devoted disciples, recalls their first meeting,which happened at the old Breakfast Club on Los Angeles' Central Avenue at about 4 a.m. The news had spread that Tatum was in town and could be expected to make the scene that morning. Just as Tatum entered the room, as Beal tells it, "Whoever was playing the piano jumped up from the stool, causing an empty beer can to fall off the piano. Tatum greeted the cats all around, then said, 'Drop that can again. It's a Pabst can, and the note it sounded was a B-flat.'" Rozelle Cayle, one of Tatum's closest friends, tops this story by saying that Tatum could tell the key of any sound, including a flushing toilet.
Genius is an overworked word in this era of thunderous hyperbolic press agency.Still, when one considers Arthur Tatum, there is no other proper descriptive adjective for referring to his talents. I have purposely pluralized them, for Tatum possessed several gifts — most of which remained unknown to all but a few of his best friends — his prodigious memory, his grasp of all sports statistics and his skill at playing cards.
Art was a formidable opponent in all types of card games, although bid whist was his favorite. There are a few bridge champions still around who recall the fun they had when Tatum played with them. According to one's reminiscence, Art would pick up his cards as dealt, hold them about one inch from the good eye, adjust them into suits and from then on, never looked at his hand again. He could actually recall every card that was played, when, and by whom. Furthermore, he played his own cards like a master.
He had an incredible memory not only for cards but also for voices as well. One account of his aptitude in catching voices has been told and retold. It seems that while playing London with Adelaide Hall hack in the late '30s, he was introduced to a certain person and immediately swept along the receiving line. Six years later, when he was playing in Hollywood, the person came to see Tatum. He greeted him with, "Hello, Art. How are you? I'll bet you don't remember me." Tatum replied, "Sure I remember you. Gee, you're looking good. I'm sorry I didn't get a chance to talk to you at that party in London, Your name is Lord So and So.'”
I realize that nature has a way of compensating for any inaccuracy, but Tatum's abilities transcended ordinary compensation. With only a high school education, he was a storehouse of information. His favorite sports were baseball and football, followed by horseracing. Tatum could quote baseball pitchers records, batting averages for almost all players in both big leagues, names and positions for almost all players, the game records any year, and so forth. Rozelle Gayle, one of Tatum's closest friends, recalls back in Art's Chicago days (the '30s) that all the musicians frequented the drugstore on the corner of 47th Street and South Park. Art became so respected as an authority on any subject (and that included population statistics) that the fellows would have him settle their arguments, instead of telephoning a newspaper.
One of the most significant aspects of Tatum's artistry stemmed from his constant self-change.
At the piano, Art seemingly delighted in creating impossible problems from the standpoint of harmonies and chord progressions. Then he would gleefully improvise sequence upon sequence until the phrase emerged as a complete entity within the structure of whatever composition he happened to be playing. Many is the time I have heard him speed blithely into what I feared was a musical cul-de-sac, only to hear the tying resolution come shining through. This required great knowledge, dexterity and daring. Tatum achieved much of this through constant practice, working hours every day on the exercises to keep his fingers nimble enough to obey that quick, creative mind. He did not run through variations of songs or work on new inventions to dazzle his audiences. Rather, he ran scales and ordinary practice exercises, and if one didn't know who was doing the laborious, monotonous piano routines, he would never guess that it was a jazzman working out.
Another form of practice was unique with Tatum. He constantly manipulated a filbert nut through his fingers, so quickly that if you tried to watch him, the vision blurred. He worked with one nut until it became sleek and shiny from handling. When it came time to replace it, he would go to the market and feel nut after nut — a, whole bin full, until he found one just the right size and shape for his exercises. Art's hands were of unusual formation, though just the normal size for a man of his height and build. But when he wanted to, he somehow could make his fingers span a 12th on the keyboard. The average male hand spans nine or 10 of the white notes, 11 is considered wizard, but 12 is out of this world. Perhaps the spread developed from that seeming complete relaxation of the fingers — they never rose far above the keyboard and looked almost double-jointed as he ran phenomenally rapid, complex runs. His lightning execution was the result of all that practice, along with the instant communication between his fingers and brain. His touch produced a sound no other pianist has been able to capture. The method he used was his secret, which he never revealed. The Steinway was his favorite piano, but sometimes he played in a club that had a miserable piano with broken ivories and sour notes. He would run his fingers over the keyboard to detect these. Then he would play that night in keys that would avoid as much as possible the bad notes. Anything he could play, he could play in any key.
Tatum's leisure hours began when almost everyone else was asleep, at 4 a.m. or so. He liked to sit and talk, drink and play, after he finished work.
Another of Art's ambitions, also unrealized, was to be a blues singer! He loved to relax by playing and singing the blues. He knew he didn't have much of a voice, but when he was offstage, he'd sing the blues. He had a feeling for the form but kept that side of himself well hidden from the public. He really adored Blind Lemon Jefferson, Bessie Smith and, especially, Big Joe Turner. Most musicians could never guess what Art was going to play from one moment to the next, which made the group he had with guitarist Tiny Grimes and bassist Slam Stewart unquestionably the best combo he ever had. The trio played on New York's 52nd Street around 1945. These three communicated, anticipated and embellished each other as if one person were playing all three instruments. It was uncanny when it's considered that they never played it safe, never put in hours of rehearsal with each sequence pinpointed. On the contrary, every tune was an adventure, since nobody could predict where Art's mind would take them.
How sour can grapes get?
Another compatriot who used to haunt every place that Art played, night after night, made the public statement: "Good God! This Tatum is the greatest! Thank God he's black — otherwise nobody's job would be safe." I suspect there was a lot of truth in that remark.
Art never seemed to let the inequities of his situation bother him. Still, in the early morning when he had consumed a few cans of beer and was surrounded by his personal camp followers, he would unburden himself, asking, "Did you hear so-and-so's latest record? What a waste of wax, for Christ's sake! There must be over 2,000 fellows who can play more than this cat. But you see who he's recording for? It will probably sell half a million copies while Willie the Lion just sits back smoking his cigar, without a gig. When will it end?"
Tatum was a great crusader against discrimination, but in his own quiet way. He used to cancel engagements if he found that the club excluded colored persons. Loyalty to his friends, even when it was not advantageous to his career, was another strong point. (I recall the time I went to catch him at a club called the Streets of Paris, in Los Angeles. After a period of superlative enjoyment, I went to the piano to pay my respects and leave. But just as Art said, "Hello, how long have you been in the joint?" Cesar Romero and Loretta Young walked up. So I stepped back to let Art converse with the movie royalty. Art said, "Come on back here. I want to introduce you. Cesar, Loretta, I want you to meet Rex Stewart," and went on to build me up, undeservedly, till they asked for my autograph!)
Art was no glad-hander. He was polite, reserved, affable but not particularly communicative unless the conversation was about one of his hobbies. A more self-effacing person would be hard to find, and he was generous to a fault with his friends. Yet he could summon up a tremendous amount of outraged dignity when it was called for.
Perhaps Art Tatum would have been assured a firmer place in musical history if he had not alienated too many of the self-righteous aficionados who preferred their piano sounds less embroidered, less imaginative and more orthodox. Therefore, it follows that Tatum would never be their favorite pianist. Posterity tends to prove that Art requires neither champion nor defense, since the proof of his genius remains intact and unblemished. The beauty within the framework of his music transcends the opinions of critics, aficionados, fans and musicians themselves. History is the arbiter. For the truly great, fame is not fleeting but everlasting.
Tatum was well and copiously recorded over the 24 years between his arrival in New York and his death in Los Angeles in 1956. Those recordings range from his youthful showpieces of the 1930's, in which he assimilated the influences of Waller, Wilson and Hines into a devastating virtuoso style, to a monumental series of solo performances recorded for the producer Norman Granz in the early 1950's.
THE MUSIC OF ART TATUM: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH ART TATUM:
Art Tatum's solo piano rendition of "Sweet Lorraine"
Art Tatum plays "Humoresque" by Antonin Dvorak (1841-1904) - 1944-45 recording
Believe it or not, Art Tatum was perhaps the biggest pianistic influence on Thelonious Monk!
At first glance, the two jazz giants couldn't be farther apart. Tatum displayed a monstrous technique, while Monk was criticized for having "no technique." Tatum was and still is the "gold standard" of pianism by which every other jazz pianist can be compared, while Monk is kind of off in his own corner. (Keith Jarrett, a huge Monk fan, said that he views Monk as standing over on the side of the road.) And even though Tatum was head and shoulders above every other pianist, his playing style was still firmly entrenched in mainstream jazz. Monk, on the other hand went in an entirely unique direction.
How Thelonious Monk developed his individual style was always a bit of a mystery to me. Although he was one of the founders of bebop, he never really played what we think of as "bebop." Even many of his bebop contemporaries found it difficult to play with him. (There's a famous example of Miles Davis asking Monk not to comp behind Davis' solo on "Bag's Groove.")
So how did Monk develop his idiosyncratic style?
When I was in my late teens, my piano teacher Billy Taylor gave me a clue. Billy had heard Monk play when Thelonious was still a young man and hadn't developed his mature style yet. Billy told me that at that point, Monk was still under the influence of Art Tatum and "played like Tatum." Taylor didn't mean that Monk played Tatum note-for-note or with the same exact technique. Rather, he was referring to Monk's general style at the time, which was modeled after Tatum's approach to playing jazz.
Well, it's taken me a few decades of listening to both pianists to connect the dots, but recently I had an 'aha' moment and now see the connection between Tatum and Monk very clearly. In fact, there are so many now-obvious connections between the way these two jazz giants play piano that I'm surprised it's taken me this long to notice them!
The reason the influence is a little obscure this is that even though Thelonious Monk came directly out of Art Tatum, he disguised his tracks so well that the influence is not very apparent when we listen to each pianist separately. We have to listen to them back-to-back and compare their approaches to playing jazz. If we listen only to their overall sound via their soloing and chord voicings, we won't hear the connection. (Indeed, Monk's chord voicings and pianistic touch are more influenced by Duke Ellington that they are by Tatum.) Despite this, Monk's overall approach is directly derived from Tatum in a number of specific ways.
Here are 8 ways that Art Tatum influenced Thelonious Monk:
1. Both pianists are an "acquired taste."
Tatum and Monk can be off-putting for first-time listeners. To say it bluntly, a lot of people don't like either one the first time they hear their music. I've heard aspiring jazz pianists say that Tatum plays "too fast" and that Monk "sounds weird." This is because both pianists took an uncompromising approach to playing jazz. They each developed a highly unique style that was somewhat outside the mainstream of their time. Tatum crammed in massive amounts of musical information into every measure which can be overwhelming for many listeners. And Monk is, well... Monk! His angular lines and dissonant voicings can take a while to get used to. By all accounts, Monk was very methodical in how he developed his musical style. If he did indeed begin his career by playing in a similar vein to Tatum, as Billy Taylor noted, then he may have taken courage and inspiration from Tatum's uncompromising individuality as well.
While we can hear this in just about every recording Tatum ever made, his playing is perhaps most overwhelming in uptempo pieces like "Tiger Rag." This is the kind of recording that made many excellent jazz pianists, such as Oscar Peterson, temporarily quit piano!
Now let's check out a similar Monk recording: "Trinkle Tinkle." Monk's melody has some elements of Tatum's virtuosity in its flourishes, and many good jazz pianists have thrown their hands up in vain after trying to solo over the tune's challenging chord progression!
2. Both pianists played with a Swing Era musical feel.
This can be expected from someone like Tatum, who, after all, came of age during the swing era. But isn't it shocking that Monk, one of bebop's creators, never completely embraced a "bebop" rhythmic feel in his use of syncopation and general style of swinging? This is particularly evident when he's playing solo piano. One aspect of this is Monk's fondness for playing stride piano with his left hand. Even though many of Monk's bebop contemporaries, such as Bud Powell, could play stride, they rarely chose to do so. Monk continued to base his solo piano style on a stride left hand throughout his entire career.
Listen to how deftly Tatum goes in and out of stride on Sweet Lorraine:
Why did Monk choose not to "modernize" his rhythmic approach in the same way that his fellow beboppers did? There are some accounts of him becoming frustrated that many musicians were jumping on the bebop bandwagon and using his musical ideas. So he resolved to go in another direction. For him, this musical direction apparently involved combining "modern" melodies and chord voicings with an at-times traditional rhythmic feel. Played in his own way, of course!
Here's Monk playing full-out stride piano!
3. Both Tatum and Monk loved to rework and reharmonize standard tunes.
Monk's re-imagining of the song "Carolina Moon," for example, went far beyond what most musicians of his time would do. Tatum, of course, excelled at re-imagining the popular songs of the day. Check out his version of "Song Of The Vagabonds." In addition, both pianists could improvise fluently over the most difficult chord progressions.
Carolina Moon
Song of the Vagabonds
4. Monk uses scale-based runs in the same way that Tatum did.
Tatum's fast, descending pentatonic runs, which are such a big part of his "sound," became Monk's fast descending whole-tone runs. The only difference is in the relative sounds of the scales each pianist used. Incidentally, Monk is the only pianist of his generation to use runs in this way, in that they fulfilled textural rather than melodic functions.
Here is a classic example of Tatum using runs in this way, some of which are harmonized in fourths!
Now listen to how Monk uses scales in this recording, especially at 0:39. After listening to Tatum, it's pretty obvious where he got the idea from!
5. They both had a comping style that was busy to the point of being intrusive.
This was very challenging for soloists to improvise over.
Listen to how busy Tatum plays "behind" clarinetist Buddy DeFranco. It's almost comical to imagine DeFranco trying to stay focused with this much going on behind him! I enjoy the overall sound, however. It's almost like Tatum is imitating the polyphony of early jazz in these moments!
Incidentally, I once remarked to Billy Taylor that I didn't think Tatum was a good accompanist. Billy smiled and said, "Well, he could be when he wanted to be. Listen to him play behind Ben Webster." (I'll invite you to check out that recording too. It's a classic pairing!)
Now listen to how "lively" Monk's comping is behind tenor sax soloist Charlie Rouse on this live recording. As with Tatum, the overall effect is thrilling, even if it made the soloists work extra hard to remain focused!
6. Both Tatum and Monk generally preferred to solo in and around a song's melody, rather than create their own melodic improvisations from the ground up.
Their solos frequently consist of creative variations on the song's melody.
Monk's solo on his tune Nutty is a good example of how he would often stay with the melody during his solo, embellishing it at will:
7. Both pianists had a complete, uncompromising, and well-developed musical concept and personality.
Combined with their unique approaches, this made them stand somewhat outside the mainstream of their time. When they performed in groups, the other musicians were required to "fit in" with them, not the other way around.
8. Both Tatum and Monk convey the entire history of jazz piano in their playing.
They made earlier jazz devices an integral part of their approach at the same time as they looked towards the future. Tatum played with a harmonic sophistication that few could match until the 1950s and Monk's motivic compositional methods wouldn't be widely emulated until the 1960s.
Listen again to how Monk begins his recording of Carolina Moon, above. The intro isn't even "jazz." It's 1890's "parlour piano," which poignantly evokes the song's history and culture before the horns come in with Monk's radical re-working of the melody. Tatum frequently did this kind of thing too, like in his version of Elegy:
The more I listen to both Art Tatum and Thelonious Monk, the more
similarities I see between them. Seen in the context of Billy Taylor's
observation that the young Monk was played in the style of Tatum, I
think the direct link is clear. Monk was a genius. But even geniuses
don't pull everything out of thin air. Part of Monk's genius consisted
in how adroitly he transformed Tatum's pianistic approach into something
that sounded completely different. He covered his musical tracks well!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Tatum
Arthur Tatum Jr. (/ˈteɪtəm/, October 13, 1909 – November 5, 1956) was an American jazz pianist.
Tatum is widely considered one of the greatest jazz pianists of all time[1] and influenced generations of jazz pianists. He was hailed for the technical proficiency of his performances, which set a new standard for jazz piano virtuosity. Critic Scott Yanow wrote, "Tatum's quick reflexes and boundless imagination kept his improvisations filled with fresh (and sometimes futuristic) ideas that put him way ahead of his contemporaries."[2]
For a musician of such stature, there is little published information available about Tatum's life. Only one full-length biography has been published, Too Marvelous for Words (1994), by James Lester.[3] Lester interviewed many of Tatum's contemporaries for the book and drew from many articles published about him.
A child with perfect pitch, Tatum learned to play by ear, picking out church hymns by the age of three, learning tunes from the radio and copying piano roll recordings his mother owned. In a Voice of America interview, he denied the widespread rumor that he learned to play by copying piano roll recordings made by two pianists.[7] He developed a very fast playing style, without losing accuracy. As a child he was also very sensitive to the piano's intonation and insisted it be tuned often.[8] While playing piano was the most obvious application of his mental and physical skills, he also had an encyclopedic memory for Major League Baseball statistics.
In 1925, Tatum moved to the Columbus School for the Blind, where he studied music and learned braille. He subsequently studied piano with Overton G. Rainey at either the Jefferson School or the Toledo School of Music. Rainey, who was also visually impaired, probably taught Tatum in the classical tradition, as Rainey did not improvise and discouraged his students from playing jazz.[9] In 1927, Tatum began playing on Toledo radio station WSPD as 'Arthur Tatum, Toledo's Blind Pianist', during interludes in Ellen Kay's shopping chat program and soon had his own program.[10] By the age of 19, Tatum was playing at the local Waiters' and Bellmens' Club.[11] As word of Tatum spread, national performers passing through Toledo, including Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Joe Turner and Fletcher Henderson, would make it a point to drop in to hear the piano phenomenon.
In 1931, vocalist Adelaide Hall commenced a world tour that lasted almost two years, during which (most probably in January 1932 when she was appearing at the Rivoli Theatre)[12] she discovered Tatum in Toledo and employed him as one of her stage pianists.[13] In 1932, Hall returned to New York with Tatum and introduced him to Harlem on stage at the Lafayette Theatre. In August 1932, she made four recordings using Tatum as one of her pianists including the songs "Strange As It Seems" and "You Gave Me Everything But Love".[14][15][16]
Tatum worked first around Toledo and Cleveland and then later in New York at the Onyx Club for a few months. He recorded his first four solo sides on the Brunswick label in March 1933.[5] Tatum returned to Ohio and played around the American midwest – Toledo, Cleveland, Detroit, Saint Louis and Chicago – in the mid-1930s and played on the Fleischman Hour radio program hosted by Rudy Vallee in 1935. He also played stints at the Three Deuces in Chicago and in Los Angeles played at the Trocadero, the Paramount and the Club Alabam.[19] In 1937, he returned to New York, where he appeared at clubs and played on national radio programs.[11] The following year he embarked on the Queen Mary for England where he toured,[20] playing for three months at Ciro's Club owned by bandleader Ambrose. In the late 1930s, he returned to play and record in Los Angeles and New York.
In the last two years of his life, Tatum regularly played at Baker's Keyboard Lounge in Detroit, including his final public performance in April 1956.[22] Earlier, Tatum had personally selected and purchased for Clarence Baker the Steinway piano at Baker's, finding it in a New York showroom, and shipping it to Detroit.[23]
Tatum's sound was attributable to both his harmonic inventiveness and technical prowess. Many of his harmonic concepts and larger chord voicings (e.g., 13th chords with various flat or sharp intervals) were well ahead of their time in the 1930s (except for their partial emergence in popular songs of the Jazz Age) and they would be explored by bebop-era musicians a decade later. He worked some of the upper extensions of chords into his lines, a practice which was further developed by Bud Powell and Charlie Parker, which in turn was an influence on the development of 'modern jazz'. Tatum also pioneered the use of dissonance in jazz piano, as can be heard, for example, on his recording of "Aunt Hagar's Blues",[28] which uses extensive dissonance to achieve a bluesy effect. In addition to using major and minor seconds, dissonance was inherent in the complex chords that Tatum frequently used.
Tatum could also play the blues with authority. Pianist Jay McShann, not known for showering compliments on his rivals, said "Art could really play the blues. To me, he was the world's greatest blues player, and I think few people realized that."[29] Tatum's repertoire, however, was predominantly Broadway and popular standards, whose chord progressions and variety better suited his talents.
His protean style was elaborate, pyrotechnic, dramatic and joyous, combining stride, jazz, swing, boogie-woogie and classical elements, while the musical ideas flowed in rapid-fire fashion. Benny Green wrote in his collected work of essays, The Reluctant Art, that "Tatum has been the only jazz musician to date who has made an attempt to conceive a style based upon all styles, to master the mannerisms of all schools and then synthesize those into something personal."[30] He was playful, spontaneous and often inserted quotes from other songs into his improvisations.[31]
Tatum was not inclined toward understatement or expansive use of space. He seldom played in a simplified way, preferring interpretations that displayed his great technique and clever harmonizations. When jazz pianist Stanley Cowell was growing up in Toledo, his father prevailed upon Tatum to play piano at the Cowell home. Stanley described the scene as, "Tatum played so brilliantly and so much ... that I thought the piano was gonna break. My mother left the room ... so I said 'What's wrong, Mama?' And she said 'Oh, that man plays too much piano.'"[32] A handful of critics, notably Keith Jarrett, have complained that Tatum played too many notes[33] or was too ornamental or was even 'unjazzlike'. Jazz critic Gary Giddins opined, "That is the essence of Tatum. If you don't like his ornament, you should be listening to someone else. That's where his genius is."[34]
From the foundation of stride, Tatum made great leaps forward in
technique and harmony and he honed a groundbreaking improvisational
style that extended the limits of what was possible in jazz piano. His
innovations were to greatly influence later jazz pianists, such as
Powell, Thelonious Monk, Oscar Peterson, Billy Taylor, Bill Evans, Tete Montoliu and Chick Corea. One of Tatum's innovations was his extensive use of the pentatonic scale, which may have inspired later pianists to further mine its possibilities as a device for soloing. Herbie Hancock
described Tatum's unique tone as "majestic" and devoted some time to
unlocking this sound and to noting Tatum's harmonic arsenal.[35] Yet much of Tatum's keyboard vocabulary remains unassimilated by today's crop of players.[36]
The sounds that Tatum produced with the piano were also distinctive. Billy Taylor has said that he could make a bad piano sound good.[37] Generally playing at mezzoforte volume, he employed the entire keyboard from deep bass tones to sonorous mid-register chords to sparkling upper register runs. He used the sustain pedal sparingly so that each note was clearly articulated, chords were cleanly sounded and the melodic line would not be blurred.[38] He played with boundless energy and occasionally his speedy and precise delivery produced an almost mechanical effect, compared by jazz critic Ted Gioia to "a player piano on steroids."[36]
Jazz historian and commentator Ira Gitler declared that Tatum's "left hand was the equal of his right."[44] When Bud Powell was opening for Tatum at Birdland around 1950, the end of an era when musicians engaged in overt competition and so-called cutting sessions,[45] Powell reportedly said to Tatum, "Man, I'm going to really show you about tempo and playing fast. Anytime you're ready." Tatum laughed and replied, "Look, you come in here tomorrow, and anything you do with your right hand, I'll do with my left." Powell never took up the challenge.[46]
Tatum played chords with a relatively flat-fingered technique compared to the curvature taught in classical training. Composer/pianist Mary Lou Williams told Whitney Balliett, "Tatum taught me how to hit my notes, how to control them without using pedals. And he showed me how to keep my fingers flat on the keys to get that clean tone."[47] Jimmy Rowles said, "Most of the stuff he played was clear over my head. There was too much going on—both hands were impossible to believe. You couldn't pick out what he was doing because his fingers were so smooth and soft, and the way he did it—it was like camouflage."[48] When his fastest tracks of "Tiger Rag" are slowed down, they still reveal a coherent, syncopated rhythm.
Tatum did not readily adapt or defer to other musicians in ensemble settings. Early in his career he was required to restrain himself when he worked as accompanist for vocalist Adelaide Hall in 1932–33. Perhaps because Tatum believed there was a limited audience for solo piano, he formed a trio in 1943 with guitarist Tiny Grimes and bassist Slam Stewart. He later recorded with other musicians, including a notable session with the 1944 Esquire Jazz All-Stars, which included Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday and other jazz greats, at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City. He also recorded group sessions for Norman Granz in the mid-1950s, toward the end of his life, with jazz greats such as Benny Carter, Roy Eldridge, Lionel Hampton, and Ben Webster.
Tatum appeared on Steve Allen's Tonight Show in the early 1950s, and on other television shows from this era. However, all of the kinescopes of the Allen shows, which were stored in a warehouse along with other now defunct shows, were thrown into a local rubbish dump to make room for new studios. However, the soundtracks were recorded off-air by Tatum enthusiasts at the time, and many are included in Storyville Records' extensive series of rare Tatum recordings.
On the recommendation of Oscar Peterson, Tatum was portrayed by Johnny O'Neal in Ray, a 2004 biopic about R&B artist Ray Charles.
Numerous stories exist about other musicians' respect for Tatum. Perhaps the most famous is the story about the time Tatum walked into a club where Fats Waller was playing, and Waller stepped away from the piano bench to make way for Tatum, announcing, "I only play the piano, but tonight God is in the house."[58] Fats Waller's son confirmed the statement.[59]
Charlie Parker (who helped develop bebop) was highly influenced by Tatum. When newly arrived in New York, Parker briefly worked as a dishwasher in a Manhattan restaurant where Tatum was performing and often listened to the pianist. Parker once said, "I wish I could play like Tatum's right hand!"[60]
When Oscar Peterson was still a boy, his father played him a recording of Tatum performing "Tiger Rag". Once the young Peterson was finally persuaded that it was performed by a single person, he was so intimidated that he did not touch the piano for weeks.[61] Peterson also stated that, "If you speak of pianists, the most complete pianist that we have known and possibly will know, from what I've heard to date, is Art Tatum."[62] "Musically speaking, he was and is my musical God, and I feel honored to remain one of his humbly devoted disciples."[63]
"Here's something new..." pianist Hank Jones remembers thinking when he first heard Art Tatum on radio in 1935, "they have devised this trick to make people believe that one man is playing the piano, when I know at least three people are playing."[64]
The jazz pianist and educator Kenny Barron commented, "I have every record [Tatum] ever made—and I try never to listen to them ... If I did, I'd throw up my hands and give up!"[65] Jean Cocteau dubbed Tatum "a crazed Chopin". Count Basie called him the eighth wonder of the world. Dave Brubeck observed, "I don't think there's any more chance of another Tatum turning up than another Mozart."[66] Pianist Mulgrew Miller, commented on personal growth by saying, "When I talk to the people I admire, they're always talking about continuous growth and development and I look at them and say, 'Well... what are YOU going to do?' But, as Harold Mabern says, 'There's always Art Tatum records around'".[67] Dizzy Gillespie said, "First you speak of Art Tatum, then take a long deep breath, and you speak of the other pianists."[68]
The pianist Teddy Wilson observed, "Maybe this will explain Art Tatum. If you put a piano in a room, just a bare piano. Then you get all the finest jazz pianists in the world and let them play in the presence of Art Tatum. Then let Art Tatum play ... everyone there will sound like an amateur."[68]
Other music luminaries of the day, including Vladimir Horowitz, Arthur Rubinstein, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Leopold Godowsky, David Oistrakh and George Gershwin are said to have marveled at Tatum's genius.[42]
Jazz critic Leonard Feather called Tatum "the greatest soloist in jazz history, regardless of instrument."[68]
During a 1985 interview with "Frets" magazine, Jerry Garcia was asked if he was inspired by any non-guitarists. He said "Oh, yeah, sure. Art Tatum is my all-time favorite. Yeah, he's my all-time favorite. He's the guy I put on when I want to feel really small. When I want to feel really insignificant. He's a good guy to play for any musician, you know. He'll make them want to go home and burn their instruments. Art Tatum is absolutely the most incredible musician – what can you say?" [69]
In 1993, J. A. Bilmes, an MIT student, invented a term that is now in common usage in the field of computational musicology: the Tatum. It means "the smallest perceptual time unit in music" and is a tribute to Tatum's pianistic velocity.[70][71]
Zenph Studios, a software company focused on precisely understanding how musicians perform, recorded a new album of Tatum's playing with Sony Masterworks in 2007. Using computer equipment coupled with a high-resolution player piano, they created re-performances of Tatum's first four commercial tracks, from March 21, 1933, and the nine tracks from the April 2, 1949 live concert at Los Angeles' Shrine Auditorium. Sony recorded these anew in the same venue, in front of an audience. These 13 tracks are on the album Piano Starts Here: Live from The Shrine. The binaural recording, when played via headphones, allows one to hear what Tatum may have heard as he played on stage, with the piano spatially in front (bass on the left, treble on the right) and the audience downstage on the righthand side.[72][73]
For his 2008 album Act Your Age, Gordon Goodwin wrote a new big band arrangement to accompany Zenph's re-performance of "Yesterdays", and the track was recognized with a Grammy Nomination for Best Instrumental Arrangement.[74]
At the Lucas County Arena in his home town of Toledo, Ohio, a memorial was dedicated to Art Tatum in 2009, the "Art Tatum Celebration Column".[75]
Robert Doerschuk, 88 – The Giants of Jazz Piano,
p. 58 "by consensus, the greatest jazz pianist who ever lived." When
Leonard Feather was compiling his Encyclopedia of Jazz in the mid-1950s,
he polled a number of musicians about the players they themselves most
admired on their respective instruments. More than two-thirds of the
pianists surveyed put Tatum at the top of the list. Gene Lees conducted a
similar poll thirty years later, and again Tatum dominated the results.Gioia, Ted. "The Dozens: Art Tatum at 100". Jazz.com. Retrieved September 11, 2012.
Scott Yanow and Michael Erlewine (1998) The All Music Guide To Jazz, 3rd edition, p. 1074, The author adds: "Art Tatum's recordings still have the ability to scare modern pianists."
James Lester (1994) Too Marvelous for Words: The Life and Genius of Art Tatum, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-509640-1
David Yonke, Time-Tested Tatum, toledojazzsociety.org
Ron Davis, Ars Gratia Tatum, rddavis.com
Lester, Too Marvelous for Words: The Life and Genius of Art Tatum: James Lester: Oxford University Press 1994: ISBN 0-19-508365-2
Lester, Too Marvelous for Words, p. 44
Lester, Too Marvelous for Words
Lester, Too Marvelous for Words, p. 37-38
Robert Dupuis, Art Tatum Biography, musicianguide.com; see also Jed Distler's introduction 'Art Tatum' in the Jazz Masters series
Jazz Profiles from NPR
Adelaide
Hall listed as appearing at the Rivoli Theatre, Toledo in the column
'Around the Theatre's in the Afro American newspaper dated week of
January 23, 1932 – page 9: (retrieved September 2, 2014) https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2211&dat=19320123&id=rUxGAAAAIBAJ&sjid=f-UMAAAAIBAJ&pg=4549,682731
'Underneath A Harlem Moon ... the Harlem to Paris Years of Adelaide Hall' by Iain Cameron Williams. 2003, ISBN 0826458939, http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/underneath-a-harlem-moon-9780826458933/ http://www.amazon.com/Underneath-Harlem-Moon-Paris-Adelaide/dp/B005ZOLV7C
'You Gave Me Everything But love' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMK4VVKWgs8
'Strange As It Seems' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhMq8_s64Y4
Art Tatum – NPR http://www.npr.org/programs/jazzprofiles/archive/tatum.html
Lester: Too Marvelous for Words: p 57/58
Ed Kirkeby, Ain't Misbehavin: The Story of Fats Waller.
Fats Waller recalled the showdown: "That Tatum, he was just too
good.... He had too much technique. When that man turns on the
powerhouse, don't no one play him down. He sounds like a brass band."
Robert Doerschuk, 88 – The Giants of Jazz Piano, p. 58.
John Cohassey, "Art Tatum." Contemporary Black Biography. The Gale Group, Inc, 2006. Answers.com December 21, 2009. http://www.answers.com/topic/art-tatum
"Much
to his dismay, Tatum's American club audiences were often noisy,
whereas those in England behaved like concert listeners, a reception the
pianist tried to cultivate wherever he went": http://www.musicianguide.com/biographies/1608000093/Art-Tatum.html
"Wee Baby Blues", Written by Big Joe Turner, Pete Johnson https://secondhandsongs.com/work/90045/all
Bjorn, Lars, & Jim Gallert, Before Motown: A History of Jazz in Detroit, University of Michigan Press, 2001 (ISBN 0-472-06765-6, ISBN 978-0-472-06765-7), p. 117.
Stryker, Mark, "New Owners Rescue Baker's Keyboard Lounge – and Fulfill a Dream", Detroit Free Press (January 31, 2011).
Art Tatum, original gravesite at Find a Grave
Art Tatum, present mausoleum at Find a Grave
Spencer, Frederick J. (2002). Jazz and Death: Medical Profiles of Jazz Greats. Jackson, MS: Univ. Press of Mississippi. p. 53. ISBN 978-1578064533.
Mrs. Geraldine Thelma "Gerri" Rounds Tatum at Find a Grave
Art Tatum Solo Masterpieces, Vol. Four, Pablo, recorded December 29, 1953
As quoted in Lynn Bayley's liner notes to Knockin' Myself Out, remastered Tatum recordings on Pristine Audio
John Cohassey, Contemporary Black Biography, Art Tatum, Vol. 28, p. 187-190.
Critic Gunther Schuller opined that Tatum overused melodic quotations. Gunther Schuller, The Swing Era: The Development of Jazz, 1930 – 1945, p.480
Lester, Too Marvelous for Words, p. 141
Keith Jarrett in September 2009 interview stated as much. http://dothemath.typepad.com/dtm/interview-with-keith-jarrett.html
Art Tatum: A Talent Never To Be Duplicated, www.npr.org
As quoted in the liner notes to the reissue of Capitol CDP 7 92866 2.
Gioia, Ted. "The Dozens: Art Tatum at 100". Jazz.com. Retrieved September 11, 2012.
Burnett, John. "Art Tatum: A Talent Never to Be Duplicated". NPR Music. NPR. Retrieved September 11, 2012.
Sheils, James. "Bach and Jazz – Melodic Presentation". Field Lines. fieldlines.org. Retrieved September 11, 2012.
Schuller, The Swing Era, p. 477
Chick Corea thus described Tatum's impression on other piano players in the 1930s, in a jazz history presentation.
Bret Primack, Art Tatum: No Greater Art, www.jazztimes.com (January/February 1998)
Lester, Too Marvelous for Words, pp. 13, 93,
"Oscar Peterson & Count Basie & Joe Pass 1980 (see 31:00-)". BBC Four. Retrieved December 4, 2013.
Ira Gitler Remembers Art Tatum, http://www.in.com/videos/watchvideo-ira-gitler-remembers-art-tatum-3899634.html
The
author of a biography of Bud Powell refers to "the Harlem-piano
tradition of the previous generation, of all-night contests in bars or
apartments." Pullman, "Wail: The Life of Bud Powell", http://www.wailthelifeofbudpowell.com/excerpt/ Brooklyn, NY: Peter Pullman, LLC, ISBN 978-0-9851418-0-6
Lester, Too Marvelous for Words, p. 174 (quoting from pianist Billy Taylor)
Robert Dupuis, Art Tatum Biography, musicianguide.com; see also http://www.pianofundamentals.com/book/en/1.III.4.2
Lester, Too Marvelous for Words, p. 140
See Editorial Review for Art Tatum: 20th Century Piano Genius on Amazon.com
quoted in Chip Stern's 1995 liner notes for a CD reissue of Tatum's The Piano Starts Here (1968), Columbia Records, UPC 886972326221
"Solo Man", Time, December 5, 1949, p.56
Sessa, Claudio (2009). Le età del jazz. I contemporanei. Milano: Il Saggiatore. p. 69. ISBN 9788842813378.
Tatum
wrote "Shout" and co-authored "Wee Wee Baby, You Sure Look Good to Me".
His recording of "Shout" was included in the soundtrack of the film The Great Debaters.
See, e.g., Riccardo Scivales (1998) The Right Hand According to Tatum
Lester, Too Marvelous for Words, p. 172
Tatum recorded over 400 titles, according to Gunther Schuller, The Swing Era: The Development of Jazz, 1930 – 1945.
DownBeat Hall of Fame
John Burnett. "Art Tatum: A Talent Never to Be Duplicated". NPR.
Bassist Charles Mingus
disputed the story in his autobiography, saying that the actual line
was "Oh, God! Tatum is in the house." Mingus may have had an ulterior
motive in making that comment, however. According to vibraphonist Red Norvo,
in whose group Mingus played bass around 1950, Mingus tried out for
Tatum's trio but did not have the ear to follow Tatum's "difficult
atonal things". Lester, Too Marvelous for Words, p. 148, 168
Bill Crow, Jazz Anecdotes, Oxford Univ. Press, 1991, p. 277
Told
by Peterson himself on "Omnibus: Oscar Peterson and Andre Previn" –
BBC, 1977; and "In the Key of Oscar" – NFB Documentary, 1992
Jazz Professional, 1962, http://www.jazzprofessional.com/interviews/Oscar%20Peterson_Points.htm
Journal, Oscar Peterson, March 7, 2004
March 30, 1996 interview with Hank Jones, reprinted in liner notes to Art Tatum, 20th Century Piano Genius, Verve reissue 1996
Kenny Barron, A Musical Autobiography, Victor Verney, allaboutjazz.com
From the liner notes to Capitol CDP 7 92866 2
"Mulgrew Miller: The Messenger", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=il7pXr0dclU
Art Tatum, enotes
"Frets Magazine, July 1985". January 29, 2016.
Jeffrey A. Bilmes (September 1993). "Timing
is of the Essence: Perceptual and Computational Techniques for
Representing, Learning, and Reproducing Expressive Timing in Percussive
Rhythm" (PDF). MIT Masters Thesis. Retrieved 2013-07-31.
Tristan Jehan, Creating Music by Listening, "Chapter 3: Music Listening," Massachusetts Institute of Technology, dissertation submitted September 2005.
Kapica, J (April 9, 2009). "New life for the dead". The Globe and Mail. Retrieved April 23, 2013.
Tamark, Jeff (April 18, 2008). "Art Tatum Celebrated in "Re-Performance" CD, Concert and Book". JazzTimes. Retrieved April 23, 2013.
"Zenph Studios Gets Its First GRAMMY Nods". December 7, 2008. Retrieved April 23, 2013.
Tatum recorded commercially from 1932 until near his death. Although
recording opportunities were somewhat intermittent for most of his
career due to his solo style, he left copious recordings.[37] He
recorded for Decca (1934–41)
EARTH WIND AND FIRE
(May 20-May 26)
JACK DEJOHNETTE
(May 27-June 2)
ALBERT AYLER
(June 3-June 9)
VI REDD
(June 10-June 16)
LIGHTNIN’ HOPKINS
(June 17-June 23)
JULIAN “CANNONBALL” ADDERLEY
(June 24-June 30)
JAMES NEWTON
(July 1-July 7)
ART TATUM
(July 8-July 14)
SONNY CLARK
(July 15-July 21)
JASON MORAN
(July 22-July 28)
SONNY STITT
(July 29-August 4)
BUD POWELL
(August 5-August 11)
http://www.allmusic.com/artist/art-tatum-mn0000505770/biography
ART TATUM
(1909-1956)
Artist Biography by Scott Yanow
Art Tatum
was among the most extraordinary of all jazz musicians, a pianist with
wondrous technique who could not only play ridiculously rapid lines with
both hands (his 1933 solo version of "Tiger Rag" sounds as if there
were three pianists jamming together) but was harmonically 30 years
ahead of his time; all pianists have to deal to a certain extent with Tatum's
innovations in order to be taken seriously. Able to play stride, swing,
and boogie-woogie with speed and complexity that could only previously
be imagined, Tatum's
quick reflexes and boundless imagination kept his improvisations filled
with fresh (and sometimes futuristic) ideas that put him way ahead of
his contemporaries.
Born nearly blind, Tatum gained some formal piano training at the Toledo School of Music but was largely self-taught. Although influenced a bit by Fats Waller and the semi-classical pianists of the 1920s, there is really no explanation for where Tatum gained his inspiration and ideas from. He first played professionally in Toledo in the mid-'20s and had a radio show during 1929-1930. In 1932 Tatum traveled with singer Adelaide Hall to New York and made his recording debut accompanying Hall (as one of two pianists). But for those who had never heard him in person, it was his solos of 1933 (including "Tiger Rag") that announced the arrival of a truly major talent. In the 1930s, Tatum spent periods working in Cleveland, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and (in 1938) England. Although he led a popular trio with guitarist Tiny Grimes (later Everett Barksdale) and bassist Slam Stewart in the mid-'40s, Tatum spent most of his life as a solo pianist who could always scare the competition. Some observers criticized him for having too much technique (is such a thing possible?), working out and then keeping the same arrangements for particular songs, and for using too many notes, but those minor reservations pale when compared to Tatum's reworkings of such tunes as "Yesterdays," "Begin the Beguine," and even "Humoresque." Although he was not a composer, Tatum's rearrangements of standards made even warhorses sound like new compositions.
Art Tatum, who recorded for Decca throughout the 1930s and Capitol in the late '40s, starred at the Esquire Metropolitan Opera House concert of 1944 and appeared briefly in his only film in 1947, The Fabulous Dorseys (leading a jam session on a heated blues). He recorded extensively for Norman Granz near the end of his life in the 1950s, both solo and with all-star groups; all of the music has been reissued by Pablo on a six-CD box set. His premature death from uremia has not resulted in any loss of fame, for Art Tatum's recordings still have the ability to scare modern pianists.
https://www.biography.com/people/art-tatum-9502561
Born nearly blind, Tatum gained some formal piano training at the Toledo School of Music but was largely self-taught. Although influenced a bit by Fats Waller and the semi-classical pianists of the 1920s, there is really no explanation for where Tatum gained his inspiration and ideas from. He first played professionally in Toledo in the mid-'20s and had a radio show during 1929-1930. In 1932 Tatum traveled with singer Adelaide Hall to New York and made his recording debut accompanying Hall (as one of two pianists). But for those who had never heard him in person, it was his solos of 1933 (including "Tiger Rag") that announced the arrival of a truly major talent. In the 1930s, Tatum spent periods working in Cleveland, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and (in 1938) England. Although he led a popular trio with guitarist Tiny Grimes (later Everett Barksdale) and bassist Slam Stewart in the mid-'40s, Tatum spent most of his life as a solo pianist who could always scare the competition. Some observers criticized him for having too much technique (is such a thing possible?), working out and then keeping the same arrangements for particular songs, and for using too many notes, but those minor reservations pale when compared to Tatum's reworkings of such tunes as "Yesterdays," "Begin the Beguine," and even "Humoresque." Although he was not a composer, Tatum's rearrangements of standards made even warhorses sound like new compositions.
Art Tatum, who recorded for Decca throughout the 1930s and Capitol in the late '40s, starred at the Esquire Metropolitan Opera House concert of 1944 and appeared briefly in his only film in 1947, The Fabulous Dorseys (leading a jam session on a heated blues). He recorded extensively for Norman Granz near the end of his life in the 1950s, both solo and with all-star groups; all of the music has been reissued by Pablo on a six-CD box set. His premature death from uremia has not resulted in any loss of fame, for Art Tatum's recordings still have the ability to scare modern pianists.
https://www.biography.com/people/art-tatum-9502561
ART TATUM
(1909-1956)
Art Tatum
|
https://musicians.allaboutjazz.com/arttatum
ART TATUM
Art Tatum was born in Toledo, Ohio and despite being blind in one eye and only partially sighted in the other he became arguably the greatest jazz piano player who ever lived.
While in New York he established his reputation in “cutting contests” with other top pianists, which he never lost, overwhelming both Fats Waller and James P. Johnson during his first visit to the Big Apple. He spent the next few years playing in Cleveland, Chicago, New York and Los Angeles and even England in 1938. During this time he established himself as a major figure in jazz circles. In the early 1940s Tatum formed an extremely popular trio with bassist Slam Stewart and guitarist Tiny Grimes. He spent much of the next decade touring North America. In 1953 Tatum signed by producer Norman Granz and recorded extensively both as a soloist and in small groups with Benny Carter, Buddy DeFranco, Roy Eldridge, Lionel Hampton, Ben Webster, Harry Sweets Edison and others. His incredible talent allowed him to be extremely productive during this time. Ray Spencer in his biography, noted that Tatum was constantly “refining and honing down after each performance until an ideal version remained needing no further adjustments”. This allowed him to achieve a remarkable work rate. For example, his solo sessions for Granz were mostly completed in two days. That is a total of 69 tracks and all but three of them needed only one take. Sadly, on Nov. 5, 1956 his prodigious output was cut short when he died of uremia, however his artistic influence has been strong and long-lasting.
The starting point of Art Tatum's style was Fats Waller's stride. As Tatum once said, “Fats, that's where I come out of and, man, that's quite a place to come from”. From this beginning he went on to create and superbly original and creative style of playing piano. His left-handed figures where similar to stride but he was really known for the way that he explored harmonic complexities and unusual chord progressions. When improvising, Tatum would often insert totally new chord sequences (occasionally with a chord on each beat) into one or two measures. He also developed the habit of quoting from other melodies, something that became a standard practice among modern jazz musicians. What really set Tatum apart was his amazing technical abilities which combined with his willingness to explore the imagined limitations of the orthodox keyboard which produced astonishing rhythmic and harmonic complexities. It is claimed that he could identify the dominant note in a flushing toilet.
Perhaps the greatest tribute to the excellence of Art Tatum lies in the opinions of his peers. He has influenced many musicians including Bud Powell, Herbie Hancock, and even non-pianists such as Charlie Parker and John Coltrane. Many would say that he inspired the bebop revolution in jazz. When Oscar Peterson first heard him play he thought it was two people and he considered Tatum the best jazz instrumentalist of all time. Legend has it that classical pianist Vladimir Horowitz was so awed by Tatum's wizardry that it brought him to tears; he also is to have said that it was fortunate for classical pianists that Tatum did not choose to pursue a classical career.
Fittingly, his strongest support comes from one of his early influences, Fats Waller. One time in 1938 Tatum dropped in to hear Waller play at a club. By way of introduction Waller told the audience, “I just play the piano, but God is in the house tonight.”
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6434701
Art Tatum: A Talent Never to Be Duplicated
Legally blind and virtually self taught, Art Tatum was a
professional musician from his teens and became the most influential of
the swing-style pianists.
Tatum at the piano, in a photo taken sometime in 1937.
Hulton Archive/Getty Images
It's hard to summon enough superlatives for Tatum's piano playing: his harmonic invention, his technical virtuosity, his rhythmic daring. The great stride pianist Fats Waller famously announced one night when Tatum walked into the club where Waller was playing, "I only play the piano, but tonight God is in the house."
The musical prodigy was born in Toledo, Ohio, to a mechanic and a domestic who worked in white homes. Legally blind and largely self-taught, Tatum memorized entire piano rolls, and absorbed music from the radio and the Victrola. He emerged in the 1930s as a fully formed musician whose improvisational skill quickly became legend.
There had never before been anyone like Art Tatum.
"Tatum's playing was unworldly, unreal, because his standard was so high," says Dick Hyman, a Florida-based pianist and composer who is considered a great performer of early piano jazz.
"Tatum's harmonies to begin with were beyond what anybody was doing at the time... really beyond what anybody's done since," Hyman says.
The highly regarded jazz critic and author Gary Giddins listens to lots and lots of jazz. But he says he plays certain artists more often than others.
"Tatum is one of them," Giddins says.
"He's endlessly fascinating. You know, people used to criticize Tatum
and they would say things like, 'Well, it's too ornamental... there's
too much decorative stuff.' That is the essence of Tatum. If you don't
like his ornament, you should be listening to someone else. That's where
his genius is."
People who heard Tatum on a record for the first time often thought they were listening to two piano players.
He became a phenomenon in New York. It wasn't unusual to look up and see the classical pianist Vladimir Horowitz or the composer George Gershwin sitting in the audience in awe.
He usually played solo, because it was so hard for accompanists to follow his dazzling, volcanic musical ideas. He tried to play everything he heard in his head.
Whitney Balliett, longtime New Yorker jazz critic, once observed: "Tatum's mind abhorred a vacuum."
The jazz pianist and educator, Dr. Billy Taylor — a protege of Tatum's — says his mentor could even make a bad piano sound good.
"He really heard so many things," Taylor says. "The piano was out of tune, he'd make it work so that even the note was out of tune, he'd use that."
Over the past year, Storyville Records, a Danish label, released nine CDs full of rare Tatum material. They're what one collector calls "the equivalent of discovering unpublished Shakespeare plays."
Many of these previously unreleased recordings came from the vault of a retired real estate executive named Arnold Laubich. He says he first heard Tatum as a teenager — more than 60 years ago — and never got over it. He is the world's preeminent collector of Art Tatum recordings.
The Storyville CDs are remarkable because they offer an audio glimpse into the invisible world of jazz — the after-hours parties where musicians unwound and tried out new songs and new ideas, or just had fun.
"He played all night and into the day, and often 'til noon or later, from the night before," Laubich says. "And this is what he would do. He would go to these places. And sometimes he'd go from place to place and crowds would follow him. But the crowds were friends."
Art Tatum died on Nov. 5, 1956 at 47. Death came from complications associated with his prodigious drinking.
Laubich says a couple years ago he gave a lecture on Tatum to a class at City College in New York. No one in the class had heard of Tatum.
He has never joined the pantheon of jazz greats — Armstrong, Ellington, Parker, Davis. There's no Tatum songbook, because he rarely composed. In fact, it's said he was so original that he re-composed every song he ever played.
His piano playing was so advanced almost nobody can copy him.
And yet, his genius is remembered, in small, but significant ways.
A few years ago, a young MIT grad student invented a term that's now in common usage in the field of computational musicology: The tatum.
It means "the smallest perceptual time unit in music."
People who heard Tatum on a record for the first time often thought they were listening to two piano players.
He became a phenomenon in New York. It wasn't unusual to look up and see the classical pianist Vladimir Horowitz or the composer George Gershwin sitting in the audience in awe.
He usually played solo, because it was so hard for accompanists to follow his dazzling, volcanic musical ideas. He tried to play everything he heard in his head.
Whitney Balliett, longtime New Yorker jazz critic, once observed: "Tatum's mind abhorred a vacuum."
The jazz pianist and educator, Dr. Billy Taylor — a protege of Tatum's — says his mentor could even make a bad piano sound good.
"He really heard so many things," Taylor says. "The piano was out of tune, he'd make it work so that even the note was out of tune, he'd use that."
Over the past year, Storyville Records, a Danish label, released nine CDs full of rare Tatum material. They're what one collector calls "the equivalent of discovering unpublished Shakespeare plays."
Many of these previously unreleased recordings came from the vault of a retired real estate executive named Arnold Laubich. He says he first heard Tatum as a teenager — more than 60 years ago — and never got over it. He is the world's preeminent collector of Art Tatum recordings.
The Storyville CDs are remarkable because they offer an audio glimpse into the invisible world of jazz — the after-hours parties where musicians unwound and tried out new songs and new ideas, or just had fun.
"He played all night and into the day, and often 'til noon or later, from the night before," Laubich says. "And this is what he would do. He would go to these places. And sometimes he'd go from place to place and crowds would follow him. But the crowds were friends."
Art Tatum died on Nov. 5, 1956 at 47. Death came from complications associated with his prodigious drinking.
Laubich says a couple years ago he gave a lecture on Tatum to a class at City College in New York. No one in the class had heard of Tatum.
He has never joined the pantheon of jazz greats — Armstrong, Ellington, Parker, Davis. There's no Tatum songbook, because he rarely composed. In fact, it's said he was so original that he re-composed every song he ever played.
His piano playing was so advanced almost nobody can copy him.
And yet, his genius is remembered, in small, but significant ways.
A few years ago, a young MIT grad student invented a term that's now in common usage in the field of computational musicology: The tatum.
It means "the smallest perceptual time unit in music."
Related NPR Stories:
Tatum on 'Shadow Classics' Oct. 18, 2006
JazzTimes
Art Tatum: No Greater Art
Art Tatum: No Greater Art
Talkin’ Tatum with Hank Jones, Billy Taylor, Dick Hyman, Adam Makowicz
Today, Art Tatum would have been 88. His music survives and continues to astound.
This weekend, after working my way through his Solo and Group Masterpieces on Pablo, which included such collaborators as Roy Eldridge, Lionel Hampton and Ben Webster, I’m listening to a Verve reissue, 20th Century Piano Genius, recorded live at several Beverly Hills parties in the ’50s. I flash on such accolades as “Tatum-no one can imitatum” and “No one can overratum.” A bit trite perhaps, but they do have the ring of truth.
Although a number of his keyboard cousins have also possessed superior technique, Tatum continues to amaze 42 years after his untimely passing. Few have been able to duplicate his dazzling right-hand runs, often executed at seemingly impossible speeds while his left hand offered his own distinctive stride beat, his boundless invention or the beauty of his harmonic tapestries. What a concept-elaborate fill-ins, dazzling arpeggios, sumptuous chording and a predilection for sudden changes of key and tempo. These uniquely distinct manifestations of Tatum’s artistry elevated standards to sovereign status.
Back in the ’30s and ’40s, when 52nd Street was at its zenith, Art Tatum, who was legally blind, was one of its most consistent drawing cards at clubs like the Downbeat and the Three Deuces. As the story goes, Fats Waller was working the Yacht Club as the featured performer one night and he spotted Tatum in the audience. “I just play the piano,” Waller announced. “But God is in the house tonight.” Even classical piano virtuosi Vladimir Horowitz and Sergei Rachmaninoff visited “The Street” to check out Tatum and left astounded and bemused by his pyrotechnical skills.
Club engagements were just the start of a night for Tatum, who thrived in after hours clubs, jam sessions and cutting contests. Many observers feel that Tatum did his best playing in these situations when, because he wasn’t being paid for his services, he was able to play for as long and late as he pleased. He also seemed to feast on competition. Another legend tells of a Harlem keyboard joust where Tatum bested an imperious Bud Powell by using his left hand to play everything Bud was playing on his right, immediately after Bud had played it.
“Every young pianist of my generation had a powerful moment when he first heard Art Tatum and wondered how it was possible for somebody to play that way. Like everyone else, I had his records early on; I must have been 10 or 11. A little later on, I got to play on the same bill with him at a club called Cafe Society. I was playing in Tony Scott’s Quartet and for a week or so, Tatum was the featured act. That was marvelous time also. Was I awestruck? I should say so.
Hank Jones
“I saw Tatum in person many many times. I used to work at a club in Buffalo, New York, the Anchor Bar. Whenever Tatum was in town, he’d be working at another club across town called McVans. We’d go over and catch his last set and then after he finished his last set, he would usually go to an after hours spot or to somebody’s home who had invited him to come and play. He would just play for hours after he finished work. I guess that’s how he practiced. He never stopped playing. It seemed that he played all of his waking hours. I think this is probably how he perfected his technique and maintained it. He had an endless flow of ideas and an unbelievable technique with both hands. He put it all together. I believe that Tatum was the greatest pianist of this century.
“When I first heard him, it was a radio broadcast before he came to New York. I listened to what I thought was two or three pianists playing together on these unbelievable arrangements. I thought to myself, they must have rehearsed this stuff a lot because these guys couldn’t play this way unless they spend a lot of time working. I was amazed when I discovered that it was only one man playing. I couldn’t believe it. That was my first introduction.
“When finally met him and got a chance to hear him play in person, it seemed as if he wasn’t really exerting much effort, he had an effortless way of playing. It was deceptive. You’d watch him and you couldn’t believe what was coming out, what was reaching your ears. He didn’t have that much motion at the piano. He didn’t make a big show of moving around and waving his hands and going through all sorts of physical gyrations to produce the music that he produced, so that in itself is amazing. There had to be intense concentration there, but you couldn’t tell by just looking at him play.
“Tatum completely mastered the jazz idiom. His harmonic conception was far advanced. In fact, he was using harmonic concepts that bebop players adapted years later. Of course his technique was flawless and with both hands too. I believe that anything he could conceive in his mind, he could execute and his mind must have moved at lightening speed, otherwise he couldn’t have done the things that he did. What else is there? He did everything possible on the piano. I’ve heard people try to imitate Tatum. The imitators can only go so far. Maybe they can approach the technique but how can they approach the creativity and the ideas, nobody’s done that. You can sit down and transcribe one of his solos and I suppose that if somebody practiced for 20 or 25 years, they could probably play one of his solos note for note, but that’s not the same thing as creating the music. Tatum created this and that’s what made him unique.”
Adam Makowicz
“The greatest pianist who ever lived! I first heard him in the mid-’50s, back in Poland, when I was studying classical music and was able to play fast runs. I’d heard some jazz pianists, but nothing like Tatum. I was 14 or 15 and was thinking seriously about a career in classical music. Then I heard this pianist on the radio who kept me listening to trying to figure out who he was and wondering where I could get some records. At that time in Poland, it was very hard to get western recordings, particularly from the U.S. I used to listen regularly to Music USA, Willis Conover’s jazz program on the Voice of America, where I heard Tatum. Overnight, I decided to go and play jazz because it was too beautiful not to touch this music and play it. Tatum made me play jazz.
“I was impressed with the flavor and color of his runs. I’m not talking about single notes, which were so fast, but his arpeggios. These runs made particular colors in my imagination. At the time, I didn’t know much about jazz and what it was all about, but I knew of course how to follow melody lines and I knew what Tatum was improvising. Rhythmically, it was too complicated for me. Not knowing the rhythms, I couldn’t tap when he played but I knew that this was right, that this was music that would swing with vitality, something that classical music didn’t have. It was such a beautiful feeling to hear these bouncing notes and precise time in such colorful lines and the sounds of the piano so enriched and so beautiful, so tasteful. I was in heaven listening to this music and even today, when I listen to Tatum I still have the same kind of feeling.
“There’s a story about Horowitz, when he heard Tatum he wanted to play like him but when he met Tatum, he told him, I could play as fast as you or even faster but I couldn’t play the right time like you play, and I couldn’t play all your runs.”
“I try and emulate his spirit because even after years of practicing, you can’t play like him, it’s impossible. I try to emulate his taste, with every note in the right place.
“I never tried to transcribe and learn, note by note, never ever, this is not fun. I wanted to improvise music like he did. From Tatum I learned that this music has to be something that comes from your soul, your brain, your whole body. It’s something you create right now, in this moment. Tatum was my guideline and the most sophisticated and difficult guideline in piano music. That title, ’20th Century Piano Genius,’ it fits. Every pianist who loves jazz should have that set.
“What I find disturbing, though, is that it’s so hard to find Tatum on the radio today. There are a lot of great musicians who are living, and should be played, but still, people today are not exposed to him enough.”
Billy Taylor
“He was my biggest influence, even before I got to NY. My uncle was a pianist who gave me my first Fats Waller record and when I kept bugging him and telling him that I wanted to play that style, he finally said, listen to this and figure it out. He gave me The Shout, by Art Tatum. What I wanted to know was, who were those two guys?
“When I got to New York,I was extremely lucky. I will never get over the fact that I came to New York on a Friday and by Sunday, I had a gig. I went to Minton’s, hung around all night and got to play on the last set. Another my idols, Ben Webster, came in, and by that time, there were so many guys on the bandstand taking solos, that’s all I could do was comp. But luckily for me, that’s what Ben was interested in. He came back, stood by the piano and listened to be and said, what’s your name kid? I told him and he said, what are you doing? I said I just got to town and he said, I’m looking for a piano player. Come down to the Three Deuces, I’d really like to hear you play, I can’t hear you tonight like this. Sunday night I went down to the Three Deuces on 52nd Street to play with Ben, and Art Tatum was the headliner. That was when I first met him. It was wonderful to be in my first dream job, opposite the most important influence on my playing.
“Art was also one of the nicest human beings I’ve ever met. He was very sensitive. And he really loved sports, especially baseball. He was very up on statistics. He knew everybody’s batting average, he had a head for stats, he would argue. We used to go to a bar up in Harlem called Hollywood. The guy who owned it was his good friend and man they’d get into some arm wrestling arguments about who did what and why. He would swear that Art was wrong and Art would say, go get the paper, go get the almanac, that’s the right statistic, he hit .217 that year.
“There’s no doubt that Art was a genius, but he was a natural musician as well. He studied European classical music when he was a kid and he was always studying for musicians and incorporating a lot of different things. The way that he studied was by listening to people whose work he liked. He played Chopin, he played Bach and he used the information that he got from the European piano masters in his own work. The thing that always excited me was the fact that he spent a lot of time in hotel rooms and would always find a classical station. The funny part about it was he would stay up all night, and listen to classical for a while, then go to sleep at ten or 11, after listening to the classical music.
“I was his protégé for three years. I got to take him to a lot of nightclubs and after hours places. He was legally blind, he couldn’t maneuver around, especially at night, as he would like, but he was very very independent. He didn’t want you to lead him but he needed someone to accompany him to wherever it was he wanted to go. And, he liked the company. Art was gregarious. He liked to have specific people around him.
“While I was working opposite with Tatum, Dizzy brought the first bebop band ever to 52nd Street that featured Don Byas, Oscar Pettiford and Max Roach. Guys like Coleman Hawkins and Tatum recognized that they were the source of a lot of this new music. Like Roy Eldridge was the source of the stuff that Dizzy was building. Hawk and Roy and Tatum recognized that bebop was something special and were anxious to incorporate it into what they were doing. They didn’t want to play bebop but they did want to use that information in their own way. And so Tatum was a big source of influence to Charlie Parker in particular because Bird loved what he did. One of the things that Bird liked about my playing was that I used some of those harmonies. I once played something and he said to me, ‘Oh man, just like Tatum.’ I told him, ‘Oh yeah, that’s where I got it from!'”
This weekend, after working my way through his Solo and Group Masterpieces on Pablo, which included such collaborators as Roy Eldridge, Lionel Hampton and Ben Webster, I’m listening to a Verve reissue, 20th Century Piano Genius, recorded live at several Beverly Hills parties in the ’50s. I flash on such accolades as “Tatum-no one can imitatum” and “No one can overratum.” A bit trite perhaps, but they do have the ring of truth.
Although a number of his keyboard cousins have also possessed superior technique, Tatum continues to amaze 42 years after his untimely passing. Few have been able to duplicate his dazzling right-hand runs, often executed at seemingly impossible speeds while his left hand offered his own distinctive stride beat, his boundless invention or the beauty of his harmonic tapestries. What a concept-elaborate fill-ins, dazzling arpeggios, sumptuous chording and a predilection for sudden changes of key and tempo. These uniquely distinct manifestations of Tatum’s artistry elevated standards to sovereign status.
Back in the ’30s and ’40s, when 52nd Street was at its zenith, Art Tatum, who was legally blind, was one of its most consistent drawing cards at clubs like the Downbeat and the Three Deuces. As the story goes, Fats Waller was working the Yacht Club as the featured performer one night and he spotted Tatum in the audience. “I just play the piano,” Waller announced. “But God is in the house tonight.” Even classical piano virtuosi Vladimir Horowitz and Sergei Rachmaninoff visited “The Street” to check out Tatum and left astounded and bemused by his pyrotechnical skills.
Club engagements were just the start of a night for Tatum, who thrived in after hours clubs, jam sessions and cutting contests. Many observers feel that Tatum did his best playing in these situations when, because he wasn’t being paid for his services, he was able to play for as long and late as he pleased. He also seemed to feast on competition. Another legend tells of a Harlem keyboard joust where Tatum bested an imperious Bud Powell by using his left hand to play everything Bud was playing on his right, immediately after Bud had played it.
Born in Toledo, Ohio, Tatum arrived in 1932 backing singer Adelaide Hall and found New York to his liking, quickly becoming one of “The Street”‘s highest paid stars. He lived as he played, prodigiously, drinking everything in one gulp yet never seeming to get drunk. Tatum would also stay awake for days on end, playing almost non-stop and maintaining his energy through catnaps, but he’d also sleep in long stretches, as well, awakening instantly when one of hands was touched.
Art Tatum died of uremic poisoning in 1956 at the age of 47 but his playing is still the subject of awe among pianists worldwide. To get more insight into Tatum, I spoke with four pianists who have been deeply touched by him: Dick Hyman, Hank Jones, Adam Makowicz and Billy Taylor. Hyman heard Tatum a number of times and, along with Billy Taylor, was cited by Tatum as one of his favorites among “young” pianists. Jones first heard Tatum on the radio in his native Detroit and was instantly hooked. Makowicz grew up in Poland and was ready to be a classical pianist until he heard Tatum on one of Willis Conover’s Voice of America broadcasts. More than 30 years later, he played at the Kennedy Center’s Tatum series and has recently released a exceptional solo piano encomium, A Tribute to Art Tatum, on VWC.” Taylor served as Tatum’s protégé and amanuensis when he came to New York in 1945.
Dick Hyman
“Every young pianist of my generation had a powerful moment when he first heard Art Tatum and wondered how it was possible for somebody to play that way. Like everyone else, I had his records early on; I must have been 10 or 11. A little later on, I got to play on the same bill with him at a club called Cafe Society. I was playing in Tony Scott’s Quartet and for a week or so, Tatum was the featured act. That was marvelous time also. Was I awestruck? I should say so.
“What was it about Tatum? It was everything, not just his technique, although that was enough to boggle the mind right there. It was his sense of harmony, his voice leading, his time, his touch, his ideas, it was his integration of his well known runs and figures with lines which were at least as complex as what Bird would do a few years later.
“At first, I did try to emulate him but I didn’t exactly transcribe his solos. I tried to learn his runs and incorporate what I could, but that’s a very tall order. I still haven’t done it.
“As pianists, we all do what we can to follow in Tatum’s footsteps but some people have gone entirely in a different direction because they’ve give up trying, they’ve seen how pointless it is to make that turn. In my case, I’ve tried to get as much as I could through the years and by now, I know a fair amount but I would never say that I do it perfectly.”
Hank Jones
“I saw Tatum in person many many times. I used to work at a club in Buffalo, New York, the Anchor Bar. Whenever Tatum was in town, he’d be working at another club across town called McVans. We’d go over and catch his last set and then after he finished his last set, he would usually go to an after hours spot or to somebody’s home who had invited him to come and play. He would just play for hours after he finished work. I guess that’s how he practiced. He never stopped playing. It seemed that he played all of his waking hours. I think this is probably how he perfected his technique and maintained it. He had an endless flow of ideas and an unbelievable technique with both hands. He put it all together. I believe that Tatum was the greatest pianist of this century.
“When I first heard him, it was a radio broadcast before he came to New York. I listened to what I thought was two or three pianists playing together on these unbelievable arrangements. I thought to myself, they must have rehearsed this stuff a lot because these guys couldn’t play this way unless they spend a lot of time working. I was amazed when I discovered that it was only one man playing. I couldn’t believe it. That was my first introduction.
“When finally met him and got a chance to hear him play in person, it seemed as if he wasn’t really exerting much effort, he had an effortless way of playing. It was deceptive. You’d watch him and you couldn’t believe what was coming out, what was reaching your ears. He didn’t have that much motion at the piano. He didn’t make a big show of moving around and waving his hands and going through all sorts of physical gyrations to produce the music that he produced, so that in itself is amazing. There had to be intense concentration there, but you couldn’t tell by just looking at him play.
“Tatum completely mastered the jazz idiom. His harmonic conception was far advanced. In fact, he was using harmonic concepts that bebop players adapted years later. Of course his technique was flawless and with both hands too. I believe that anything he could conceive in his mind, he could execute and his mind must have moved at lightening speed, otherwise he couldn’t have done the things that he did. What else is there? He did everything possible on the piano. I’ve heard people try to imitate Tatum. The imitators can only go so far. Maybe they can approach the technique but how can they approach the creativity and the ideas, nobody’s done that. You can sit down and transcribe one of his solos and I suppose that if somebody practiced for 20 or 25 years, they could probably play one of his solos note for note, but that’s not the same thing as creating the music. Tatum created this and that’s what made him unique.”
Adam Makowicz
“The greatest pianist who ever lived! I first heard him in the mid-’50s, back in Poland, when I was studying classical music and was able to play fast runs. I’d heard some jazz pianists, but nothing like Tatum. I was 14 or 15 and was thinking seriously about a career in classical music. Then I heard this pianist on the radio who kept me listening to trying to figure out who he was and wondering where I could get some records. At that time in Poland, it was very hard to get western recordings, particularly from the U.S. I used to listen regularly to Music USA, Willis Conover’s jazz program on the Voice of America, where I heard Tatum. Overnight, I decided to go and play jazz because it was too beautiful not to touch this music and play it. Tatum made me play jazz.
“I was impressed with the flavor and color of his runs. I’m not talking about single notes, which were so fast, but his arpeggios. These runs made particular colors in my imagination. At the time, I didn’t know much about jazz and what it was all about, but I knew of course how to follow melody lines and I knew what Tatum was improvising. Rhythmically, it was too complicated for me. Not knowing the rhythms, I couldn’t tap when he played but I knew that this was right, that this was music that would swing with vitality, something that classical music didn’t have. It was such a beautiful feeling to hear these bouncing notes and precise time in such colorful lines and the sounds of the piano so enriched and so beautiful, so tasteful. I was in heaven listening to this music and even today, when I listen to Tatum I still have the same kind of feeling.
“There’s a story about Horowitz, when he heard Tatum he wanted to play like him but when he met Tatum, he told him, I could play as fast as you or even faster but I couldn’t play the right time like you play, and I couldn’t play all your runs.”
“I try and emulate his spirit because even after years of practicing, you can’t play like him, it’s impossible. I try to emulate his taste, with every note in the right place.
“I never tried to transcribe and learn, note by note, never ever, this is not fun. I wanted to improvise music like he did. From Tatum I learned that this music has to be something that comes from your soul, your brain, your whole body. It’s something you create right now, in this moment. Tatum was my guideline and the most sophisticated and difficult guideline in piano music. That title, ’20th Century Piano Genius,’ it fits. Every pianist who loves jazz should have that set.
“What I find disturbing, though, is that it’s so hard to find Tatum on the radio today. There are a lot of great musicians who are living, and should be played, but still, people today are not exposed to him enough.”
Billy Taylor
“He was my biggest influence, even before I got to NY. My uncle was a pianist who gave me my first Fats Waller record and when I kept bugging him and telling him that I wanted to play that style, he finally said, listen to this and figure it out. He gave me The Shout, by Art Tatum. What I wanted to know was, who were those two guys?
“When I got to New York,I was extremely lucky. I will never get over the fact that I came to New York on a Friday and by Sunday, I had a gig. I went to Minton’s, hung around all night and got to play on the last set. Another my idols, Ben Webster, came in, and by that time, there were so many guys on the bandstand taking solos, that’s all I could do was comp. But luckily for me, that’s what Ben was interested in. He came back, stood by the piano and listened to be and said, what’s your name kid? I told him and he said, what are you doing? I said I just got to town and he said, I’m looking for a piano player. Come down to the Three Deuces, I’d really like to hear you play, I can’t hear you tonight like this. Sunday night I went down to the Three Deuces on 52nd Street to play with Ben, and Art Tatum was the headliner. That was when I first met him. It was wonderful to be in my first dream job, opposite the most important influence on my playing.
“Art was also one of the nicest human beings I’ve ever met. He was very sensitive. And he really loved sports, especially baseball. He was very up on statistics. He knew everybody’s batting average, he had a head for stats, he would argue. We used to go to a bar up in Harlem called Hollywood. The guy who owned it was his good friend and man they’d get into some arm wrestling arguments about who did what and why. He would swear that Art was wrong and Art would say, go get the paper, go get the almanac, that’s the right statistic, he hit .217 that year.
“There’s no doubt that Art was a genius, but he was a natural musician as well. He studied European classical music when he was a kid and he was always studying for musicians and incorporating a lot of different things. The way that he studied was by listening to people whose work he liked. He played Chopin, he played Bach and he used the information that he got from the European piano masters in his own work. The thing that always excited me was the fact that he spent a lot of time in hotel rooms and would always find a classical station. The funny part about it was he would stay up all night, and listen to classical for a while, then go to sleep at ten or 11, after listening to the classical music.
“I was his protégé for three years. I got to take him to a lot of nightclubs and after hours places. He was legally blind, he couldn’t maneuver around, especially at night, as he would like, but he was very very independent. He didn’t want you to lead him but he needed someone to accompany him to wherever it was he wanted to go. And, he liked the company. Art was gregarious. He liked to have specific people around him.
“While I was working opposite with Tatum, Dizzy brought the first bebop band ever to 52nd Street that featured Don Byas, Oscar Pettiford and Max Roach. Guys like Coleman Hawkins and Tatum recognized that they were the source of a lot of this new music. Like Roy Eldridge was the source of the stuff that Dizzy was building. Hawk and Roy and Tatum recognized that bebop was something special and were anxious to incorporate it into what they were doing. They didn’t want to play bebop but they did want to use that information in their own way. And so Tatum was a big source of influence to Charlie Parker in particular because Bird loved what he did. One of the things that Bird liked about my playing was that I used some of those harmonies. I once played something and he said to me, ‘Oh man, just like Tatum.’ I told him, ‘Oh yeah, that’s where I got it from!'”
“Genius
is an overworked word in this era of thunderous hyperbolic press agency. Still, when one
considers Arthur Tatum, there is no other proper descriptive adjective for
referring to his talents. I have purposely pluralized them, for Tatum possessed
several gifts—most of which remained unknown to all but a few of his best
friends—his prodigious memory, his grasp of all sports statistics and his skill
at playing cards.”
“At the
piano, Art seemingly delighted in creating impossible problems from the
standpoint of harmonies and chord progressions. Then he would gleefully
improvise sequence upon sequence until the phrase emerged as a complete entity
within the structure of whatever composition he happened to be playing. Many is
the time I have heard him speed blithely into what I feared was a musical
cul-de-sac, only to hear the tying resolution come shining through. This
required great knowledge, dexterity and daring.
“Perhaps
Art Tatum would have been assured a firmer place in musical history if he had
not alienated too many of the self-righteous aficionados who preferred their
piano sounds less embroidered, less imaginative and more orthodox. Therefore,
it follows that Tatum would never be their favorite pianist. Posterity tends to
prove that Art requires neither champion nor defense, since the proof of his
genius remains intact and unblemished. The beauty within the framework of his
music transcends the opinions of critics, aficionados, fans and musicians
themselves. History is the arbiter. For the truly great, fame is not fleeting
but everlasting.”
-- Rex Stewart, Jazz trumpet
player and author
In his
impeccably written American Masters: 56 Portraits in Jazz, the
esteemed author Whitney Balliett observed:
“Great
talent often has a divine air: it's there, but no one knows where it comes
from. Tatum's gifts were no exception; his background was plain and strict….
“Tatum
was a restless, compulsive player who abhorred silence. He used the piano's
orchestral possibilities to the fullest, simultaneously maintaining a melodic
voice, a harmonic voice, a variety of decorative voices, and a kind of
whimsical voice, a laughing, look-Ma-no-hands voice. The effect was both
confounding and exhilarating.
Tatum had two main modes—the flashy, kaleidoscopic style he used on the job, and the straight-ahead jazz style, which emerges in fragments from his few after-hours recordings and from some of the recordings made with his various trios (piano, guitar, and bass), which seemed to galvanize him. (Tatum did not have an easy time playing with other instruments; he tended to compete with them, then overrun them.) He offered the first style to the public, which accepted it with awe, and he used the second to delight himself and his peers….”
“Tatum
did not fit comfortably in jazz, for his playing, which was largely orchestral,
both encompassed it and overflowed it. He occupied his own country. His playing
was shaped primarily by his technique, which was prodigious, even virtuosic.
Tatum had an angelic touch: no pianist has got a better sound out of the
instrument. He was completely ambidextrous. And he could move his hands at
bewildering speeds, whether through gargantuan arpeggios, oompah stride basses,
on-the-beat tenths, or single-note melodic lines. No matter how fast he played
or how intense and complex his harmonic inventions became, his attack kept its
commanding clarity. The Duke Ellington cornetist Rex Stewart, who turned into
something of a writer in his later years, said of Tatum in his Jazz
Masters of the Thirties:”
“At every
dance that Fletcher Henderson's band played, there'd be someone boasting about
hometown talent. Usually, the loca talent was pretty bad, and we were reluctant
to take the word of anyone but a darn-good musician, such as alto saxophonist
Milton Senior of McKinney's Cotton Pickers, who was touting a piano player.
"Out of this world," Milton said. We were persuaded to go to the club where this pianist was working.
The setting was not impressive; it was in an alley, in the middle of Toledo's Bohemian section. I 'm not sure if the year was 1926 or 1927, but I am sure that my first impression of Art Tatum was a lasting one. As a matter of fact, the experience was almost traumatic for me, and for a brief spell afterward, I toyed with the idea of giving up my horn and returning to school.
Looking back, I can see why Tatum had this effect on me. Not only did he play all that piano, but, by doing so, he also reminded me of how inadequately I was filling Louis Armstrong's chair with the Henderson band.
To a man, we were astonished, gassed, and just couldn't believe our eyes and ears. How could this nearly blind young fellow extract so much beauty out of an old beat-up upright piano that looked like a relic from the Civil War? Our drummer, Kaiser Marshall, turned to Henderson and said it for all of us:
"Well, it just goes to show you can't judge a book by its cover. There's a beat-up old piano, and that kid makes it sound like a Steinway. Go ahead, Smack, let's see you sit down to that box. I bet it won't come out the same."
Fletcher just shrugged his shoulders and answered philosophically, "I am pretty sure that we are in the presence of one of the greatest talents that you or I will ever hear. So don't try to be funny."
Coleman
Hawkins was so taken by Tatum's playing that he immediately started creating
another style for himself, based on what he'd heard Tatum play that night—and
forever after dropped his slap-tongue style.
To our
surprise, this talented youngster was quite insecure and asked us humbly,
"Do you think I can make it in the big city [meaning New York]?" We
assured him that he would make it, that the entire world would be at his feet
once he put Toledo behind him. Turning away, he sadly shook his head, saying,
kind of to himself, "I ain't ready yet."
However,
as far as we were concerned, he was half-past ready! I can see now that Tatum
really thought he was too green and unequipped for the Apple, because he spent
the next few years in another alley in another Ohio city — Cleveland—at a place
called Val's.
It was probably at Val's that Paul Whiteman "discovered" him a year or so later, when Art was 19, and took him to New York to be featured with the Whiteman band. But insecurity and homesickness combined to make him miserable, and after a short time, he fled back to Toledo. This is a good example of a man being at the crossroads and taking the wrong turn.
After
returning home, Tatum gradually became confident that he could hold his own.
When Don Redman was passing through Toledo a year or so later, Art told him,
"Tell them New York cats to look out. Here comes Tatum! And I mean every
living 'tub' with the exception of Fats Waller and Willie the Lion."
At that
time, Art had never heard of Donald (the Beetle) Lambert, a famous young piano
player around New York in the '20s, and he came into the picture too late to
have heard Seminole, an American Indian guitar and piano player whose left hand
was actually faster than most pianists' right hands. In any case, to Tatum,
Fats was Mr. Piano.
The admiration was reciprocated. The story goes that Fats, the cheerful little earful, was in great form while appearing in the Panther Room of the Sherman Hotel in Chicago. Fats was in orbit that night, slaying the crowd, singing and wiggling his behind to his hit "Honeysuckle Rose."
Suddenly
he jumped up like he'd been stung by a bee and, in one of those rapid changes
of character for which he was famous, announced in stentorian tones:
"Ladies and gentlemen, God is in the house tonight. May I introduce the
one and only Art Tatum."
I did not witness this scene, but so many people have related the incident that I am inclined to believe it. At any rate, before Tatum did much playing in New York, he spent a period of time with vocalist Adelaide Hall as part of a two-piano team, the other accompanist being Joe Turner (the pianist). Miss Hall, then big in the profession, took them with her on a European tour.
In
appearance, Tatum was not especially noteworthy. His was not a face that one
would pick out of a crowd. He was about 5 feet, 7 inches tall and of average
build when he was young but grew somewhat portly over the years. Art was not
only a rather heavy- drinker but was also fond of home cooking and savored good
food. As he became affluent, his favorite restaurant was Mike Lyman's in
Hollywood, which used to be one of Los Angeles' best.
An only child, Tatum was born in Toledo on Oct. 13, 1910. He came into the world with milk cataracts in both eyes, which impaired his sight to the point of almost total blindness. After 13 operations, the doctors were able to restore a considerable amount of vision in one eye. Then Tatum had a great misfortune; he was assaulted by a holdup man, who, in the scuffle, hit Tatum in the good eye with a blackjack. The carefully restored vision was gone forever, and Tatum was left with the ability to see only large objects or smaller ones held very close to his "good" eye.
Art had
several fancy stories to explain his blindness, and a favorite was to tell in
great detail how a football injury caused his lack of sight. I've heard him go
into the routine: he was playing halfback for his high school team on this
rainy day; they were in the huddle; then lined up; the ball was snapped... wait
a minute—there's a fumble! Tatum recovers... he's at the 45-yard line, the 35,
the 25! Sprinting like mad, he is heading for a touchdown! Then, out of nowhere,
a mountain falls on him and just before oblivion descends, Tatum realized he
has been tackled by Two-Ton Tony, the biggest follow on either team. He is
carried off the field, a hero, but has had trouble with his eyes ever since.
The real
stories about Art are so unusual that one could drag out the cliche about fact
being stranger than fiction. When Art was three, his mother took him along to
choir practice. After they returned home, she went into the kitchen to prepare
dinner and heard someone fumbling with a hymn on the piano. Assuming that a
member of the church had dropped by and was waiting for her come out of the
kitchen, she called out, "Who's there?" No one-answered, so she
entered the parlor, and there sat three-year-old Art, absorbed in playing the hymn.
He continued playing piano by ear, and he could play anything he heard. Curiously, there was once a counterpart of Tatum in a slave known as Blind Tom. Tom earned a fortune for his master, performing before amazed audiences the most difficult music of his time after a single hearing. But Tom couldn't improvise; he lacked the added gift that was Tatum's.
Tatum
played piano several years before starting formal training. He learned to read
notes in Braille. He would touch the Braille manuscript, play a few bars on the
piano, touch the notation, play... until he completed a tune. After that, he
never "read" the song again; he knew it forever. He could play any
music he had ever heard. One time, at a recording session, the singer asked if
he knew a certain tune. Art answered, "Hum a few bars." As the singer
hummed, Art was not more than a half-second behind, playing the song with
chords and embellishments as if he had always known it, instead of hearing it
then for the first time.
His mother, recognizing that he had an unusual ear, gave him four years of formal training in the classics. Then the day came when the teacher called it halt to the studies, saying, "That's as far as I can teach you. Now, you teach me."
Tatum carried his perception to the nth degree, Eddie Beal, one of Art's devoted disciples, recalls their first meeting,which happened at the old Breakfast Club on Los Angeles' Central Avenue at about 4 a.m. The news had spread that Tatum was in town and could be expected to make the scene that morning. Just as Tatum entered the room, as Beal tells it, "Whoever was playing the piano jumped up from the stool, causing an empty beer can to fall off the piano. Tatum greeted the cats all around, then said, 'Drop that can again. It's a Pabst can, and the note it sounded was a B-flat.'" Rozelle Cayle, one of Tatum's closest friends, tops this story by saying that Tatum could tell the key of any sound, including a flushing toilet.
Genius is an overworked word in this era of thunderous hyperbolic press agency.Still, when one considers Arthur Tatum, there is no other proper descriptive adjective for referring to his talents. I have purposely pluralized them, for Tatum possessed several gifts — most of which remained unknown to all but a few of his best friends — his prodigious memory, his grasp of all sports statistics and his skill at playing cards.
Art was a formidable opponent in all types of card games, although bid whist was his favorite. There are a few bridge champions still around who recall the fun they had when Tatum played with them. According to one's reminiscence, Art would pick up his cards as dealt, hold them about one inch from the good eye, adjust them into suits and from then on, never looked at his hand again. He could actually recall every card that was played, when, and by whom. Furthermore, he played his own cards like a master.
He had an incredible memory not only for cards but also for voices as well. One account of his aptitude in catching voices has been told and retold. It seems that while playing London with Adelaide Hall hack in the late '30s, he was introduced to a certain person and immediately swept along the receiving line. Six years later, when he was playing in Hollywood, the person came to see Tatum. He greeted him with, "Hello, Art. How are you? I'll bet you don't remember me." Tatum replied, "Sure I remember you. Gee, you're looking good. I'm sorry I didn't get a chance to talk to you at that party in London, Your name is Lord So and So.'”
I realize that nature has a way of compensating for any inaccuracy, but Tatum's abilities transcended ordinary compensation. With only a high school education, he was a storehouse of information. His favorite sports were baseball and football, followed by horseracing. Tatum could quote baseball pitchers records, batting averages for almost all players in both big leagues, names and positions for almost all players, the game records any year, and so forth. Rozelle Gayle, one of Tatum's closest friends, recalls back in Art's Chicago days (the '30s) that all the musicians frequented the drugstore on the corner of 47th Street and South Park. Art became so respected as an authority on any subject (and that included population statistics) that the fellows would have him settle their arguments, instead of telephoning a newspaper.
Despite
impaired vision, he was a very independent man. He had little methods to avoid
being helped. For example, he always asked the bank to give all his money in
new $5 bills, which he put in a certain pocket. When he had to pay for
something, he gave a $5 and then counted his change by fingering the $1 bills
and feeling the coins. The 1’s then went into a certain pocket and the coins
into another. He had a mind like an adding machine and always knew exactly how
much money he had.
One of the most significant aspects of Tatum's artistry stemmed from his constant self-change.
At the piano, Art seemingly delighted in creating impossible problems from the standpoint of harmonies and chord progressions. Then he would gleefully improvise sequence upon sequence until the phrase emerged as a complete entity within the structure of whatever composition he happened to be playing. Many is the time I have heard him speed blithely into what I feared was a musical cul-de-sac, only to hear the tying resolution come shining through. This required great knowledge, dexterity and daring. Tatum achieved much of this through constant practice, working hours every day on the exercises to keep his fingers nimble enough to obey that quick, creative mind. He did not run through variations of songs or work on new inventions to dazzle his audiences. Rather, he ran scales and ordinary practice exercises, and if one didn't know who was doing the laborious, monotonous piano routines, he would never guess that it was a jazzman working out.
Another form of practice was unique with Tatum. He constantly manipulated a filbert nut through his fingers, so quickly that if you tried to watch him, the vision blurred. He worked with one nut until it became sleek and shiny from handling. When it came time to replace it, he would go to the market and feel nut after nut — a, whole bin full, until he found one just the right size and shape for his exercises. Art's hands were of unusual formation, though just the normal size for a man of his height and build. But when he wanted to, he somehow could make his fingers span a 12th on the keyboard. The average male hand spans nine or 10 of the white notes, 11 is considered wizard, but 12 is out of this world. Perhaps the spread developed from that seeming complete relaxation of the fingers — they never rose far above the keyboard and looked almost double-jointed as he ran phenomenally rapid, complex runs. His lightning execution was the result of all that practice, along with the instant communication between his fingers and brain. His touch produced a sound no other pianist has been able to capture. The method he used was his secret, which he never revealed. The Steinway was his favorite piano, but sometimes he played in a club that had a miserable piano with broken ivories and sour notes. He would run his fingers over the keyboard to detect these. Then he would play that night in keys that would avoid as much as possible the bad notes. Anything he could play, he could play in any key.
With all
that talent, perhaps it is not strange the effect that Art had on other
pianists. When he went where they were playing, his presence made them
uncomfortable. Some would hunt for excuses to keep from playing in front of the
master. Others would make all kinds of errors on things that, under other
circumstances, they could play without even thinking about it. There was the
case of the young fellow who played a great solo, not being aware that Tatum
was in the house. When Art congratulated him later, he fainted.
This sort
of adulation did not turn Tatum's head, and he continually sought reassurance
after a performance. Any friend who was present would be asked, "How was
it?" One couldn't ask for more humility from a king of his instrument.
A
little-known fact is that Art also played the accordion. Back in Ohio, before
he had gained success, he was offered a year's contract in a nightclub if he
would double on accordion. He quickly mastered the instrument and fulfilled the
engagement, but he never liked the accordion and after that gig, he never
played it again.
Tatum
always liked to hear other piano players, young or old, male or female. He
could find something kind to say even about quite bad performers. Sometimes his
companion would suggest leaving a club where the pianist could only play some
clunky blues in one key. But Art would say, "No, I want to hear his story.
Every piano player has a story to tell."
His
intimates (two of whom—Eddie Beal and Rozelle Gayle—I thank for much of this
information) agree that Tatum's favorites on the piano were Fats Waller, Willie
(the Lion) Smith and Earl Hines. He also liked lots of the youngsters, including
Nat Cole, Billy Taylor and Hank Jones.
In the
days when most musicians enjoyed hanging out with each other, Art and Meade Lux
Lewis palled around; Two more dissimilar chums could hardly be imagined. Tatum
was a rather brooding, bearlike figure of a man, and Meade Lux was a plump,
jolly little fellow. They kept a running joke going between themselves, Meade
Lux cracking that Art was cheap, even if Tatum was paying the tab.
Tatum's leisure hours began when almost everyone else was asleep, at 4 a.m. or so. He liked to sit and talk, drink and play, after he finished work.
There was
a serious and well-hidden side to the man. His secret ambition was to become
known as a classical composer, and somewhere there exist fragments of
compositions he put on tape for orchestration at some later date.
Tatum
also wanted, very definitely, to he featured as a soloist accompanied by the
Boston or New York symphony orchestras, which he considered among the world's
best As a matter of record, this admiration for the longer-haired musical forms
was mirrored; he had numerous fans among classical players, who were astonished
at his skill, technique and imagination. To them, his gifts were supernatural.
Vladimir Horowitz, who frequently came to hear Art play, said that if Tatum had
taken up classical piano, he'd have been outstanding in the field.
It's been
said that Tatum forced today's one-hand style of piano into being because after
he'd finished playing all over the instrument with both hands, the only way for
the piano to go was back, until the people forgot how much Tatum played.
Another of Art's ambitions, also unrealized, was to be a blues singer! He loved to relax by playing and singing the blues. He knew he didn't have much of a voice, but when he was offstage, he'd sing the blues. He had a feeling for the form but kept that side of himself well hidden from the public. He really adored Blind Lemon Jefferson, Bessie Smith and, especially, Big Joe Turner. Most musicians could never guess what Art was going to play from one moment to the next, which made the group he had with guitarist Tiny Grimes and bassist Slam Stewart unquestionably the best combo he ever had. The trio played on New York's 52nd Street around 1945. These three communicated, anticipated and embellished each other as if one person were playing all three instruments. It was uncanny when it's considered that they never played it safe, never put in hours of rehearsal with each sequence pinpointed. On the contrary, every tune was an adventure, since nobody could predict where Art's mind would take them.
Tatum
loved to go from one key to another without his left hand ever breaking the
rhythm of his stride. Even in this, he was unpredictable, since he never went
to the obvious transpositions, like a third above. No, Art would jump from
B-flat to E-natural and make the listener love it.
While Art
was alive, and as great as he was, there were still a few detractors. One such
critic had been trained as a classical pianist hut was trying desperately to
apply his academic training to jazz. This fellow said, during one of Tatum's
superb performances, "Sure, Art's great, but he fingers the keys the wrong
way."
How sour can grapes get?
Another compatriot who used to haunt every place that Art played, night after night, made the public statement: "Good God! This Tatum is the greatest! Thank God he's black — otherwise nobody's job would be safe." I suspect there was a lot of truth in that remark.
Art never seemed to let the inequities of his situation bother him. Still, in the early morning when he had consumed a few cans of beer and was surrounded by his personal camp followers, he would unburden himself, asking, "Did you hear so-and-so's latest record? What a waste of wax, for Christ's sake! There must be over 2,000 fellows who can play more than this cat. But you see who he's recording for? It will probably sell half a million copies while Willie the Lion just sits back smoking his cigar, without a gig. When will it end?"
Tatum was a great crusader against discrimination, but in his own quiet way. He used to cancel engagements if he found that the club excluded colored persons. Loyalty to his friends, even when it was not advantageous to his career, was another strong point. (I recall the time I went to catch him at a club called the Streets of Paris, in Los Angeles. After a period of superlative enjoyment, I went to the piano to pay my respects and leave. But just as Art said, "Hello, how long have you been in the joint?" Cesar Romero and Loretta Young walked up. So I stepped back to let Art converse with the movie royalty. Art said, "Come on back here. I want to introduce you. Cesar, Loretta, I want you to meet Rex Stewart," and went on to build me up, undeservedly, till they asked for my autograph!)
Art was no glad-hander. He was polite, reserved, affable but not particularly communicative unless the conversation was about one of his hobbies. A more self-effacing person would be hard to find, and he was generous to a fault with his friends. Yet he could summon up a tremendous amount of outraged dignity when it was called for.
Perhaps Art Tatum would have been assured a firmer place in musical history if he had not alienated too many of the self-righteous aficionados who preferred their piano sounds less embroidered, less imaginative and more orthodox. Therefore, it follows that Tatum would never be their favorite pianist. Posterity tends to prove that Art requires neither champion nor defense, since the proof of his genius remains intact and unblemished. The beauty within the framework of his music transcends the opinions of critics, aficionados, fans and musicians themselves. History is the arbiter. For the truly great, fame is not fleeting but everlasting.
RECORDINGS VIEW:
Jazz Piano's Heavyweight Champ
by TOM PIAZZA
JULY 28, 1996
New York Times
The
jazz piano occupies a world of its own. It leads a triple life, at once
a harmony instrument, a melody instrument and a percussion instrument.
Unlike a trumpet or a saxophone, a piano is not confined to a single
melodic line; it potentially offers at least 10 separate melodic lines
-- one for each finger -- and infinite gradations and permutations of
melody and self-accompaniment. And of all jazz instruments, it is the
one with the most daunting heritage from European classical music.
In
the 1930's, the world of jazz piano was up for grabs. Liberated from
the need to constantly spell out the underlying rhythm of a song by Earl
Hines's Cubist innovations of the late 1920's, the jazz piano could
encompass the crisp, pearlescent inventions of Teddy Wilson, the
tidal-wave swing of Harlem stride players like James P. Johnson and
boogiewoogie men like Pete Johnson, the blues-drenched Pointillism of
Count Basie and the angular Impressionism of Duke Ellington.Into this
welter strode Art Tatum, who promptly claimed an undisputed heavyweight
championship for himself. Born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1909, blind in one
eye and nearly blind in the other, he was an acknowledged prodigy at an
early age.
By 1932, when he moved to New York City -- perhaps the most notorious snake pit of pianistic competitiveness of all time -- musicians instantly recognized his pre-eminence. No less a pianist than Fats Waller, performing one evening in a nightclub, saw Tatum enter the room, stopped playing and announced from the stage, in a famous remark, "Ladies and gentlemen, I play piano, but God is in the house tonight."
By 1932, when he moved to New York City -- perhaps the most notorious snake pit of pianistic competitiveness of all time -- musicians instantly recognized his pre-eminence. No less a pianist than Fats Waller, performing one evening in a nightclub, saw Tatum enter the room, stopped playing and announced from the stage, in a famous remark, "Ladies and gentlemen, I play piano, but God is in the house tonight."
Tatum was well and copiously recorded over the 24 years between his arrival in New York and his death in Los Angeles in 1956. Those recordings range from his youthful showpieces of the 1930's, in which he assimilated the influences of Waller, Wilson and Hines into a devastating virtuoso style, to a monumental series of solo performances recorded for the producer Norman Granz in the early 1950's.
But
Tatum, like many jazz artists, delivered some of his most thrilling
performances away from the recording studio microphones, in tiny
after-hours clubs in Harlem, at house parties, in jam sessions. The arc
of understanding between the player and the audience is a mysterious but
vital factor in a music in which esthetic decisions must be made at a
moment's notice. It affects different musicians in different ways; to
Tatum it was pure catnip.
For
years, some of the most sought-after of Tatum's performances were those
recorded about a year and a half before his death during a private
party at the home of Ray Heindorf, musical director for Warner Brothers.
Originally released on the small 20th Century Fox label, they passed
quickly out of print and into legend among piano fans.
This
week they are becoming available once again with the release by Verve
of "20th-Century Piano Genius," a two-CD set that includes a number of
tracks that were hitherto unavailable. They document probably the
greatest instrumental talent in the history of jazz at the peak of his
inventive powers.
The
solo piano is a special case in jazz. In its earliest days, the solo
piano, like the early jazz bands, provided functional music for dancing
and accompaniment for vocalists. But the solo pianist, by definition,
has no other musicians to egg him on, to draw ideas from in the heat of
group improvisation. The modern solo piano converses only with itself
and with the history of the piano.
Art
Tatum was the father of the modern solo piano. At the keyboard he was
an omnivore, a force of nature. His technique was overwhelming; tumbling
cascades of notes in the right hand would meet erupting geysers from
the left hand and cross in mid keyboard, each hand picking up where the
other left off and continuing the thought. Impossible runs would
suddenly be cushioned by shifting, pastel chords that split the thinnest
of harmonic hairs into filaments leading into corners no one knew
existed before.
Yet
with that torrent of notes and ideas, Tatum wasted little, especially
as he matured. His improvisations at their best had a stunning sense of
spontaneously evolved structure; a bass note, or a harmony note plucked
out with the left thumb as the other fingers did their work, would
resonate like a rock thrown in a pond, causing ripples to move outward.
The miraculous inner voices of his chords, the suggestive bass notes
that hung amid smoky chords before resolving -- every element was in
motion, pointing somewhere harmonically and rhythmically.
Tatum's
1930's recordings, made while he was still in his mid-20's, have the
antic humor of a prodigiously talented adolescent who laughs as he does
things he knows no one else can do, like the young Mozart of the movie
"Amadeus." As Tatum got older his talent centered less on that
breathtaking high-wire dexterity and more on a series of harmonic and
rhythmic chess problems of increasing difficulty that he would pose for
himself over the course of a piece.
Nowhere
has this inner conversation been better documented than on the
recordings that make up "20th-Century Piano Genius." They capture Tatum
in a unique mood. Over the previous decade, he had become a concert
performer; in the process, his signature pieces, like "Yesterdays,"
"Begin the Beguine" and "Willow Weep for Me," had congealed into set
routines, which he performed with small alterations of emphasis here and
there, much as Louis Armstrong did in his late years. On this set,
however, amid a small and appreciative group gathered around the piano,
Tatum seems freed from any imperative except to enjoy himself, and we
hear him taking completely different approaches to songs he had played
and recorded many times.
His
repertory here, as elsewhere, consists almost entirely of pop standards
of the 1920's, 30's and 40's: "Body and Soul," "I Cover the
Waterfront," "Memories of You" and so on. Tatum, who recorded almost no
compositions of his own, was a musical counterpuncher; his imagination
took flight from the materials he found around him, which he then
inflated, deflated, distorted, reimagined and reinhabited for himself.
THERE
IS A MARVELOUS sense of presence on these recordings; Tatum is at his
most relaxed and allusive, playing with a kind of intellectual ferocity
and sardonic wit that is absolutely awe-inspiring. At times, as on his
version of "Don't Blame Me," he drapes the melody with dense, velvety
chords that conceal as much as they reveal of the tune's outlines. At
other times, he attacks songs from several angles at once, jabbing,
smearing and distorting them, as he does here on a rambunctious and
hilarious deconstruction of "Makin' Whoopee."
On
"Too Marvelous for Words" and two radically different and equally
brilliant versions each of "Love for Sale" and "Sweet Lorraine," all the
listener can do is hold on and watch, amazed, as an entirely new
musical landscape emerges under Tatum's hands from the familiar map of
the tunes.
These
recordings say something essential as well about the nature of jazz, a
testament to the freedom and power of the individual imagination to
recast the world in its own image. The French jazz writer Andre Hodeir
once criticized Tatum for relying so heavily on familiar popular songs
for his material. He missed the point, of course; jazz isn't about where
you start from, it's about where you can go. And on recordings like
these, Art Tatum showed what it is like to live in a world where all
doors are open.
RECORDINGS
Why a Virtuoso Jazz Pianist Still Provokes Debate
by PETER WATROUS
March 4, 1990
The brilliant virtuoso pianist Art Tatum, a major influence on jazz through his own recordings and the playing of musicians who spent time studying him - Coleman Hawkins, Don Byas, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane, among others - can still get a table of jazz fans arguing and gnashing their teeth over his relevance.
As recently as last year, the estimable critic Gunther Schuller brought back the anachronistic distinction between craft and art in his book ''The Swing Era,'' diminishing Tatum's work as mere craft. In Frank Tirro's ''Jazz: A History,'' a standard jazz textbook, Tatum gets a paltry four paragraphs - that for a man whom Fats Waller called ''God.'' Earl Hines, himself a virtuoso pianist, avoided appearing on the same stage with Tatum for fear of being outshone, and virtually all other jazz musicians were in awe of his imagination.
Three new reissues on CD, ''Decca Presents Art Tatum, Solos 1940'' (MCAD 42327) and ''The Complete Capitol Recordings, Volumes 1 and 2'' (Capitol Jazz CDP7, 92866 and 92867) show off Tatum's astounding technique, his infallible and graceful sense of swing and a good dose of humor. The 44 pieces collected on the three CD's, 36 of which are solos (there are eight trio selections spread, illogically, over the two Capitol CD's), also show off an esthetic that, in its gleeful mixing and matching of styles, sounds utterly contemporary. The performances on the Decca CD are all from 1940, and the Capitol recordings are split between two dates: the solos from 1949, the trios from 1952. The quarrels over his importance notwithstanding, jazz before Tatum sounds different than jazz since. Tatum, who died in 1956 at the age of 47, was classically trained, but even if he had aspirations to perform on the traditional classical-music circuit, he probably would have been denied access to it, as were so many early black musicians. He was also an avid student of the New York school of piano playing, memorizing piano rolls by Fats Waller and James P. Johnson.
He reveled in both cultures, and brought the two techniques and sensibilities together as effortlessly as any jazz musician ever has. Never afraid of his training, he showered his pieces with keyboard-long runs, arpeggios and dense, progressive harmonies; breathless at times, his pieces cram in idea after idea, luxuriating in musical literacy and choice, in the abundance of pleasure given by information. It is the sound of the modern, industrial world.
It's a sound people haven't always taken to. Anybody looking for middle-class notions of taste and classical balance would find some of his work offensive, technique-bound and garish. Like the times, Tatum could be extreme; it was one of his strengths. He wasn't shy about his knowledge at a time when some critics wanted their jazz to be the product of a limited black culture and not of the United States.
It's on pieces like Massenet's ''Elegie'' and Dvorak's ''Humoresque,'' both on ''Decca Presents Art Tatum,'' where he adds jazz embellishments to classical pieces, that Tatum's humor shines. Banging together elements of the originals - laced with funny, overwrought runs - with Irish jigs, hyperactive stride piano and quotes like ''Stars and Stripes,'' he presents a world where everything is for sale, where both the jazz and the European tradition are fooled with, used to satisfy his demands. Defying every possible convention - except the convention of jazzing the classics, a cheap trick that artists of his stature weren't supposed to do - he gleefully throws away tradition. The pieces come out loaded with meaning; read as trivial and glib by some, they are the work of a fertile imagination.
But ''Elegie'' and ''Humoresque'' are exceptions among Tatum's work, and if these three collections do anything, they should kill the idea that Tatum had only one musical personality, driven by too much coffee. The majority of the eight tracks on ''Decca Presents Art Tatum'' (which, oddly, doesn't have any composer credits in the liner notes) are smoothly swinging standards that purr contentedly, moving from carefully planned introductions (which turn up on be-bop records half a decade later; ''Begin the Beguine'' on the Decca collection is a perfect example) into stride sections with improvised right-hand parts, then back to the introductions. On tunes like ''Sweet Lorraine,'' his swing makes the melody painfully evocative; anything but glib, he turns the sentimental into the emotional.
Tatum was practicing the art of embellishment, and the solo pieces, especially those on ''The Complete Capitol Recordings'' (but marred on these CD's by a couple of bad transfers), show his fearlessness when it came to reinventing standard pop tunes. Tatum has often been condemned for not creating new forms - jazz is still hindered by Romantic notions of formal progress - and these 36 solo tracks, sticking as they do to song forms, affirm the charge. But what he did inside the form is astonishing, turning the simplest harmonic and melodic framework into a radically different composition, junk metamorphosed into jewelry.
By 1949, Tatum's pieces had become dense with detail, and today they give endless pleasure. Much of the material on the CD's was semi-composed; Tatum kept to his basic arrangements for tunes with varying degrees of faithfulness. When playing to large audiences, Tatum reproduced his records because he though that was what his audience wanted to hear. In the after-hours places Tatum frequented, he could improvise all night. Several of the pieces on the Capitol collection end abruptly at the three-minute limit of a 78, implying that the pieces weren't finished in Tatum's mind.
On ''Willow Weep for Me'' on Volume 1 of the Capitol CD's, it's immediately obvious how much control Tatum had gained since recording the solos for the Decca collection. Throwing in restless harmonic movement, he turns the end of each eight-bar segment of the tune into a thicket of chord progressions. His rhythm is surer, the stride he goes into is implied rather than stated and the tempo juxtapositions, where the melody flies by at double time, is evidence of a real sense of humor at work. And throughout all the pieces there is an underlying sense of gentleness, accented by the warm and round sound Tatum drew from the piano at whatever speed he chose. But more importantly these pieces exude knowledge, the knowledge of what it meant to be astride American culture mid-century, with all its pressures, conflicts, joys and bumps in the night.
Art Tatum's solo piano rendition of "Sweet Lorraine"
Art Tatum plays "I Got Rhythm"--Solo piano, 1940:
Art Tatum - "Yesterdays" (1954)
Art Tatum Documentary
Art Tatum and Ben Webster--The Album (1956)
Art Tatum plays "Tea for Two" (1933, 1939, 1953)
"All The Things You Are" (1953) by Art Tatum
Art Tatum plays "Tenderly" (1948)
The Best of Art Tatum:
The Incredible Art Tatum: Anthology of Inhuman Stride:
"Art Tatum Group Masterpieces Vol. 1", Pablo label:
Art Tatum (p), Benny Carter (as), Louis Bellson (d)
Art
Art Tatum plays "Caravan"--1940
Art Tatum plays "I Surrender Dear"—1955
Art
https://keyboardimprov.com/8-ways-thelonious-monk-was-influenced-by-art-tatum/
8 Ways Thelonious Monk was influenced by Art Tatum
Believe it or not, Art Tatum was perhaps the biggest pianistic influence on Thelonious Monk!
At first glance, the two jazz giants couldn't be farther apart. Tatum displayed a monstrous technique, while Monk was criticized for having "no technique." Tatum was and still is the "gold standard" of pianism by which every other jazz pianist can be compared, while Monk is kind of off in his own corner. (Keith Jarrett, a huge Monk fan, said that he views Monk as standing over on the side of the road.) And even though Tatum was head and shoulders above every other pianist, his playing style was still firmly entrenched in mainstream jazz. Monk, on the other hand went in an entirely unique direction.
How Thelonious Monk developed his individual style was always a bit of a mystery to me. Although he was one of the founders of bebop, he never really played what we think of as "bebop." Even many of his bebop contemporaries found it difficult to play with him. (There's a famous example of Miles Davis asking Monk not to comp behind Davis' solo on "Bag's Groove.")
So how did Monk develop his idiosyncratic style?
When I was in my late teens, my piano teacher Billy Taylor gave me a clue. Billy had heard Monk play when Thelonious was still a young man and hadn't developed his mature style yet. Billy told me that at that point, Monk was still under the influence of Art Tatum and "played like Tatum." Taylor didn't mean that Monk played Tatum note-for-note or with the same exact technique. Rather, he was referring to Monk's general style at the time, which was modeled after Tatum's approach to playing jazz.
Well, it's taken me a few decades of listening to both pianists to connect the dots, but recently I had an 'aha' moment and now see the connection between Tatum and Monk very clearly. In fact, there are so many now-obvious connections between the way these two jazz giants play piano that I'm surprised it's taken me this long to notice them!
The reason the influence is a little obscure this is that even though Thelonious Monk came directly out of Art Tatum, he disguised his tracks so well that the influence is not very apparent when we listen to each pianist separately. We have to listen to them back-to-back and compare their approaches to playing jazz. If we listen only to their overall sound via their soloing and chord voicings, we won't hear the connection. (Indeed, Monk's chord voicings and pianistic touch are more influenced by Duke Ellington that they are by Tatum.) Despite this, Monk's overall approach is directly derived from Tatum in a number of specific ways.
Here are 8 ways that Art Tatum influenced Thelonious Monk:
1. Both pianists are an "acquired taste."
Tatum and Monk can be off-putting for first-time listeners. To say it bluntly, a lot of people don't like either one the first time they hear their music. I've heard aspiring jazz pianists say that Tatum plays "too fast" and that Monk "sounds weird." This is because both pianists took an uncompromising approach to playing jazz. They each developed a highly unique style that was somewhat outside the mainstream of their time. Tatum crammed in massive amounts of musical information into every measure which can be overwhelming for many listeners. And Monk is, well... Monk! His angular lines and dissonant voicings can take a while to get used to. By all accounts, Monk was very methodical in how he developed his musical style. If he did indeed begin his career by playing in a similar vein to Tatum, as Billy Taylor noted, then he may have taken courage and inspiration from Tatum's uncompromising individuality as well.
While we can hear this in just about every recording Tatum ever made, his playing is perhaps most overwhelming in uptempo pieces like "Tiger Rag." This is the kind of recording that made many excellent jazz pianists, such as Oscar Peterson, temporarily quit piano!
Now let's check out a similar Monk recording: "Trinkle Tinkle." Monk's melody has some elements of Tatum's virtuosity in its flourishes, and many good jazz pianists have thrown their hands up in vain after trying to solo over the tune's challenging chord progression!
2. Both pianists played with a Swing Era musical feel.
This can be expected from someone like Tatum, who, after all, came of age during the swing era. But isn't it shocking that Monk, one of bebop's creators, never completely embraced a "bebop" rhythmic feel in his use of syncopation and general style of swinging? This is particularly evident when he's playing solo piano. One aspect of this is Monk's fondness for playing stride piano with his left hand. Even though many of Monk's bebop contemporaries, such as Bud Powell, could play stride, they rarely chose to do so. Monk continued to base his solo piano style on a stride left hand throughout his entire career.
Listen to how deftly Tatum goes in and out of stride on Sweet Lorraine:
Why did Monk choose not to "modernize" his rhythmic approach in the same way that his fellow beboppers did? There are some accounts of him becoming frustrated that many musicians were jumping on the bebop bandwagon and using his musical ideas. So he resolved to go in another direction. For him, this musical direction apparently involved combining "modern" melodies and chord voicings with an at-times traditional rhythmic feel. Played in his own way, of course!
Here's Monk playing full-out stride piano!
3. Both Tatum and Monk loved to rework and reharmonize standard tunes.
Monk's re-imagining of the song "Carolina Moon," for example, went far beyond what most musicians of his time would do. Tatum, of course, excelled at re-imagining the popular songs of the day. Check out his version of "Song Of The Vagabonds." In addition, both pianists could improvise fluently over the most difficult chord progressions.
Carolina Moon
Song of the Vagabonds
4. Monk uses scale-based runs in the same way that Tatum did.
Tatum's fast, descending pentatonic runs, which are such a big part of his "sound," became Monk's fast descending whole-tone runs. The only difference is in the relative sounds of the scales each pianist used. Incidentally, Monk is the only pianist of his generation to use runs in this way, in that they fulfilled textural rather than melodic functions.
Here is a classic example of Tatum using runs in this way, some of which are harmonized in fourths!
Now listen to how Monk uses scales in this recording, especially at 0:39. After listening to Tatum, it's pretty obvious where he got the idea from!
5. They both had a comping style that was busy to the point of being intrusive.
This was very challenging for soloists to improvise over.
Listen to how busy Tatum plays "behind" clarinetist Buddy DeFranco. It's almost comical to imagine DeFranco trying to stay focused with this much going on behind him! I enjoy the overall sound, however. It's almost like Tatum is imitating the polyphony of early jazz in these moments!
Incidentally, I once remarked to Billy Taylor that I didn't think Tatum was a good accompanist. Billy smiled and said, "Well, he could be when he wanted to be. Listen to him play behind Ben Webster." (I'll invite you to check out that recording too. It's a classic pairing!)
Now listen to how "lively" Monk's comping is behind tenor sax soloist Charlie Rouse on this live recording. As with Tatum, the overall effect is thrilling, even if it made the soloists work extra hard to remain focused!
6. Both Tatum and Monk generally preferred to solo in and around a song's melody, rather than create their own melodic improvisations from the ground up.
Their solos frequently consist of creative variations on the song's melody.
Monk's solo on his tune Nutty is a good example of how he would often stay with the melody during his solo, embellishing it at will:
7. Both pianists had a complete, uncompromising, and well-developed musical concept and personality.
Combined with their unique approaches, this made them stand somewhat outside the mainstream of their time. When they performed in groups, the other musicians were required to "fit in" with them, not the other way around.
8. Both Tatum and Monk convey the entire history of jazz piano in their playing.
They made earlier jazz devices an integral part of their approach at the same time as they looked towards the future. Tatum played with a harmonic sophistication that few could match until the 1950s and Monk's motivic compositional methods wouldn't be widely emulated until the 1960s.
Listen again to how Monk begins his recording of Carolina Moon, above. The intro isn't even "jazz." It's 1890's "parlour piano," which poignantly evokes the song's history and culture before the horns come in with Monk's radical re-working of the melody. Tatum frequently did this kind of thing too, like in his version of Elegy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Tatum
Art Tatum
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Art Tatum | |
|---|---|
Tatum c. May 1946
|
|
| Background information | |
| Birth name | Arthur Tatum Jr. |
| Born | October 13, 1909 Toledo, Ohio, U.S. |
| Died | November 5, 1956 (aged 47) Los Angeles, California |
| Genres | Jazz, stride |
| Occupation(s) | Musician |
| Instruments | Piano |
| Years active | 1927–1956 |
| Labels | Brunswick, Decca, Stinson, Verve, Folkways |
Arthur Tatum Jr. (/ˈteɪtəm/, October 13, 1909 – November 5, 1956) was an American jazz pianist.
Tatum is widely considered one of the greatest jazz pianists of all time[1] and influenced generations of jazz pianists. He was hailed for the technical proficiency of his performances, which set a new standard for jazz piano virtuosity. Critic Scott Yanow wrote, "Tatum's quick reflexes and boundless imagination kept his improvisations filled with fresh (and sometimes futuristic) ideas that put him way ahead of his contemporaries."[2]
Contents
Life and career
Art Tatum, at the Vogue Room, New York (between 1946 and 1948)
For a musician of such stature, there is little published information available about Tatum's life. Only one full-length biography has been published, Too Marvelous for Words (1994), by James Lester.[3] Lester interviewed many of Tatum's contemporaries for the book and drew from many articles published about him.
Early years
Tatum was born in Toledo, Ohio. His father, Arthur Tatum, Sr., was a guitarist and an elder at Grace Presbyterian Church, where his mother, Mildred Hoskins, played piano.[4] He had two siblings, Karl and Arlene.[5] From infancy he suffered from cataracts (of disputed cause) which left him blind in one eye and with only limited vision in the other. A number of surgical procedures improved his eye condition to a degree but some of the benefits were reversed when he was assaulted in 1930.[6]
A child with perfect pitch, Tatum learned to play by ear, picking out church hymns by the age of three, learning tunes from the radio and copying piano roll recordings his mother owned. In a Voice of America interview, he denied the widespread rumor that he learned to play by copying piano roll recordings made by two pianists.[7] He developed a very fast playing style, without losing accuracy. As a child he was also very sensitive to the piano's intonation and insisted it be tuned often.[8] While playing piano was the most obvious application of his mental and physical skills, he also had an encyclopedic memory for Major League Baseball statistics.
In 1925, Tatum moved to the Columbus School for the Blind, where he studied music and learned braille. He subsequently studied piano with Overton G. Rainey at either the Jefferson School or the Toledo School of Music. Rainey, who was also visually impaired, probably taught Tatum in the classical tradition, as Rainey did not improvise and discouraged his students from playing jazz.[9] In 1927, Tatum began playing on Toledo radio station WSPD as 'Arthur Tatum, Toledo's Blind Pianist', during interludes in Ellen Kay's shopping chat program and soon had his own program.[10] By the age of 19, Tatum was playing at the local Waiters' and Bellmens' Club.[11] As word of Tatum spread, national performers passing through Toledo, including Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Joe Turner and Fletcher Henderson, would make it a point to drop in to hear the piano phenomenon.
In 1931, vocalist Adelaide Hall commenced a world tour that lasted almost two years, during which (most probably in January 1932 when she was appearing at the Rivoli Theatre)[12] she discovered Tatum in Toledo and employed him as one of her stage pianists.[13] In 1932, Hall returned to New York with Tatum and introduced him to Harlem on stage at the Lafayette Theatre. In August 1932, she made four recordings using Tatum as one of her pianists including the songs "Strange As It Seems" and "You Gave Me Everything But Love".[14][15][16]
Musical career
Tatum drew inspiration from the pianists James P. Johnson and Fats Waller, who exemplified the stride piano style, and from the more "modern" Earl Hines, six years Tatum's senior. Tatum identified Waller as his main influence, but according to pianist Teddy Wilson and saxophonist Eddie Barefield, "Art Tatum's favorite jazz piano player was Earl Hines. He used to buy all of Earl's records and would improvise on them. He'd play the record but he'd improvise over what Earl was doing ... 'course, when you heard Art play you didn't hear nothing of anybody but Art. But he got his ideas from Earl's style of playing – but Earl never knew that."[17] A major event in his meteoric rise to success was his appearance at a cutting contest in 1933 at Morgan's bar in New York City that included Waller, Johnson and Willie "The Lion" Smith. Standard contest pieces included Johnson's "Harlem Strut" and "Carolina Shout", and Waller's "Handful of Keys". Tatum performed his arrangements of "Tea for Two" and "Tiger Rag", in a performance that was considered to be the last word in stride piano. Johnson, reminiscing about Tatum's debut afterward, simply said, "When Tatum played Tea For Two that night I guess that was the first time I ever heard it really played."[18] Tatum's debut was historic because he outplayed the elite competition and heralded the demise of the stride era. He was not challenged further until stride specialist Donald Lambert initiated a half-serious rivalry with him.
Tatum worked first around Toledo and Cleveland and then later in New York at the Onyx Club for a few months. He recorded his first four solo sides on the Brunswick label in March 1933.[5] Tatum returned to Ohio and played around the American midwest – Toledo, Cleveland, Detroit, Saint Louis and Chicago – in the mid-1930s and played on the Fleischman Hour radio program hosted by Rudy Vallee in 1935. He also played stints at the Three Deuces in Chicago and in Los Angeles played at the Trocadero, the Paramount and the Club Alabam.[19] In 1937, he returned to New York, where he appeared at clubs and played on national radio programs.[11] The following year he embarked on the Queen Mary for England where he toured,[20] playing for three months at Ciro's Club owned by bandleader Ambrose. In the late 1930s, he returned to play and record in Los Angeles and New York.
Art Tatum (on the right) at Downbeat Club, New York, N.Y., c. 1947
1940s and 1950s
In 1941, Tatum recorded two sessions for Decca Records with singer Big Joe Turner, the first of which included "Wee Baby Blues",[21] which attained national popularity. Two years later Tatum won Esquire magazine's first jazz popularity poll. Perhaps believing there was a limited audience for solo piano, he was inspired by Nat King Cole's successful jazz trio to form his own trio in 1943 with guitarist Tiny Grimes and bassist Slam Stewart, whose perfect pitch enabled him to follow Tatum's excursions. Tatum recorded exclusively with the trio for almost two years. Grimes abandoned the group, but Tatum continually returned to this format. He also carried on his solo work. Although Tatum was admired by many jazz musicians, his popularity faded in the mid to late 1940s with the advent of bebop – a movement that Tatum did not embrace. Despite the decline in fame, Tatum went on to perform a jazz concert at the Metropolitan Opera House in 1944 alongside other popular jazz artists such as Louis Armstrong.
In the last two years of his life, Tatum regularly played at Baker's Keyboard Lounge in Detroit, including his final public performance in April 1956.[22] Earlier, Tatum had personally selected and purchased for Clarence Baker the Steinway piano at Baker's, finding it in a New York showroom, and shipping it to Detroit.[23]
Death
Art Tatum died on November 5, 1956, at Queen of Angels Medical Center in Los Angeles, from complications of uremia (as a result of kidney failure). He was originally interred at Angelus Rosedale Cemetery in Los Angeles,[24] but was moved by his wife, Geraldine Tatum, to the Great Mausoleum of Glendale's Forest Lawn Cemetery in 1991,[25] so she could ultimately be buried next to him, although his headstone was left at Rosedale to commemorate where he was first laid to rest.[26] Geraldine died on May 4, 2010, in Los Angeles, and was interred beside Art at Forest Lawn Cemetery.[27]
Style
Tatum built upon stride and classical piano influences to develop a novel and unique piano style. He introduced a strong, swinging pulse to jazz piano, highlighted with cadenzas that swept across the entire keyboard. His interpretations of popular songs were exuberant, sophisticated and intricate. Jazz soloing in the 1930s had not yet evolved into the free-ranging extended improvisations that flowered in the bebop era of the 1940s, 1950s and beyond. But jazz musicians were beginning to incorporate improvisation while playing over the chord changes of tunes, and Tatum was a leader in that movement. He sometimes improvised lines that presaged bebop and later jazz genres, although generally not venturing far from the original melodic line. Tatum embellished melodic lines, however, with an array of signature devices and runs that appeared throughout his repertoire. As he matured, Tatum became more adventurous in abandoning the written melody and expanding his improvisations.
Tatum's sound was attributable to both his harmonic inventiveness and technical prowess. Many of his harmonic concepts and larger chord voicings (e.g., 13th chords with various flat or sharp intervals) were well ahead of their time in the 1930s (except for their partial emergence in popular songs of the Jazz Age) and they would be explored by bebop-era musicians a decade later. He worked some of the upper extensions of chords into his lines, a practice which was further developed by Bud Powell and Charlie Parker, which in turn was an influence on the development of 'modern jazz'. Tatum also pioneered the use of dissonance in jazz piano, as can be heard, for example, on his recording of "Aunt Hagar's Blues",[28] which uses extensive dissonance to achieve a bluesy effect. In addition to using major and minor seconds, dissonance was inherent in the complex chords that Tatum frequently used.
Tatum could also play the blues with authority. Pianist Jay McShann, not known for showering compliments on his rivals, said "Art could really play the blues. To me, he was the world's greatest blues player, and I think few people realized that."[29] Tatum's repertoire, however, was predominantly Broadway and popular standards, whose chord progressions and variety better suited his talents.
His protean style was elaborate, pyrotechnic, dramatic and joyous, combining stride, jazz, swing, boogie-woogie and classical elements, while the musical ideas flowed in rapid-fire fashion. Benny Green wrote in his collected work of essays, The Reluctant Art, that "Tatum has been the only jazz musician to date who has made an attempt to conceive a style based upon all styles, to master the mannerisms of all schools and then synthesize those into something personal."[30] He was playful, spontaneous and often inserted quotes from other songs into his improvisations.[31]
Tatum was not inclined toward understatement or expansive use of space. He seldom played in a simplified way, preferring interpretations that displayed his great technique and clever harmonizations. When jazz pianist Stanley Cowell was growing up in Toledo, his father prevailed upon Tatum to play piano at the Cowell home. Stanley described the scene as, "Tatum played so brilliantly and so much ... that I thought the piano was gonna break. My mother left the room ... so I said 'What's wrong, Mama?' And she said 'Oh, that man plays too much piano.'"[32] A handful of critics, notably Keith Jarrett, have complained that Tatum played too many notes[33] or was too ornamental or was even 'unjazzlike'. Jazz critic Gary Giddins opined, "That is the essence of Tatum. If you don't like his ornament, you should be listening to someone else. That's where his genius is."[34]
Screen capture of Tatum from the film The Fabulous Dorseys (1947)
The sounds that Tatum produced with the piano were also distinctive. Billy Taylor has said that he could make a bad piano sound good.[37] Generally playing at mezzoforte volume, he employed the entire keyboard from deep bass tones to sonorous mid-register chords to sparkling upper register runs. He used the sustain pedal sparingly so that each note was clearly articulated, chords were cleanly sounded and the melodic line would not be blurred.[38] He played with boundless energy and occasionally his speedy and precise delivery produced an almost mechanical effect, compared by jazz critic Ted Gioia to "a player piano on steroids."[36]
Technique
Critic Gunther Schuller declared, "On one point there is universal agreement: Tatum's awesome technique."[39] That technique was marked by a calm physical demeanor and efficiency. Tatum did not indulge in theatrical physical or facial expression. The effortless gliding of his hands over difficult passages baffled most who witnessed the phenomenon. He especially astonished other pianists to whom Tatum appeared to be "playing the impossible."[40] Even when playing scintillating runs at high velocity, it appeared that his fingers hardly moved. Hank Jones said:
When I finally met him and got a chance to hear him play in person, it seemed as if he wasn't really exerting much effort, he had an effortless way of playing. It was deceptive. You'd watch him and you couldn't believe what was coming out, what was reaching your ears. He didn't have that much motion at the piano. He didn’t make a big show of moving around and waving his hands and going through all sorts of physical gyrations to produce the music that he produced, so that in itself is amazing. There had to be intense concentration there, but you couldn’t tell by just looking at him play.[41]Using self-taught fingering, including an array of two-fingered runs, he executed the pyrotechnics with meticulous accuracy and timing. His execution was all the more remarkable considering that he drank prodigious amounts of alcohol when performing,[42] yet his recordings are never sloppy. Tatum also displayed phenomenal independence of the hands and ambidexterity, which was particularly evident while improvising counterpoint. Oscar Peterson cited Tatum as one of the most "intimidating" pianists, and said that "there wasn't a jazz pianist of the era who wasn't influenced by him".[43]
Jazz historian and commentator Ira Gitler declared that Tatum's "left hand was the equal of his right."[44] When Bud Powell was opening for Tatum at Birdland around 1950, the end of an era when musicians engaged in overt competition and so-called cutting sessions,[45] Powell reportedly said to Tatum, "Man, I'm going to really show you about tempo and playing fast. Anytime you're ready." Tatum laughed and replied, "Look, you come in here tomorrow, and anything you do with your right hand, I'll do with my left." Powell never took up the challenge.[46]
Tatum played chords with a relatively flat-fingered technique compared to the curvature taught in classical training. Composer/pianist Mary Lou Williams told Whitney Balliett, "Tatum taught me how to hit my notes, how to control them without using pedals. And he showed me how to keep my fingers flat on the keys to get that clean tone."[47] Jimmy Rowles said, "Most of the stuff he played was clear over my head. There was too much going on—both hands were impossible to believe. You couldn't pick out what he was doing because his fingers were so smooth and soft, and the way he did it—it was like camouflage."[48] When his fastest tracks of "Tiger Rag" are slowed down, they still reveal a coherent, syncopated rhythm.
After hours
After regular club dates, Tatum would decamp to after-hours clubs to hang out with other musicians who would play for each other. Biographer James Lester notes that Tatum enjoyed listening to other pianists and preferred to play last when several pianists played. He frequently played for hours on end into the dawn, to the detriment of his marriages.[42] Tatum was said to be more spontaneous and creative in those free-form nocturnal sessions than in his scheduled performances.[42] Evidence of this can be found in the set entitled 20th Century Piano Genius which consists of 40 tunes recorded at private parties at the home of Hollywood music director Ray Heindorf in 1950 and 1955. According to the review by Marc Greilsamer, "All of the trademark Tatum elements are here: the grand melodic flourishes, the harmonic magic tricks, the flirtations with various tempos and musical styles. But what also emerges is Tatum's effervescence, his joy, and his humor. He seems to celebrate and mock these timeless melodies all at once."[49]
Art Tatum headlining at the Famous Door nightclub on 52nd Street, May 1948
Group work
Tatum tended to work and to record unaccompanied, partly because relatively few musicians could keep pace with his fast tempos and advanced harmonic vocabulary. Other musicians expressed amazed bewilderment at performing with Tatum. Drummer Jo Jones, who recorded a 1956 trio session with Tatum and bassist Red Callender, is quoted as quipping, "I didn't even play on that session [...] all I did was listen. I mean, what could I add? [...] I felt like setting my damn drums on fire."[50] Clarinetist Buddy DeFranco said that playing with Tatum was "like chasing a train."[44] Tatum said of himself, "A band hampers me."[51]
Tatum did not readily adapt or defer to other musicians in ensemble settings. Early in his career he was required to restrain himself when he worked as accompanist for vocalist Adelaide Hall in 1932–33. Perhaps because Tatum believed there was a limited audience for solo piano, he formed a trio in 1943 with guitarist Tiny Grimes and bassist Slam Stewart. He later recorded with other musicians, including a notable session with the 1944 Esquire Jazz All-Stars, which included Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday and other jazz greats, at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City. He also recorded group sessions for Norman Granz in the mid-1950s, toward the end of his life, with jazz greats such as Benny Carter, Roy Eldridge, Lionel Hampton, and Ben Webster.
Repertoire
Tatum's repertoire mainly consisted of music from the Great American Songbook—Tin Pan Alley, Broadway and other popular music of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. He played his own arrangements of a few classical piano pieces as well, most famously Dvořák's Humoresque No. 7 and Massenet's "Élégie".[52] Tatum composed a handful of original compositions.[53]
Emulators and influence
Transcriptions of Tatum are popular and are often practiced assiduously.[54] But perhaps because his playing was so difficult to copy, only a small number of musicians – such as Oscar Peterson, Johnny Costa, Johnny Guarnieri, Adam Makowicz, Dick Hyman, and, outside of the usual roster of jazz pianists, André Previn and, more recently, Yuja Wang – have attempted to emulate or challenge Tatum. Although Bud Powell was of the bebop movement, his prolific and exciting style showed Tatum influence.[55]
Recordings
Tatum recorded commercially from 1932 until near his death. Although recording opportunities were somewhat intermittent for most of his career due to his solo style, he left copious recordings.[56] He recorded for Brunswick (1933), Decca (1934–41), Capitol (1949, 1952) and for the labels associated with Norman Granz (1953–56). Tatum demonstrated remarkable memory when he recorded 68 solo tracks for Granz in two days, all but three of the tracks in one take. He also recorded a series of group recordings for Granz with, among others, Ben Webster, Jo Jones, Buddy DeFranco, Benny Carter, Harry Sweets Edison, Roy Eldridge and Lionel Hampton.
Film
Although only a small amount of film showing Tatum playing exists today, several minutes of professionally shot archival footage can be found in Martin Scorsese's documentary The Blues. Footage also appears in Ken Burns' documentary Jazz, which includes a short passage on Tatum's life and work, including comments from Jimmy Rowles and Gary Giddins. Tatum appeared in the 1947 movie The Fabulous Dorseys, first playing a solo and then accompanying Dorsey's band in an impromptu song.
Tatum appeared on Steve Allen's Tonight Show in the early 1950s, and on other television shows from this era. However, all of the kinescopes of the Allen shows, which were stored in a warehouse along with other now defunct shows, were thrown into a local rubbish dump to make room for new studios. However, the soundtracks were recorded off-air by Tatum enthusiasts at the time, and many are included in Storyville Records' extensive series of rare Tatum recordings.
On the recommendation of Oscar Peterson, Tatum was portrayed by Johnny O'Neal in Ray, a 2004 biopic about R&B artist Ray Charles.
Legacy and tributes
In 1964, Art Tatum was posthumously inducted into the Down Beat Jazz Hall of Fame.[57] He received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1989.
Numerous stories exist about other musicians' respect for Tatum. Perhaps the most famous is the story about the time Tatum walked into a club where Fats Waller was playing, and Waller stepped away from the piano bench to make way for Tatum, announcing, "I only play the piano, but tonight God is in the house."[58] Fats Waller's son confirmed the statement.[59]
Charlie Parker (who helped develop bebop) was highly influenced by Tatum. When newly arrived in New York, Parker briefly worked as a dishwasher in a Manhattan restaurant where Tatum was performing and often listened to the pianist. Parker once said, "I wish I could play like Tatum's right hand!"[60]
When Oscar Peterson was still a boy, his father played him a recording of Tatum performing "Tiger Rag". Once the young Peterson was finally persuaded that it was performed by a single person, he was so intimidated that he did not touch the piano for weeks.[61] Peterson also stated that, "If you speak of pianists, the most complete pianist that we have known and possibly will know, from what I've heard to date, is Art Tatum."[62] "Musically speaking, he was and is my musical God, and I feel honored to remain one of his humbly devoted disciples."[63]
"Here's something new..." pianist Hank Jones remembers thinking when he first heard Art Tatum on radio in 1935, "they have devised this trick to make people believe that one man is playing the piano, when I know at least three people are playing."[64]
The jazz pianist and educator Kenny Barron commented, "I have every record [Tatum] ever made—and I try never to listen to them ... If I did, I'd throw up my hands and give up!"[65] Jean Cocteau dubbed Tatum "a crazed Chopin". Count Basie called him the eighth wonder of the world. Dave Brubeck observed, "I don't think there's any more chance of another Tatum turning up than another Mozart."[66] Pianist Mulgrew Miller, commented on personal growth by saying, "When I talk to the people I admire, they're always talking about continuous growth and development and I look at them and say, 'Well... what are YOU going to do?' But, as Harold Mabern says, 'There's always Art Tatum records around'".[67] Dizzy Gillespie said, "First you speak of Art Tatum, then take a long deep breath, and you speak of the other pianists."[68]
The pianist Teddy Wilson observed, "Maybe this will explain Art Tatum. If you put a piano in a room, just a bare piano. Then you get all the finest jazz pianists in the world and let them play in the presence of Art Tatum. Then let Art Tatum play ... everyone there will sound like an amateur."[68]
Other music luminaries of the day, including Vladimir Horowitz, Arthur Rubinstein, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Leopold Godowsky, David Oistrakh and George Gershwin are said to have marveled at Tatum's genius.[42]
Jazz critic Leonard Feather called Tatum "the greatest soloist in jazz history, regardless of instrument."[68]
During a 1985 interview with "Frets" magazine, Jerry Garcia was asked if he was inspired by any non-guitarists. He said "Oh, yeah, sure. Art Tatum is my all-time favorite. Yeah, he's my all-time favorite. He's the guy I put on when I want to feel really small. When I want to feel really insignificant. He's a good guy to play for any musician, you know. He'll make them want to go home and burn their instruments. Art Tatum is absolutely the most incredible musician – what can you say?" [69]
In 1993, J. A. Bilmes, an MIT student, invented a term that is now in common usage in the field of computational musicology: the Tatum. It means "the smallest perceptual time unit in music" and is a tribute to Tatum's pianistic velocity.[70][71]
Zenph Studios, a software company focused on precisely understanding how musicians perform, recorded a new album of Tatum's playing with Sony Masterworks in 2007. Using computer equipment coupled with a high-resolution player piano, they created re-performances of Tatum's first four commercial tracks, from March 21, 1933, and the nine tracks from the April 2, 1949 live concert at Los Angeles' Shrine Auditorium. Sony recorded these anew in the same venue, in front of an audience. These 13 tracks are on the album Piano Starts Here: Live from The Shrine. The binaural recording, when played via headphones, allows one to hear what Tatum may have heard as he played on stage, with the piano spatially in front (bass on the left, treble on the right) and the audience downstage on the righthand side.[72][73]
For his 2008 album Act Your Age, Gordon Goodwin wrote a new big band arrangement to accompany Zenph's re-performance of "Yesterdays", and the track was recognized with a Grammy Nomination for Best Instrumental Arrangement.[74]
At the Lucas County Arena in his home town of Toledo, Ohio, a memorial was dedicated to Art Tatum in 2009, the "Art Tatum Celebration Column".[75]
Discography
- Art Tatum Piano Impressesions, ARA (Boris Morros Music Company) A-1, c.1945
- Art Tatum Piano Solos, Asch 356, c.1945
- Footnotes to Jazz, Vol. 2: Jazz Rehearsal, II- Art Tatum Trio, Folkways, 1952
- The Genius of Art Tatum, 1953-4
- Makin' Whoopee, Verve, 1954
- The Greatest Piano Hits of Them All, Verve, 1954
- Genius of Keyboard 1954–56, Giants of Jazz
- Still More of the Greatest Piano Hits of Them All, Verve, 1955
- "The Lionel Hampton, Art Tatum, Buddy Rich Trio," Clef Records MG C-709 1956
- More of the Greatest Piano Hits of All Time, Verve, 1955
- The Art Tatum–Ben Webster Quartet, Verve, 1956, reissued as The Tatum Group Masterpieces, Volume Eight, Pablo, 1975
- The Essential Art Tatum, Verve, 1956
- Capitol Jazz Classics – Volume 3 Solo Piano, Capitol M-11028, 1972
- Masterpieces, Leonard Feather Series MCA2-4019, MCA, 1973
- God is in the House, Onyx, 1973 [re-released on High Note, 1998]
- Piano Starts Here, Columbia, 1987
- The Complete Capitol Recordings, Vol. 1, Capitol, 1989
- The Complete Capitol Recordings, Vol. 2, Capitol, 1989
- Solos 1940, Decca/MCA, 1989
- The Tatum Group Masterpieces, Vol. 6, Pablo, 1990
- The Tatum Group Masterpieces, Vol. 7, Pablo, 1990
- The Tatum Group Masterpieces, Vol. 4, Pablo, 1990
- The Tatum Group Masterpieces, Vol. 2, Pablo, 1990
- The Tatum Group Masterpieces, Vol. 3, Pablo, 1990 (The Lionel Hampton Art Tatum Buddy Rich Trio)
- The Tatum Group Masterpieces, Vol. 1, Pablo, 1990
- Art Tatum at His Piano, Vol. 1, Crescendo, 1990
- The Complete Pablo Group Masterpieces, Pablo, 1990
- Classic Early Solos (1934–37), Decca Records, 1991
- The Complete Pablo Solo Masterpieces, Pablo, 1991
- The Best of Art Tatum, Pablo, 1992
- Standards, Black Lion, 1992
- The V-Discs, Black Lion, 1992
- The Art Tatum Solo Masterpieces, Vol. 1, Pablo, 1992
- The Art Tatum Solo Masterpieces, Vol. 2, Pablo, 1992
- The Art Tatum Solo Masterpieces, Vol. 3, Pablo, 1992
- The Art Tatum Solo Masterpieces, Vol. 4, Pablo, 1992
- The Art Tatum Solo Masterpieces, Vol. 5, Pablo, 1992
- The Art Tatum Solo Masterpieces, Vol. 6, Pablo, 1992
- The Art Tatum Solo Masterpieces, Vol. 7, Pablo, 1992
- The Art Tatum Solo Masterpieces, Vol. 8, Pablo, 1992
- I Got Rhythm: Art Tatum, Vol. 3 (1935–44), Decca Records, 1993
- Fine Art & Dandy, Drive Archive, 1994
- The Art Tatum Solo Masterpieces, Vol. 2, Pablo, 1994
- Marvelous Art, Star Line Records, 1994
- House Party, Star Line Records, 1994
- Masters of Jazz, Vol. 8, Storyville (Denmark), 1994
- California Melodies, Memphis Archives, 1994
- 1934–40, Jazz Chronological Classics, 1994
- 1932–44 (3-CD Box Set), Jazz Chronological Classics, 1995
- The Rococo Piano of Art Tatum, Pearl Flapper, 1995
- I Know That You Know, Jazz Club, 1995
- Piano Solo Private Sessions October 1952, New York, Musidisc (France), 1995
- The Art of Tatum, ASV Living Era, 1995
- Trio Days, Le Jazz, 1995
- 1933–44, Best of Jazz (France), 1995
- 1940–44, Jazz Chronological Classics, 1995
- Vol. 16-Masterpieces, Jazz Archives Masterpieces, 1996
- 20th Century Piano Genius (20th Century/Verve), 1996
- Body & Soul, Jazz Hour (Netherlands), 1996
- Solos (1937) and Classic Piano, Forlane, 1996
- Complete Capitol Recordings, Blue Note, 1997
- Memories Of You (3-CD Set) Black Lion, 1997
- On The Sunny Side Topaz Jazz, 1997
- 1944, Giants of Jazz, 1998
- Standard Sessions (2-CD Set), Music & Arts, 1996 & 2002/Storyville 1999
- Piano Starts Here – Live at The Shrine (Zenph Re-Performance), Sony BMG Masterworks, 2008
- Art Tatum – Ben Webster: The Album (Essential Jazz Classics) 2009
Notes
The great stride pianist Fats Waller famously announced one night when Tatum walked into the club where Waller was playing, 'I only play the piano, but tonight God is in the house.'
- "Art Tatum Memorial". The Art Commission of Toledo. September 11, 2009. Retrieved April 23, 2013.
References
- Jed Distler (1981/1986) Art Tatum: Jazz Masters Series: intro and notes to Tatum Piano Transcriptions: Amsco Publications: ISBN 0-8256-4085-7
- James Lester (1994) Too Marvelous for Words: The Life and Genius of Art Tatum, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-509640-1
- Gunther Schuller (1989) The Swing Era – The Development of Jazz 1930–1945, "Art Tatum" p 476-502, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-19-507140-5
- Riccardo Scivales (1998) The Right Hand According to Tatum, Ekay Music, Inc. ISBN 0-943748-85-2
- Arnold Laubich, Ray Spencer (1982) "Art Tatum: A Guide to His Recorded Music", Scarecrow Press and the Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University, ISBN 0-8108-1582-6
External links
- Art Tatum at www.jazz-piano.org
- Art Tatum's profile at NPR and Resources about Art Tatum at NPR
- "History Of The Piano Pt 3 – Art Tatum" by Richard Michael at BBC Radio 3, features Tatum's 1933 Brunswick recording of Tiger Rag
- MIDI sequences of 5 piano compositions and 27 piano arrangements by Art Tatum
